text:
This action might not be possible to undo. Are you sure you want to continue?
by Justin Katko
Printed version bound in an edition of 20 @ Critical Documents 112 North College #4 Oxford, Ohio 45056 USA http://plantarchy.us
Submitted to the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (Western College Program) in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy Interdisciplinary Studies
by Justin Katko Miami University Oxford, Ohio April 10, 2006
APPROVED Advisor: _________________ Xiuwu Liu
An experimental poetry of radical political efficacy must be instantiated by and within micro-social structures negotiated by practically critical attentions to the material conditions of the social web that upholds the writing. There are recent historical moments where such demands were being put into practice. British. This is a critical supplement to the first issue of Plantarchy. * Language work you. starting with writing's primary dispersion into the social—publishing. a hand-bound journal of contemporary experimental poetry by American.ABSTRACT Capitalist social structure obstructs the potentials of radical subjectivities by over-determining life as a hierarchy of discrete labors.* Assuming an analog mesh between social and docu-textual structures. Structural analyses of grammatical syntax reveal the reproduction of capitalist social structure within linguistic structure. Consider how the struggle of articulation is the struggle to make language work. and Canadian practitioners. certain experimental poetries can be read as fractal imaginations of anarcho-Marxist utopianism in their fierce disruption of linguistic convention. iii .
... Ben Watson "The SI Bootsale: The Betrayal of Lettriste Poetics & Proletarian Politics by the Popsicle Academy" --The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to statements uttered.as an object of hatred. as the font of the Spectacle. as the personification of Capital. Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life iv .
Author's black-outs're surely irrelevant if it's the Author's Intention we're after. And for a discussion of what William R. Howe calls "implied relevancy". TURN TO THE THIRD AND FINAL CHAPTER NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! v .cris cheek from A PRESENT Hyper-abject comedy-knees chip thru th back a yr head. After all. In terms of relevancy-as-implying clearly visible script.
1 4 4 5 8 11 13 16 17 22 27 29 31 33 40 56 67 Introduction I. Capital's grammar. a. Possessions... / Professions... b. Division... / ...Laborers c. Hierarchy d. Alienation e. The Situationists II. Grammar's capital. a. Terms of Engagement b. Covnention c. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 1. Metaphorical Critique 2. Literal Critique III. Publishing grammars. / Publishing Capitals. Notes Diagrams Bibliography Plantarchy
Realizing the Utopian Longing of Experimental Poetry is to be read as a critical supplement to the first issue of Plantarchy, a journal of poetry and poetics with work by American, British, and Canadian practitioners, published in a hand-sewn edition of 300. It has been financially supported by various departments at Miami University. Copies may be requested by visiting the website or writing to the address in the inside front cover of this edition; this is a suggested and perhaps necessary reference to this text, espcially in terms of what Jerome McGann calls "initial production" in Social Values and Poetic Acts (1988).1 What is the site of Plantarchy's initial production? When the finished InDesign file was exported to PDF? When the PDF was printed in my living room? When the pages were collated by me and a group of my friends? When they were bound and taped in my kitchen? When they were trimmed by a guillotine in the garage-based print-shop of William R. and LA Howe's Slack Buddha Press? A lot of what this text deals with is particular avant-garde movements and the ways in which they can be situated on a theory<—>practice continuum that discourse shifts tectonically beneath them. This discourse itself is a theoretical practice employed as a means of searching for ideal modes of practice. A praxis: the meshing of theory and practice into a unified field of action. The text's major aim is to account for the radical politics bound up in samizdat editions of experimental poetry, the aesthetics of their materialist politics and the politics of their materialist aesthetics. The field of concern is poetry on the printed page, and the politics are dogmatically Marxist, if only because such a readily available theoretical means cuts to the quick as a complete language of critique. What's at stake here is reading politics into cultural productions. And it's generally not the subject of these productions that is under consideration, but rather their object—their status as historical artifacts and the contemporary subjectivities engendered by engagements with the particularities of their objectstatus. Commodity status. Anti-commodity status. Politico-economic valuation. A psychogeography of the book-as-environment. The objects of everyday social existence, the objects of aesthetic linguistic production, the objects of poetry publications: the conflation of these terms and the swarm-systems of which their social dispersions are part and parcel. Central to this conflation is a term used in the third and final chapter—fractal imagination—to describe how utopian images of universal patterns are read into conditionally local fields of material organization. Using the formal means of one medium to project a complex system of desires onto a disparate and discrete field. This text performs a dialectical (projective) leap between chapters one and two, and this leap is to be motored by Michel de Certeau's metaphor quoted previously as the second of the text's epigraphs. The
first epigraph alludes to this metaphor as well—the Spectacle's "font"—but is chosen to perform a more polemic function. Chapter one lays down foundational political concerns. These concerns are largely informed by the critical writing of the Situationists, whose work is established on a Marxist belief structure with all the requisite circular logics and prophecies of future harmony. Situationist theory is fractal, such that a fragment contains the total cosmology, while a sequence of fragments amplifies the total saturation of each fragment in the others. The Situationist posture is not negative even if their aesthetics are, but rather constructive, offering historical visions and histories of temporary enactments of an alternative to capitalist democracy via a collaboratively-negotiated anarcho-Marxism. While this writing is partisan in its employment of Situationist ideology, the SI's theorizing of the total reorganization of social life as a function of collective spontaneous creativity is a thesis deserving contemporary application, if only because of its complete and utter irreverence for (or irrelevance to) discretion of any kind.2 It is important to give this critique its own chapter because of the extent to which it underwrites the poli-aesthetics of the practitioners whom I discuss in chapters two and three. Chapter two shows how the Situationist critique of Western capitalist societies has been furthered by a number of American poets—roughly aligned under the banner of Language poetry—who've employed language both as object and subject of their social critique. Linguistic structure as fractal laboratory for the Revolution; linguistic structure as actual platform of Revolution's ignition. The reason for emphasizing Language poetics as a discrete school of thought is the quantity of critical writing they've produced. Consonant contemporaneous critiques have been leveled by poets in Canada and the United Kingdom—a select portion of the latter being the subject of chapter three—but Language is a necessary theoretical landmark as it were, in much the same way that the sheer quantity of Situationist prose makes the SI an unavoidable (though admittedly totalizing, as with Language) point of entry. And to give a negative context to the ideological work of the Language poets, I've conducted a basic overview of the covnentional knowledge of linguistic structure as distributed by grade-school and college-level grammar textbooks. Chapter three multiplies the social critique by the linguistic critique towards making vague claims as to how a radically efficacious writing practice might be dispersed into the social body via publication. One way would be the slow infiltration of state-funded cultural institutions. While such infiltration was for the Language Poets an eventually clean and academic success, a range of Londonbased poets associated with an ideological battle for the grounds and resources of England's National Poetry Centre serve as an historical example of how an anarcho-Marxist micro-community engages in "organizing a space"3 constellated by intimate relations of free power between humans and machines employed
for cultural productions. The call for principally unprincipled subjectivities as grounding the construction of poetic and social structures will serve as a resounding beep that ties up the loose ends by clanging shut the mechanical door. I must lastly make brief mention of Dreamtime Village,4 an artist-run anarchist community where I spent the summer of 2005 as a media/book-making intern, working specifically on projects for the small experimental poetry press Xexoxial Editions, as edited by mIEKAL aND. Dreamtime is located in Wisconsin, two hours west of Madison, in the upper driftless bio-region, a hilly unglaciated farm-land whose rural composition is Amish communities, dairy farms, an organic farming network, and a small community of anarchists occupying the majority of the buildings in the mostly-abandoned farming town of West Lima—the post office and the schoolhouse to name a few. The space behind the schoolhouse is an intricate vast permaculture garden and found-sculpture park. The Village is itself a kind of dream, a jungle of the cultural traces of a short but intense private history of free constructive community play. Every wall hand-painted, the past hanging spoken and unspoken in the air. Dreamtime is the 90s sequel to the Madisonbased Church of Anarchy, which in the 80s was an experiment in urban gardening, publishing, and sidewalk performance art. It was at Dreamtime that I made many of the contacts that comprise the contributors to Plantarchy, not to mention my first prolonged experience in book-making and getting a poetry press up and running.
Vladimir Lenin. 4 . but on the contrary..2 Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market. But progressing or regressing? Regardless. That is one side of the picture.3 POSSESSIONS: MINE OR HISS PROFESSIONS: MINED OR PISSED Capitalism is the problem.. and injecting it back into the vein closest to the heart: this is your self on television. their social being that determines their consciousness. in the end as in the beginning: more shit produced. it is engaged in expanding internally in population and industry.The mode of material production of material life conditions the social. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being. Or rather. blood-doping it.the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy. same shit consumed. But we need a more poetic image: being as if and indeed watching television. The Ouroboros lies gorged on the digestion of itself. and (b) the methods of preparing and distributing the means to satisfy these needs. The amassing of wealth is intensified by generalizing (a) the linkage of men by their needs. This results in the dependence and distress of the class tied to the work of that sort. capital breeds pseudo-citizens asleep at the unbreakable windows on their dreams.. So here's taking the piss out of that 90s anti-drug commercial. The LIE of Lying Around divided by Victory's V = LIVE. something to be done.CAPITAL'S GRAMMAR CHAPTER ONE When civil society is in a state of unimpeded activity. Capitalism produces the problems only to consume them. Which doesn't describe a State (as in a life) but a directive. and these again entail inability to feel and enjoy the broader freedoms and especially the intellectual benefits of society.1 legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind. but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life. what in fact the market specifically eliminates. The other is the subdivision and restriction of particular jobs. political and intellectual life process in general.. because it is from this double process of generalization that the largest profits are derived.
alienation—in order to gloss this monolith and some of the ways it's been critiqued by over two centuries of radical theorists. Following is a fifth section on the Situationist project. hierarchy.6 DIVISION OF LABOR DIVIDES AND CONQUERS LABORERS Adam Smith articulates the positivist logic of capitalism in Wealth of Nations (1776).12 In the tradition of Hegel. a subjective read on the object. Marx. separated subjectivities united by their objectification. My analysis is divided into three sections—division of labor. George Romero's mall zombies in Dawn of the Dead. be they undertaken in theory or in practice. "beyond the capacity of the old social organization"5—what's necessitated is a tactics of critical mapping. Hegel."10 This alienation is consonant with fragmentation: singularities of cultural Life blown asunder."8 For a formation this large to operate organically. Pre-echoes of the immediate.4 Towards amplifying the everyday construction and consciousness of quality to a degree of saturation that capital is incapable of retaining—or in the words of Guy Debord. explaining that a laboring order of full-time specialists is necessary for the accrual of national wealth in a post-mercantilist democracy. In The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967). its subjects must sublimate into little bits of organs. 5 . linked not by their qualitative needs but by their survival needs as replaceable quantities of man-power. Marx: discrete labor constructs "material relations between persons and social relations between things. Raoul Vaneigem articulates the communalist ideal of the "qualitative totality" and "the construction of the whole man" in opposition to labor's specialization. Modernity and all its beginnings. what is not to be done? The complete de-fusing of capital's mechanisms (necessarily anti-social) by way of the construction of other means of life—lives beyond the anemic quality of scope engendered by the curve and rattle of the coil—impels radical experiments. Cogs in the political time-bomb. is markedly enlightened in mourning the modern State's evolution beyond the "direct democracy of the classical polis."9 Synthetic parasites. Ghosts of the past in the present. Well.7 This implies a traffic of innumerable modes of commerce beneath the flag of the modern State as thing within which people are marked off into discrete utilitarian functions following utilitarian space/time flows.1902. framed as a theory of practice (via its practice in theory) for inflicting immediate and temporary changes in political economies that happen to be over-determined by capitalist exchange. a structural abstract of capitalism. "Roles are bloodsuckers of the will to live.
There's a disturbing metaphysics in the implication that if the politicians' assembly constructs them as a (if not the) distinct people—Platonic ideals of mass political will—then all other laborers are by default not a people. Team colors. Guy Debord writes of "compartmentalized utilitarian disciplines [as] avert[ing] concerted overall critique. In this sense. welder. since the best of them rarely get paid for their work. Apart. Play your part. poets are able to make such radical critiques with impunity. "The subdivision and restriction of particular jobs."14 Example: politicians can't pursue the advancement of society beyond specialized labor unless they are willing to forgo their own roles as salaried politician.13 The language of the commodity is quantification and specialized labor streamlines time into a shrink-wrapped tic(k) to be plucked off the shelf." When Raoul 6 . Political assembly is fenced off as the discrete labor-set of a particular commodity: the "public servant" or politician. just as "the end of separation means the end of the bourgeoisie. Vaneigem writes.17 The everyday reproduction of the division of labor turns divisible roles— artist. Images of ourselves separate us from each other. the reality of the content captivating the subject into more and more acute degrees of a spectator's passion. Call your local Congressman: two receivers constitute the gap between messenger and receiver. The private accumulation of capital wards off fears of obsolescence. the post-bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.16 Ben Watson and Esther Leslie critique specialization via the ways in which artistic production is implicated in the lie of capitalist democracy: That art exists—or culture more broadly—as a specialised activity practiced by the few means that it becomes an alibi for the majority's noncultural life. making specialized role-players both generally necessary and particularly disposable. art justifies exploitation and oppression. Public policy as articulated by politicians implies that their decisions are written into the fabric of social reality—the ever lagging Letter of the Law—determining objective consequences on political economies. Trotsky."12 The illusion is the image shining deep into the eyes of the subject rendered spectator of their own representation.. Fired? Retired? Or how about wouldn't be there in the first place. Watching the Senate on C-Span. Roles (serious jobs) are the anti-matter (invisible) that hold the whole façade together as it crumbles. and in strict opposition with Smith's golden logic. Safety lies in the absence of presence: doubled absence: imagined imaginations: remembering that you might have been sleep-walking. fuel for the fires of all-consuming capital. Again.Dada. Democratic voting is thus revealed as the illusion of assembly. illusions being images and the voting process mediated by communicative mechanisms. politician. "we have nothing in common but the illusion of being together."15 Fortunately.. professor—into commodities (each with varying degrees of value).
The collective refusal to fragment social life into polite discretions—a general strike—would focus democracy's scope beyond such clumsy mediations as "the world. In Patterns of Anarchy (1966). the inseparable commodity structure."20 From representation to presentation.24 HIERARCHY Skill in playing and handling roles determines rank in the spectacular hierarchy." to encourage the rise of unspecialized organizations of free and absolute power over the self. at the bottom."21 A comprehensive unification of all roles—meshing the directing of a politico-economic traffic with only those people constituting said traffic—is consonant with a direct democracy negotiated 1:1 on the plane of "total self management. where in addition to actual labor." "the State. writing "we need no power to intercede for us. "Criticism becomes direct action in an anarchist context. whether this side 7 . Leonard Krimerman and Lewis Perry summarize Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's call for radical socio-economic reforms as articulated in Solution du Problème Social (1847): "a revolutionary movement that withdraws support from government and attaches it to citizen-controlled activities (thus dissolving the state).Vaneigem writes that "collectively it is quite possible to abolish roles." "the continent. the concepts of labor and politics themselves are not separated. in the middle—but never outside the hierarchy. His "qualitative totality" describes the organization of societal flows according to qualitative or subjective excesses rather than those that are quantitative or objectifying. and hence in the spectacle: at the top." to lock in instead on the local. Presence here and now. the only degree of Newtonian magnitude whose presence can always be proven without aid of technical mediation. Democracy as a gift to be taken. Hakim Bey reiterates Vaneigem's directives in The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1985).The role is a consumption of power.." and "the state. potentially rendering obsolete any policy articulated by centralized specialists.. With the refusal of specialization. "The free construction of the entire space-time of individual life. It locates one in the representational hierarchy."19 Specialized labor relegates discrete actions to discrete individuals."18 he is underscoring a self-evidence: the collective and direct articulation of local social reality—immediate acts of public policy—implies the disintegration of separable commodities as well as their corollary. actions taken not in the spirit of passionate community engagement but out of financial desire. In or out. the local would undergo a qualitative amplification in the scopic eye of free power."22 This implies fluid modes of collective labor produced not by poli-financial obligations23 but rather by conscious socio-cultural desires.
that each individual. negating any possibility of "free" independence. Y is dependant upon X. the business to be done. capitalist democracy is imagined as the body politic—organized from head to toe. reproducing at its greatest manifestation the fractal order of its least. digitized as fingers building micro-chips in India. There is a price to freedom.. The working class is not situated on the 0° of the X-axis. the national economy emerges as a crystalline formation. Ideological power flows down crystallized vertical channels while capitalized Power flows up. and what he can give in exchange. Or at least that's the logic of hierarchy. with a view to have them recorded in a book kept for that purpose. Social contract. the relationship being a function of gravitational pull. A social model that lacks the perpetual undoing of absolute negotiation by its lowest common denominator is in contrast to Josiah Warren's mid-nineteenth century description of the intimate construction of political economies among small groups of persons engaged in "practical movements" (or intentional communities): The first step to be taken by any number of persons in these practical movements appears to be.should consider his or her present wants. horizontal and vertical. be it coal or capitalist. and as such the geometric model can be posed dialectically against a democratic formula for power's liquidation (or fluid dispersal across a horizontal plane). as the task of labor is nothing less than the transformation of raw material.of it or beyond it. At the bottom? Invisible information. The individual being the most compact of the social organs. And to efficiently maintain the uphold of this scaffolding.Everyone wishing to take some part in practical operations.29 8 .. complete with its shadow.28 More people near the bottom doing what their role prescribes means more stability for the minority doing what their role prescribes near the top.. Material of no matter.25 The specialization of labor necessitates a hierarchical distribution of power. anti-logic. The working poor. the demand for particular jobs played against the supply of human resources reduces social being to a mere calculation.26 Fractured into discretions. such that sudden disturbances in the horizon's planar integrity are capable of disrupting the vertical's perpendicular. A hierarchy is structured by two basic axes: X and Y.27 The introduction of a visual metaphor should help to further this position. but rather sub-zero. 9/11. now has before him in this report of wants.. X is "independent" because Y bears down upon it. The labor of the horizontal takes on variable degrees of legality depending on the Y-value at which it is honed.
they do move up and down the faces of pre-established vertical structures. For Althusser. labor for labor. Deleuze and Guattari's is a theory not necessarily communicated as a directive for constructive anarchist actions. disappearance in the blink of the bureaucratic eye.30 While Louis Althusser quips in "Contradiction and Overdetermination" that Proudhon is a "prisoner of bourgeois economics. the tautology of focus is thus at the heart of why capitalist democracy 9 . Their projection of a rhizomatic schema (as opposed to one which is arboreal) onto histories of decentralized organizations of radical power implies a subversive engagement with capital's hierarchical flows. product for product. claiming their radical potential by a clandestine tapping of the structure's vertical and horizontal streams. disintegrating the organization of power as amassed in the unblinking bureaucratic eye. though not by the strict horizontals of Proudhon's reciprocity or the clean legers of Warren's balanced public records. The presence of the rhizome is the momentous taking and 1:1 distribution of power as desired by those occupying rhizomatic functions. However. material flows.This is a rural corollary to Proudhon's theory (written just two years after Warren's) that mutuality is central to a just urban society: the exemplary form of which is direct. withdrawal from hierarchy is a petty re-fusing of the mechanism.32 Perhaps the collaborative work of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari can be helpful in finding common ground between the Warren-Proudhon model and Althusser's critique over a century later. a constructive spontaneity of indiscrete cutting that produces networks of "semiotic flows. and social flows simultaneously. What is difficult about focusing a total critique of civil society on hierarchy is the mundane absence of signs of hierarchy in everyday life. contractual exchange of service for service. a "theoretical practice" in the sense of all theory and no practice. what Deleuze and Guattari call "territorialization. What is interesting about Proudhon is imagining withdrawal as the saboteur's dodge into the shadows." Organic parasitism.. Rather. hierarchy's presence only peering out from the banality of its poeticized images.which [does] not require overseeing or enforcement by administrators and politicians." where horizontal exchanges are framed as pacifist uprisings of withdrawal. signs = images. Althusser hides a kernel of an idealized violent proletariat in the mystical shell of his theorizing. unhinging the gravity-anti-gravity totality by the integrity of their silent grip and thus upsetting the axioms of hierarchical structure."31 there is worth in salvaging the spatial metaphysics of Proudhon's post-Revolution "solutions. but as an articulation of the workings of social reality as that reality exists within the spectacular presence of hierarchy."33 While rhizomes don't drop roots (signifiers of vertical power)..
"34 The immediacy of mediation. actually.38 "History" refers to the evolutionary development of socio-cultural techniques as ever-culminating in the contemporary and its arbitrary means for mediating social organization. even though it is the one we live in. art.to 'order them about' properly."35 arguing in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" that citizens are saturated in a trickle-down acculturation to the "know-how"36 of the division of labor they will engage.is such a convincing lie. From his preface: The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the 'naturalness' with which newspapers.is to establish protected areas where the intensity of conditioning tends towards zero. As power moves towards the top it approaches the singularity of the individual. The mirror gaze. this know-how being: "the attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour. Roland Barthes' notion of cultural myth and its naturalization exposes the semiotic means by which various modes of ISA harness the duplicitous invisibility of the spectacle to cast down the arbitrary formation of social architectures into the mundane. Our role as spectators of power is the real issue at stake. while it approaches the solidarity of individuals as it moves towards the bottom. What we wish to see as lived reality—signs of life—we see only as mediated reality—images of life—both of which are in fact the same thing. Rendering mediation consonant with conditioning in his desire for radical communities isolated from hierarchical over-coding."37 Note that orders pass from one to many. The mundane role that the administrator.e. is undoubtedly determined by history. Raoul Vaneigem writes: "The task of a coherent revolutionary group. the spectacular becomes mundane and hierarchy works because it reproduces an image of itself.. "This trap we're in is spectacular."39 We might think of this 10 . i.. As a result. In Mythologies (1957).. citizens of all rank in the capitalist hierarchy are channeled through "ISAs" (cultural institutions) that naturalize social constructions by way of mediations: seamless articulations of reality as it is imagined by the super-structural formations of the productive means harnessed by an industrialized capitalist democracy. From childhood.. Althusser called these guardians "the high priests of the ruling ideology. and common sense constantly dress up a reality which.. the politician or the policeman must play as agents of nonreciprocal oversight has a shadow resonance in those workers' more fundamental roles as guardians of their own hierarchical positions—divine breeders of the social order playing out around them—and thus the very integrity of hierarchy itself..[such that future capitalists will learn] to 'handle' the workers correctly. and hierarchy helps to reproduce the spectator as a divisible role (though popular) insofar as it is assumed that the power to make change is present only at the top of the heap.
when it allows us to live cheaply?41 Deleuze and Guattari use the term "controlled 'situations of abandonment'" to describe the reproduction of alienation in capitalist economies. telephones. This space can be thought of in the printer's terminology as the bleed. And it turns out that the mechanisms alienating citizens from the negotiations of the State are the very commodities that they receive as holiday gifts and birthday presents from their loved ones: televisions. books."zero" as the zero-value of the Y-axis. magazines. having tied each 11 .43 it follows that a role's specialization in the production of a particular commodity transforms work itself into a commodity. after all. its value splayed at the law of supply and demand. No different in its essence as utility than a box of croutons or a shoe-horn.40 What does it matter. DVDs and tombstones.42 Proceeding from the dictum that workers are alienated from their labor because they produce commodities for an economy of which they have little if any say in the construction. In short. yet the political is the platform from which legislation charges reality with the barb of legality."44 A commodified role-player's discrete functioning within a hierarchy of like discretions (jobs) might be thought of as a controlled situation of abandonment. alienation is comprehensive. newspapers. our means labor and our means are antipodal mirrors. where even the family trees are plowed over in the areas' "establish[ment]. Being in such a world demands a resignation to imagination. CDs. But when playing by the rules of a capitalist democracy."45 or the space separating one discrete labor from the others. not just on the job or at the mall. Time and motion studies. insofar as functions inserted into the hierarchy are hemmed into form by a frame of "rigid vacuity. Vaneigem's "protected areas" being roofed economies power-blipping in 1:1 intimacies along an X-axis of infinite dimensions." ALIENATION The size of the modern states make it quite impossible to realize the ideal of giving every free individual a share in debating and deciding political affairs of universal concern. The production and the checkout lines allow for only so much margin of error. "We have nothing in common but the illusion of being together. license plates. Specialization and hierarchy demand that politics be left to the politicians. an acquiescence to the anemia of representation. computers. if Order is a little brutal or a little blind. allowing the smooth functioning of so many cogs.
Or what agents of intimacy might consider the re-directing of White House tourist traffic for a game of hide-and-go-seek towards a friendly chance meeting with the President. however.46 Capitalist democracy places phenomenological subjects within nonintimate politico-economic milieus. agents of the State might consider sedition—regardless of intent. Intimacy is a function of the distribution of social power. agents of Status) might consider to be an act of vandalism—regardless of content. Since the individual is defined by his situations. and as such the total consumption of a milieu that contains significant47 elements produced (or transformed) by the consumer's labor is a situation that can be categorized as non-alienating. And so when a bloc of laborers chooses to use its machines for the production of pleasure rather than the production of commodities. abundance."52 12 .50 There's a price to the consumption of freedom. agents of the State (or. Vaneigem argues that artistic creation is itself revolutionary because it constructs the aura of quality rather than the efficiency of quantity. or to put it in Vaneigem's quasi-militant terms. and I hope there is a pacifism assumed in anything I cite. sterilized and boring. intimate blood. relegation to the private life of the family cell: locus of deep presence. it is essential to create human situations. Homemade. When Hakim Bey writes. What agents of intimacy might consider the communication of a critical message to the citizens of their local community.other up with the subject locked between. The overcoming of particular alienations is possible through engagements with the space-times in which we find ourselves. But the Situationists offer hope beyond the retreat to the soil of the nuclear family. Since man is the product of the situations he goes through."48 his object is the intimate material transformation of one spacio-temporal milieu into another. public intimacy's sterilization."49 Sabotage doesn't necessarily imply violence. And that's alienation for you. he wants the power to create situations worthy of his desires. "Art project: the construction of a 'map' bearing a 1:1 ratio to the 'territory' explored. and there are prescribed means of producing (read: consuming) it.51 And it seems that all the misplaced accounts of radical energy welling up and offering new visions of social potential seem to end the same way: defeat by the triumph of the mundane. it is important to read into Vaneigem the legalitarian violence of capitalist democracy. "the sabotage of the mechanisms of economic and cultural consumption. alienation will necessarily be abolished: "The laboratory of individual creativity transmutes the basest metals of daily life into gold through a revolutionary alchemy.
" Ben Watson draws a clear line between the sloppy aims of English anarchism and the critical Marxism of the Situationists.53 The absolutely free will. those who confuse Debord's attacks on the Communist Party with attacks on Lenin. who was: devoid of the imprecision of English anarchists with Situationist pretensions.THE SITUATIONISTS a collective project explicitly concerned with all aspects of lived experience. and its new methods of agitation were influential in leading up to the May 1968 revolt in France. and end up with confusionist stunts that have more in common with Monty Python and the late Viv Stanshall— aristocratic japes—than the SI. a society they charged as infected by spectacle."58 This is sensible.59 Communism as it has been historically practiced (and distinct from the uprisings of the Paris Commune throughout the nineteenth century) is an incomplete reading of Marx applied dogmatically to State affairs by ideologues in control of a cadre of passive militants.56 I have used the term anarcho-Marxist to describe the Situationists. their goal being the total reorganization of society. In "The SI Bootsale.57 John Henry Mackay claims in The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1891) that a communist-anarchism is "a contradiction in terms. so I will now investigate the historical relationship between anarchist and Marxist agendas. resulting in an non-Marxist State Capitalism. has the determinate character of immediacy. George Woodock can be read as a predecessor to the Situationists. considering that the Situationists specifically critiqued the French Communist Party as a Stalinist institution implicated in the reproduction of the dominant social order by their control of the trade unions. the Situationist International. focusing on Debord as the SI ringleader." with the 13 .54 A handful of experimental European and North African artists formed a unified movement in 1957. when in "Railroads and Society" (1943) he argues that "Syndicalism is the industrial manifestation of anarchism. at the stage when its concept is abstract.55 Over the next decade the SI developed an increasingly incisive and coherent critique of modern society and its bureaucratic pseudoopposition.
000 people?)— parts of the Commune.60 Here Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" comes alive in a mantra that might be grafted onto the Situationist corpus: the autonomy of the workers councils. when asked in a questionnaire if they were Marxists. anti-alienation. Estey argued in Revolutionary Syndicalism (1913) that syndicalism is not anarchism. Ironically."64 The Situationists' theses of collective creativity are a re-tasking of what is conventionally thought of as anarchism (as well as Marxism). As the largest constituency is necessarily the proletariat.67 This is problematic insofar 14 .implication that "workers in each industry" would control the means of production at the service of the rest of society. anti-specialization and their corollary. This is a particularly libertarian read on anarchism. Estey's quip that "the anti-social nature of Anarchism seems to Syndicalists a subtle form of decadence"63 ignores anarchism's function as an alternative to the anti-sociality of capitalist democracy. to people living in the same neighborhood and to volunteers coming in from the parasitical sectors. perhaps 8. aligning anarchism with individualism and syndicalism with socialism. the Situationists responded: "Just as much as Marx when he said.62 We can see both Marxism and anarchism at work in the intimate negotiation of a worker-controlled political-economy according to principles of anti-hierarchy.61 Vaneigem writes of the function of workers' councils: Generalized self-management implies the extension of the councils. so that they rapidly take the form of local councils (units of more or less the same size.'"65 Let us now move past examining the Situationists' political influences to examining their theory of permanent uprising. J. it is the opposite of anarchism. above—especially if we hark back to Vaneigem's dictum that "we have nothing in common but the illusion of being together. grouped in councils. work areas will be taken over by the workers concerned.000 to 10. the anarchism of the Situationists is channeled into practice through Marx.A. and insofar as libertarianism signals an extremist resignation to Social Darwinism. In order to rid these first councils of their corporative aspect. by exclaiming that being together is precisely what capitalist democracy deprives of its constituents." producing an oscillating time-line of enslavement and rebellion as a function of the degree of said society's alienation. At first. 'I am not a Marxist.66 In "How Do Enslaved People Make Revolutions?" the Dutch Katarzyna Paprzycka and Marcin Paprzycki cite a study by Leszek Nowak which backs a Marxist argument with statistical evidence: "there exists a dependence between the level of civil alienation and the reaction of the society as a whole. Anarchism is in fact a negation of the anti-social—as expressed for instance by the plans for anarchist community associations by Josiah Warren. the historico-materialist frame. the workers will as soon as possible open them to their friends. Prior to Woodock.
Not by one."77 making Zen akin to "lived poetry" in many ways. Implied is a comprehensive re-negotiation of the material means by which civil society is conducted. everyone is now some kind of artist. However." a "valuative consciousness" produced by "the intensity of unmediated perception & experience" as blissed off "the suchness of things when unchained from the Law" and overcome by "the energy-rush of danger & adventure. as one of the many products might very well be a transformation of the structure of consciousness itself..as it projects a macro-social narrativity onto what in reality are micro-social flows of particular modes of power producing overlapping degrees of alienation and antialienating mobilizations. which "could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment. 15 . John Moore writes in "Towards a Cultural Ecology of Anarchy" that Zen "manifests itself in spontaneous acts. however radical those practices may be.[and that] regaining the experience of life's instantaneousness constitutes its essence.real alteration of this reality. whether in urban or rural milieus.75 This is in keeping with Debord's pre-Situationist articulations of psychogeography. the practice of radical cartography."70 Understanding the free negotiation of local political economy to be consonant with "lived poetry"—"to the extent that it reinforces spontaneity's hold on reality" and "engenders new realities"71—Watson and Leslie's above-cited call for the reorganization of "cultural life's" qualitative distribution and Lautréamont's directive in Poems—"Poetry must be made by everyone."72—we see Vaneigem's call for "the appropriation of the machines by collective creativity"73 takes on an epic utility such that "Potentially. But the sub-text here is more than Zen or Tao."68 Insofar as the Situationists' definition of poetry is "immediate communication within reality and.. the private epiphany of overcoming all interior police. Nowak's findings do ring of Vaneigem's postMay '68 prophecy that alienation will erupt in proletarian revolution as a literal "rising flood of individual pleasures. At stake with the pleasure principle is not a free-wheeling hedonism."69 we can see that the Situationists have radically re-tasked dominant notions of pleasure and poetry towards a revolutionary efficacy. The implications of this are all-encompassing and hardly imaginable. but rather an "insurrectionary joy."74 Peter Lamborn Wilson ignores the issue of class struggle in arguing that an anarchism of revolutionary efficacy enacts the Situationists' lived poetry by way of micro-social organizations growing as much of their own food as possible."76 The passion behind these manifestos has much to do with the writers' perception of their values as existing in historical legacies of Dionysian festivity and transcendent fluidity...
and even when we are not particularly listening or speaking but are attending to some work or taking a rest. Hence it cannot surprise us that as soon as man looks thoughtfully about himself at what he is.4 The articulation of a grammar both conducts an operation of closure via anticipating the limits of a system's potential. even when we do not utter a single word aloud... language which activates imagination and surprises the reader into new abilities.. it is perhaps important to look not at what is said in any particular poem but rather to examine theoretical inquiries into the means by which language produces. and facilitates the social exchange of linguistic meaning. To articulate a grammar is to derive an abstract theory of a generative system from data generated by that system. To be more pointed. The first two sections that follow explore dialectical tendencies 16 . We are always speaking. just what is at stake in experimental poetry's negotiation of grammar? To approach these questions. while offering a positivist rationale to those functions that have been demarcated as grammatical. what is it about language as a social phenomenon and a field of formal conventions that make the economy of its grammar any kind of pertinent site of anti-capitalist utopian resistance? Further.We encounter language everywhere. it's useful to consider grammar at its most general: a set of rules delineating the parameters of a system and the structural dynamics of the set of particular functions that operate therein.. but. and ask why a structuralist inquiry into grammar should be a corollary to a like inquiry into capitalism. but merely listen or read.1 TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT We speak when we are awake and we speak in our dreams..3 Social security. Freedom and its price.2 To be a reader is to be the willing receptor of transformative agencies destined to either alter or confirm one's position in a social circuitry. he quickly hits upon language too. reproduces. rather. At the outset.. But let us think of grammar particularly in terms of language. insofar as these means govern the extent to which poems are capable of performing what it is they are saying.GRAMMAR'S CAPITAL CHAPTER TWO Poetry is not recognition patterns within a spectator-consumer society.only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man.
We all possess it like no other medium. perfunctory manner in the workplace may make us feel more intensely that we have an inalienable right to misuse it outside of the workplace. to make our flirtations.6 There is likely no essential pattern to finding ourselves awake and without articulation or to finding ourselves without what feels like an instinctual reliance on the speech patterns that give social consensus to meaning's reproduction. Sutherland writes: Language is everyone's competence and everyone's possession . i. Carolee Schneeman.e. Language is the only medium of expression used in art that we are compelled to use and to control and to suppress and to modify in our workplaces. Uniquely among the various media of self-expression. paint) are just as specialized and truly occasional as their artistic use values. whereas language is both a specialist artistic medium and a human competency whose use value7 is dispersed among all social occasions. This is a kind of possession that no-one experiences in quite the same way with regard to paint: we can be speechless but we cannot with an identical implication be paintless.5 Social life is saturated in language. the popular uses of other mediums (e. Michel de Certeau. In his unpublished lecture "Mainstream and Margins in Contemporary British Poetry" (2005).in theorizations of grammar. The body too is "everyone's competence and everyone's possession". to do our shopping. We use words to conduct our daily lives. etc—specific instantiations of which could surely lounge beneath what Sutherland terms "distortions" of a contractual Lacanian mirror. while the final section discusses texts whose aesthetic experimentation I will justify as charging the magnetism between writing and radical political efficacy. what de Certeau calls "pedestrian street acts" in The Practice of Everyday Life are just as likely to reproduce stated Orders 17 . Keston Sutherland writes of language's idiosyncratic status among the various media systems. The experience of being compelled to use language in a controlled. by a necessity that is daily renewed in inescapable relation to our economic necessities. . words are what we have to use for what is ours in the most daily way.g.8 A critical note that deserves full-text status is a nod towards the ongoing histories of performance and writing that situate the body itself as a communicative media— Stelarc. and by transforming our use of language in our free time to enact a kind of virtual rebellion against our employers and the necessity of work in general. and above all to do our jobs. negative interventions into the work/leisure two-lane that constitutes the general anemia of everyday living. But first I will offer a general pragmatic overview of language towards offering some answers to the questions posed at the beginning of this paragraph. . to announce our responses of outrage or indifference to the news. that strange form of doing.
and performance-writing—as developed by a range of practitioners among whom Caroline Bergvall and cris cheek stand out as forerunners—seem to offer the most resonant possibilities for a radical writing praxis. Any radical engagement with grammar—i.9 For just what radical desires does the average experimental poet encode into the collective image of public behavior when they purchase their groceries or pump gas into their cars? The politico-economic avenues through which we choose to direct our bodies—"the forms used in a system and the ways of using this system (i. post-literate world banker)15 might be useful in articulating the distance between everyday use and the letter of the Law. blueprint / Platonic model / William S. the means of linguistic meaning-production—has the potential to inflect any and all means of social reproduction.14 But there is a verso to this mundane economy of use: language as it is uttered in the Stated sacred sites of politico-legal power – i. a performative making-real of that which is uttered. towards an inquiry into the grammatical structure of English. the sorcerer's seeing can be thought of as a generative imagining.. its use exists in an intimate relationship with everyday life as both a tool for representing reality and a particular function within reality itself. the notion of language as a tool of the human everyday being a necessary distinction for the theories I examine in the following two sections. Burroughs-esque "pre-recording" / genetic source-code / etc of the real (or social). Tracing sorcerer back to its Latin sortiarius gives us "one who tells the lot of the others. especially when even the most formally anti-capitalist lyric is composed in "the parallel life which absorbs the reader leaving his/her body depoliticized. Fated fx. Power is a performative force that alters material conditions." As clairvoyance occupies the visionary function of passive seeing.(and States of order) as speech itself. In terms of human agency. rules)"10—are perhaps more capable of "complicity with an unjust structure of social management" than language. that language speaks louder the body. notions of live.e. So let's assume.e. in that language can be projected onto (or accumulated in) any and all social occasions. teleologies of intention are often grafted onto the effects of power on particular material states over time. The mundane materiality of language is transmuted into a materializing spelling out of directed energy.e.12 though such a discussion is beyond this paper's horizons."11 In this sense. language rising above the social necessity of articulation 18 .e. a raster transmuting particular states into non-logical (or non-essential) poststates. a basic consideration of the pre-literate sorcerer-function (i.16 We can also find a like cult of performativity in the Bible—"And the Word [read: orality] became flesh [read: literacy] and dwelt among us"17—wherein language is imagined as being armed or imbued (by divinity in the case of God and by will in the case of the sorcerer) with the power of spell.13 Because language is unavoidably the most pointedly articulate of the communicative media. But as for the potential performativity of language.
performative) function being the prescriptive articulation of social order as drafted in the board-rooms. the poet's language is by convention a mere sideshow—ornament.in its reification of idea (or intention) as catalytic reality-agent. But if I am indeed to draw a parallel between the language of the sorcerer and that of the global capitalist. what is stake in a so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics is a Messianic distance from conventional grammar."21 In "Theses on Need" (1942).e. and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. And just as a document is not free of barbarism. and elite golf courses of the global economy. the language of power being a "cultural treasure" imbued with the democratic token of social contract. The historical shift from Walter Ong's notion of "primary orality" to literacy—as articulated in Orality and Literacy (1982)—resituates the performative utterance onto the blank skin of writing: the intimate resonance of the spelling voice shapeshifting into the clatter of the digital age's overworked keyboard—the Constitution encoded into an html document—the letter of the Law."19 As I will detail in the third section of this chapter. at most secondary. In "Theses on the Philosophy of History.There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. they are an object of calculation. The written word's most exhaustively critical (i.18 Today's corporate institutions and the governments lobbied to do their bidding are the inheritors of the sorcerer's divining tongue (even if it's myth was only ever made belief) in a very real way (i." Walter Benjamin writes: And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them..e. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. In his preface to The Politics of Poetic Form (1990). barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. According to traditional practice. They are called cultural treasures. Michel de Certeau's notion of "the Scriptural Economy" locates the history of writing in a capitalist strategy of accumulation.. executive offices. grammar in this case conceived of as both a reproduction of (and a thing whose use value is in part that of reproducing) a society structured from the top down by the smooth circulation of commodities20 wherein "the masses are not primary. politico-economic). the spoils are carried along in the procession. but secondary. an historical scheme must under-write such reasoning.. Theodor Adorno writes: 19 . an appendage of the machinery. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. writing being an architectural centralization of reality (conceived of as a dispersion of intimate particulars) into historically accessible knowledge. Charles Bernstein writes: "The relation of poetry to public policy is usually assumed to be tenuous..
literature has more and more radically narrowed its rights to the public participation in the ongoing construction of society by itself—inseparable from power.." Now I will gloss the grammatical structure of covnentional English as a brief corollary to the vagrant "mapping" conducted in the previous chapter.as far as possible" from the powerful (or utilitarian) cultural habits of linguistic transmission (including as well those imagined to perform something of a populist efficacy—cf.22 In this light. experience of which tends toward reconciliation with nature because it is no longer in the service of usefulness of the exploiters. What Benjamin distrusts as the "manner" of transmission necessarily encompasses grammar as a culturally treasured means utilized for the linguistic exchange of (potentially) culturally treasured meanings.. the charge of the radically anti-capitalist poet might be thought of as the construction of "documents of civilization" whose performative modes are "dissociate[d]... Boone writes: . poetry turns to willed uselessness as a function of what Bruce Boone calls a reciprocal "fascination" between writing and power. the useless. Fascination is a compelling notion in light of the question: why might language itself be the object or site of an anti-capitalist resistance? Boone's "fascination" is the description of a sociological impetus whose function is that of adhesive. i.23 If I've yet to give adequate support to the claim that language is indeed a pertinent site of political resistance. it also promises at the same time the beginning of art.. To imagine a textual practice of radical uselessness might indeed prove a useful exercise in considering just what it means to construct an anti-capitalist poetry that approaches practical critique. fascinate each other.When classless society promises the end of art through sublation of the tension between what is real and what is possible. Theodor Adorno's Jargon of Authenticity).Yet both [power and literature] continue to influence each other. and to build a structure whose historical destruction will be articulated in the section following. implicating linguistic utility in a political critique by way of a gluey performance of synthetic osmosis.. A profound disjunction. 20 .e. As the structures of politico-economic power obstruct poetry from its fair time-share in the reality studios of the Ideal Republic. I'll the claim fall back on the sociological fact that a few particular communities of poets and scholars have built their lives' work on Boone's "uneasy attractiveness. and their uneasy attractiveness seems to register the uneven development of revolution itself.
Got my feet on the ground.. "[o]pinions [i. Of course. it is a tactical. speak... write. but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated. even as a concrete opinion. the threshold at which the fruits of linguistic production leap from inedible to good(s) is a fluid and historical one—"there is no fixed / threshold at which noise becomes phonically / significant. So where my arguments might seem reductive and surely not as informed as they could be.. goods safely in tow. Logos—"the communicative skills of man"29—techne—language functions bio-technologically as usefully generative of a thing called sense. language in general] are to the vast apparatus of social existence 21 . which itself has the function of adhesive: keeping the wheels of the social machinery locked-in to the well-worn tracks of covnention's bottom-line.We never read.COVNENTION How better to appear insane than to read words without understanding the system that holds them together? The words become a swarm of objects flying at you every which way. language as a world view."26—and so the first step in a consideration of covnentional grammatical structure is the acknowledgement that language is a material phenomenon produced by functional mechanisms capable of (perhaps) infinitely more various products than mere conventionally grammatical speech.e. or hear words that explode before us like lava from a volcano24 In point of fact we are going to claim that the words in [a] sentence are grouped into units (called constituents) and. construct smooth avenues through which linguistic meaning can course from speaker to receiver like an 18-wheeler trucking cross-country. the greater the resonance at the cutting / edge.30 But it also has the function of lubricant: as Benjamin was quoted in an above footnote. insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. polemic representation of the iceberg's tip of a particular field of linguistics scholarship. Rather.25 Pointed facts: sentences can be broken into phrases can be broken into words can be broken into syllables can be broken into letters can be broken into traces (or marks) of the minute bodily gestures that when repeated in habituated sequences (re-marks). and so on until you get a sentence.28 Which is to say that the following discussion of covnentional grammatical structure is conducted in a way that is by no means impartial..these constituents are grouped into larger constituents. the further back this threshold is / pushed.27 We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories. let the seduction of a comprehensive Dogma be my apology.
and so on beyond the scope of syntax. Max Morenberg writes: grammar is like a machine that fabricates sentences according to a set of discernible principles. downed. continents / phrases. the more 22 . I will look at a single aspect of English grammar. Sense ability. the social contract being neither up in the air nor a toss-up. the professional jargon developed by the syntax scholars readily lends itself to politico-economic metaphors. too. determining just which words come into contact with one another along a space/time axis of social utterance. and once written. nations / words. Sensibility. To examine sense's means of production through a particular lens. it is useful to think of syntactical structure in terms of Newtonian orders of magnitude: planet / sentence.we don't throw words into sentences at random. We build constituents and relate them to one another within hierarchical frameworks. Sense is able to. Grammar [makes] sense. The closer to Earth. we order them according to a GRAMMATICAL system.what oil is to machines. a pragmatics of pragmatism: "Urging a realistic view of language in matters of inte[r]n[a]tional agency.37 the economic systems becoming evident only when bits of language data are stripped of their particularity.38 I will reiterate here that rules of syntax determine the order in which words and phrases follow one another. Rather it is written down."34 and "[t]here is evidence to support the idea that a system of syntactic operations is the foundation stone of natural languages. Consensus. Most every grammar textbook used in English composition courses "concentrates on the sentence as the primary unit of expression.."32 In Doing Grammar (2002). where discrete semantic units (are given) order(s) to erect plateaus of consensual(ly) meaning(ful relations). Senses able: two."31 Sense (is the) means (of) the reproduction of a level playing field.. Sense is able. prescriptions of what tool is to be used when and where. Sense abilities.33 Synthetic constituencies sedimented by hierarchical gravity.. beneath which complex "internal" patterns of structural labor grind away."35 so. and (mass) organ-ized as corpora. As well. That is. It is in syntax that interrelations between objects and states can be represented.. I will isolate syntax as the order of linguistic magnitude most telling of the ways that constituency and hierarchy36 structure grammatical communication. At the outset.
Andrew Carnie writes: "Node A dominates node B if and only if A is higher up in the tree than B and if you can trace a branch from A to B going only downwards. love.unique the environmental data. above it is the grammatical description of the words' utility as cogs in the sense-machine and the phrasal organ(ization)s within which they are grouped. we can understand constituency as being the grouping of words into functional units. In the textbook Syntax: A Generative Introduction (2002). verb phrase. [virtual meanings tucked away into actual discrete holdings] [literally. At the bottom of the architecture is the particular sentence data." a node is a level of coding at "the end of a branch" whereas a branch is "a line connecting two parts of a tree. shelter. our charmed poles are the word and the sentence. Food. See Diagram 3 for two "phrase structure diagrams" that illustrate conventional sentence structure. Thus S dominates the material relationship between NP and VP as well as the phrase structure rules determining the dominance of NP and VP as general blueprints for constructions: organisms whose lives depend on particularly basic material conditions.39 These architectures show us that above any rational sentence can be stacked a visual coding that describes the functional relations structuring the basal labors of individual words. Noun phrase.42 The diagram in Diagram 543 goes into even more detail. "Dominance" is the term used to describe the hierarchical imposition of syntactic order. The phrase structure diagram in Diagram 4 illustrates a more detailed coding of the sentence data than the previous diagram. it is enough to merely present terms and 23 . and in the case of syntax. empirical analysis necessitates the determination of limits. With these models."41 "Phrase structure rules" delineate the order in which constituents must be sequenced for a minimal economy of sense—S (sentence) must contain NP (noun phrase) and VP (verb phrase) in that order. uninitiated and under (the) initiated. function being determined by the demands of structural design in the service of sensible language. hard to get to] ["surrounded by towering trees of unfamiliar detail"45] [these bureaus46 are labyrinthine] [brr] [bureaucracy] And the "described" red tape grows in complexity as the jargon ungrounds into autotelic skyrocket. and two others in Diagrams 6a & 6b44 are abstracted to a level of code beyond that which I am prepared to discuss. the particulars melt away into larger functional mechanisms. Each word has a utilitarian function in the structural unit and each constituent has a utility in the sentence."40 A constituent is "a set of nodes exhaustively dominated by a single node. While a systematic ecology saturates the organism across the spectrum of magnitudes. For my purposes. the spectators all a-gawk from the ground up. abstracted. But zooming out.
"These rules are thought to generate the sentences of a language. effectively obscuring the historical-material conditions within which grammars' toils for sense occur. This is why we find three sentences with completely different words being coded as if they were the same sentence—for the purposes of grammar. I want to first acknowledge that. What's most interesting is the ethos in the will to mimetic social reproduction. yet the model is used to generate particular utterances that weren't originally part of the language data given. psychogeography. not because everyday language is imbued with a mundane inevitability of contingency. In effect. And so the basic sentence requires only two constituents: NP and VP. Indeed." let us look at the articulation of grammatical structure as the distribution of ideology via State Apparatuses. hence the name generative grammar. being in dialectical opposition to that of an immediatist revolutionary consciousness. not having access to the grammar textbooks I've cited would mean ignorance of a significant field of critical knowledge. Not in practice. A disregard of the potentials of the everyday construction of linguistic spontaneous structures is the pipeline spitting both ways along the channels branching linguistic material and its coded abstraction. But actually. even revolutionary potentialities—as would an array of tools in a workshop—but their use-values are restricted to discretely specialized utilities. It is this reflexivity that gives grammatically strict language the hollow aura of inevitability —an anemic tautological virus in its mirrored reproducing. educational institutions in particular."47 The model is generated from particular utterances. dialectics spin theories into babels of complexity. Now taking after Bahktin in his claim that "language [is] conceived as ideologically saturated. What's most critical are the basic rules—the framework as it were—beyond the scope of which there is no ordered linguistic economy—and within which.49 But I suppose it is the frame of this knowledge's "transmission" that I distrust. the particular materialities of the given sentences are overwhelmed by the homogenizing logic of the grammar-slime-mold stacked dripping above them. there is much that I find necessary about these texts.models as metalinguistic surfaces—the traces of analyses understood as intoning a variegated ambience of potentials—through which we can imagine social corollaries in regards to subjectivity. Knowledge of grammar is relegated by the textbooks to a dialectic of description 24 . in theory. social conditioning. in abstracted power relationships with the grammar-code mapping them from above. The words in the diagrams' sentences might have various radical. even if it happens to be a knowledge of whose production my critique is perhaps reductively utopian.48 The material is relegated to the backseat. pulled taut and punctual in the service of grammar in the service of sense. Where we're at: a system of discrete phrasal units in material relationships with the units before and after them. but because the good that it produces —covnentional sense—is fetishized. they are practically the same. etc.
reifying the terms as polar limits of engagement: practical frames imposed in theory. and in particular. with prescribing ways of speaking and writing as correct or incorrect. What's interesting is that it is still a required text for numerous university courses. we argued that descriptive rules are the primary focus of syntactic theory. The prefaces and introductions to countless grammar textbooks are marked with defensive maneuvers like those copied below. the apologistic din of White's introductory applause for the formal demands that the text places on students of writing. What are these uses? Why do we maintain prescriptive rules in our society?52 But why do we maintain descriptive rules in our society? More token agency: It's important to remember what our purpose is and what it is not. White emphasizing Strunk's "bold" rhetorical means of communicating such demands. The token is for a free lunch as it were. We are primarily concerned with understanding how sentences are structured. it is pointed out that certain variations are appropriate at the informal level. being what seems to be a trend in paratextual covnention that I want to read as a token nod toward the liberatory discourses of user-based agencies that have been central to the various post-structuralisms and -modernisms. This doesn't mean that prescriptive rules aren't important (in fact. The dialectic 25 . often pared with a structural grammar textbook.53 And a caveat: Since most of us use the informal language of speech and are familiar with its usages.51 The referenced question reads as follows: In the text above.and prescription. the emphasis here is on the formal level and its applications to writing and to certain speech situations. As a result. but for our purposes descriptive rules are more important.54 In this vein.50 Skeleton hands gripping text: For this reason. certain prescriptions about usage are made—prescriptions that are applicable to this level. it's interesting to note the dated cultural politics of Strunk and White's Elements of Style (1959). This doesn't mean that prescriptive rules don't have their uses. we focus on descriptive rules. We're not concerned with language propriety. in the exercises section of this chapter you are asked to critically examine the question of descriptive vs. prescriptive rules). At the same time.
" in reply to Strunk and White's patronizing candor and as a bridge into the next section: A sentence says you know what I mean. But why does the critique implied by anarcho-Marxism take aim at grammar? This was explored briefly in the first section of this chapter. From Guy Debord's "Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action" (1957): 26 ..It concentrates on fundamentals: the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated. Grammar does not mean that they are to limit themselves. an (indifferent-possibly-overlapping-instances) utopian and/or Messianic critique to which the polemic in the previous section is in debt. Grammar does not make me hesitate about prepositions. The reader will soon discover that these rules and principles are in the form of sharp commands55 And now Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee Laufer from "Style. The sociological fact simply is. via a samizdatgrounded poetics of (socio-textual) criticism. and its articulation will always be a rearticulation.57 A mostly American cadre of avant-garde poets umbrella'd together as the Language School—and in dialogue/exchange with a range of contemporaneous British practitioners—launched a fierce anarcho-Marxist critique. White from his introduction: Mr. on commodified modes of textual production propped up by "official verse culture"58 in the 70s and 80s.56 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Decisions about forms are political as well as personal acts. but let us consider the question in terms set by the Situationists some two decades prior to the Language School's emergence. More and more grammar is not a thing.. His book contains rules of grammar phrased as direct orders.of description and prescription means that description prescribes and prescription describes. dear do I well I guess I do. I am a grammarian I do not hesitate I rearrange prepositions. Strunk was a positive man.
Charles Bernstein. We know that such a change is possible through appropriate actions. "Theory is never more than an extension of practice. Copied below are some fragments broken by editorial interjections. perspectival approach"63 that Language poetics and its authors have put forward.59 The interesting terms here are "appropriate actions. and the dialectic referenced in "reflects and prefigures." According to the above de-conflation of imaginative theorizing and sociolinguistic behavior. but which must be applied in interrelation with all revolutionary changes. "as the poets repeatedly tell us. I will divide the Language critique into two basic categories — metaphoric and literal—according to means by which the work's critique engages an ontology distance between im/materiality and materiality—t/here and here. Because.First of all. from "Artifice of Absorption": "The obvious problem is that the poem said any / other way is not the poem. the particular semantic residues and materialities of the language produced in such a laboratory would have the active social function of what Keston Sutherland terms the "anti-mirror": an attempt at refusing to culturally reflect society's "ways of organizing life" by actively projecting an alien(ating) image at those organizational modes—literally." Language poetry is a laboratory for imagining the radical diversion of crystallized streams of social organization into what Deleuze and Guattari call "war-machines"60— just as one might imagine the reorganization of words in a sentence to concoct previously non-existent structures of meaning. the distinction between theory and poetry is an arbitrary one anyway."61 But moving further along the continuum.64 I have found it most useful to represent the Language School by a pastiche of their work in poetics. we think the world must be changed. quoting poetry. Let my duality serve as a heuristic for parsing the recto and verso of the "totalizing."62 In this way. Our specific concern is the use of certain means of action and the discovery of new ones. We want the most liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves confined. However. cf Benjamin's "rubbing history against the grain" in approach of a functional(ly Proto-Post-Neo-Platonic?) "prefigure. 27 . conducting social choreographies and conducting experiments. means which are more easily recognizable in the domain of culture and customs."65 Notice the line breaks. to identify two discrete tendencies within the Language school's general critique would be to project polar limits onto the range of criticisms leveled by the movement's key texts. A society's "culture" both reflects and prefigures its possible ways of organizing life." "new ones" (regarding actions). reciting theory.
A grammatical critique can be mobilized by presenting language as opaque and resistant to reinvestment. and zero-semantic sound poetry. conditions and prohibitions. more as something where challenge is prefigurative or parallels what other kinds of larger challenges would look like or could look like in society. Wolman is updated by the parallel McCaffery builds between the discrete laborers under capitalism and discrete functions under the order of the sentence. for instance. social reproduction. I have tended to think about this social machinery being confronted more as a methodological issue. This need to produce (brought on by instituting an opacity in language) becomes the need to activate a relation of human energies70 And McCaffery from "Text-Sound. Meaning in these cases is no longer a surplus value.. from "Poetry as Explanation. but also (and perhaps more importantly) as metaphor for a popular appropriation of the means of production. but that which is to be produced without reinvestment. diminishes the profit rate and lowers investment drives just as a productive need is increased. Poetry as Praxis": A notion of an allegory of method would offer a way to think about radical poetry's work. by means of rules.. its functioning by means of arbitrary.– METAPHORICAL CRITIQUE – "'Phonemes of the Word fragment! You have nothing to lose but your referents!"66 And so the plagiaristic "literary communism"67 of Guy Debord and Gil J. Energy and Performance": Language.69 A practice of agency in regards to the means of linguistic production indeed functions as an engine for the generation of new meanings capable of articulating unconducive social desires. through its nature as representation. a clarity through sequence carried into meaning. A language centered writing. society at large realizing its fundamental ownership of the means of its own facilitation.68 Means of production. Bruce Andrews. articulated signs. becomes a huge mechanism for repressing libidinal flows71 28 . Steve McCaffery's critique is particularly Situationist in its emphasis on unleashing libidinal flows from the alienating repression of grammatical form when he writes in "From the Notebooks": Grammar is invested precisely because of the expected profit rate viz.
word shooting off referential vectors like the energy field in a Kirillian photograph. One X stretches Y to here. pervasively neologistic) – "ig ok aber-flappi" – in which reference. Into X." akin to the Situationists' critique of alienation as denying the spontaneous pleasure of the diversion (detournement). nail down ("this" word).. how 'reference' then is not a one-to-one relation to an 'object' but a perceptual dimension that closes in to pinpoint. X to adjust Y lamp. or. Points to X less around Y." akin to McCaffery's "repressing libidinal flows.. that much rarer case. sputters omnitropically (the in in of which of who where what wells). X doubles in line. fixing a reference at each turn (fills vats ago lodges spire). deprived of its automatic reflex reaction of word/ stimulus image/response roams over the range of associations suggested by the word. As X if Y. And X chords strained line on racks of Y-ness. from "Semblance": Not 'death' of the referent—rather a recharged use of the multivalent referential vectors that any word has. No but X. X more to determine the radial Y. Out of X. X feeling posture points To Y shaded head. So that Y. X plays on Y phone. refuses the build up of an image track/projection while.of "zaum" (so called "transrational". X spins Y. An X crossed with Y breaks. Since Y.74 29 . Charles Bernstein. for Y. And diversion is precisely what is at stake in radical political efficacy: the diversion and dispersal of powerful tools to people on the ground. pointillistically. how words in combination tone and modify the associations made for each of them. format of Y procedure. Least X to Y finale.Charles Bernstein echoes this analysis with a look at the temporality of referential syntax in "Semblance": Sentences that follow standard grammatical patterns allow the accumulating references to enthrall the reader by diminishing diversions from a constructed representation72 The key phrase here is "diminishing diversions. Barrett Watten's "XY"73 from DECAY: X accepts addresses from Y tape.
Bright colored discs hardening into grids. I make demands. from "The Rejection of Closure": Language discovers what one might know. All strings pulling together. The gravest mistake in his personal life was his attachment to the ground.Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object. the underlying structures) of poetry. if you prefer the terminology.Barrett Watten's "INSIST"75 from DECAY: I see walls straight into the ground.. (2) the stage of historical development determines the natural laws of 30 . This sentence we can Assume. Logic before thought. by analogy with other objects—ball and rivers. Maybe his last toy fading into air poses a colorless question. A bag placed over the body waits for the soul. One divides into many others."76 – LITERAL CRITIQUE – Eric Mottram.77 Lyn Hejinian. Ron Silliman. Charles Bernstein from "The Dollar Value of Poetry": "language control = thought control = reality control. from "Disappearance of the Word / Appearance of the World": some fairly specific statements concerning the object of inquiry can be made: (1) the stage of historical development determines the natural laws (or. This sentence occurs in other places. the limits of language are the limits of what we might know. All is animated. from "'Declaring a Behaviour': The Poetry Performance": a change in poetics is generated by and generates new experiential definitions of what a poem is. And to bridge into the next section. Clouds melt on contact with sound. Therefore. inseperable from intellectual and emotional changes in the society of which it is a major function..78 The poem's function under socio-cultural-specific conditions.
and prohibitions. 31 . no gap to be aware of and to bridge from reader to text: what purports to be an experience is transformed into the blank stare of the commodity—there only to mirror our projections with an unseemly rapidity possible only because no experience of 'other' is in it. the primary material. from "Text and Context": Language is the center. becomes a huge mechanism for suppressing libidinal flow. articulate signs. Energy and Performance": Language. around features which make present to us words' lack of transparency. Not a separate but a distinguishing reality. and language arts. the erotic sense of its own shared reality. and to practice out the actuality and non-representation of the phonematic marks an important stage in establishing the agencies for a general libidinal derepression.81 Marjorie Perloff commenting critically on the intentions of the Language school in The Dance of the Intellect (1985): For here the attempt is not to articulate the curve of a particular experience but to create a formal linguistic construct that itself shapes our perception of the world around us. their refusal to be motivated along schematic lines by frames exterior to themselves.79 Bruce Andrews. through its nature as representation.language. their practicality. There is nothing difficult in the products of such activity because there is no distance to be traveled. by means of rules. To investigate sound in isolation from the sign-function. from "The Dollar Value of Poetry": Experience dutifully translated into these 'most accessible' codes loses its aura and is reduced to the digestible contents which these rules alone can generate.. from "Text-Sound.82 Steve McCaffery. its functioning by means of arbitrary. of the rise of capitalism has been in the area of reference and is directly related to the phenomena known as the commodity fetish. conditions.. from "Text and Context": Referentiality is diminished by organizing the language around other features or axes. the sacred corpus.83 Bruce Andrews.80 Charles Bernstein. (3) the primary impact on language.
even more so than the innovative techniques of the poetry itself. from "Poetry as Explanation. its explanation. away from the Language school's utopianism as quoted above —"Theory is never more than an extension of practice"—to a pragmatic distancing (by way of inevitability) of poetic form conceived of as formative practice."85 Moving back now along the theory-practice continuum. I will read "(social) method" not only as poetic interventions into grammatical linguistic forms.Yet where is the energy invested?84 And not only where it is invested. 32 . is the book's history as an object and the means of production employed in its construction. what marks the poetry's relation to a politics of praxis. a community of readers in complex material relationships to the means by which the poetic forms under discussion are presented to them. In terms of print culture (the subject of the following and concluding paragraph). but where/when/why/how is it invested? Bruce Andrews again. since 'the future' is implicated one way or another by how reading reconvenes conventions. Poetry as Praxis": "Writing's (social) method is its politics. but also as poetry's dispersal into social networks via publication: out of the printer (or linked from a server) and into the world at large.
Jerome McGann. / Litho Division. to be practical. on the one hand.g. cultural production is jacked into a syntax of specialized alienations. and this implication can be thought of as a notation of one's ecological footprint. The distinction means to bracket out of consideration those bibliographical and textual-critical materials with 33 .. your name on the jacket. Objects are products of politico-economic relationships between humans and machines. complex equations.. they don't happen without a lot of work.H. and. Machines are constructed with labor. and the 'document' on the other. we can be rest-assured that most commercial printers have particularly unhealthy relationships to global warming. from Social Values and Poetic Acts (1988): Formal and immanent approaches to the poetic tend to conceive the discourse system as a verbal or grammatological one. = hand-made in your living room or some intimate equivalent. swept up in a stream of labor relations set in anarchic contiguities by the fluid aim of capital. Hence a sharp distinction is commonly made between 'the text'.PUBLISHING GRAMMARS PUBLISHING CAPITALS CHAPTER THREE It is the poet side of you that dreams of being published. Brown Ltd. sent off to an editor who then sends off the copy to a commercial printer—e. Of course. and labor employs tools (machines). / Helena St. "F. Negotiating the various avenues of object-production—bound by such polar end-stops as shelflife commodity markets and esoteric gift economies—involves fundamentally political choices about one's implication in the production/consumption economy. An experimental poetry published as the trace of a radical re-laboring of language moves closer towards a comprehensive praxis as the materiality of its book-ness and the "long biography"4 of its production/dispersal become more evidently intimate and localized.How to make those dreams reality? Dreams don't come true overnight. and they often employ humans. that sees a book with your title."2 So when a poetry manuscript is written by an author. And while environmental impact is questionable as always. Works. one must consume raw goods in transforming them into "cooked" goods as it were.1 Objects are constructed with labor. often but not always taking the form of commodities. Burley"3—who then sends it back to the editor to be properly distributed to the book-sellers. a deep economics that underpins all pro-sumption choices regardless of their surface relationship to "nature.
necessitates further (and more specialized) archival research. but a body of work trimmed on that guillotine will expose a constellation of labored relations—intertextuality of the material/ medial enterprise—that lead by their dispersive branching into further networks and corpora. of which the present document serves only as an introduction. for a mode of practice that might be thought of as motivated waste of the scriptural economy's techne. I will briefly describe opposing models for publishing and "getting published" in terms of a heuristic dialectic: market orientation and community orientation. as well as in printing. as previously mentioned— and an ongoing body of primary research that I am conducting on London-based micro-press publications associated with what Eric Mottram calls the "British Poetry Revival" (1960-1975). my study of the community orientation is informed both by theory and practical community engagement. This latter category includes my experience as a book-making intern for Xexoxial Editions—a product of this experience being the network of practitioners into which I tapped to find contributors for Plantarchy. But these marks can only be read backwards. For now. The options that writers choose in the area of initial production. these marks contributing to an everdeveloping and always-complete system of co-laboring object-functions at play in auratic fields of difference.9 This is a project that. While my study of the market orientation is a theoretical engagement with how-to guides and insiders' manuals. What Charles Bernstein calls a "technical cataloguing"6 in reference to formal accountings of poetic structure might be re-directed towards reading the saturation of the poem in its object-status as an historical trace of politico-economic methodologies.which poetic discourse is always and necessarily involved. In order to contextualize the decisions I've made in editing and publishing the first issue of Plantarchy. Consequently.5 The object's movement through climates of construction and distribution inscribe conditional marks on the book object. through history: examining the cut-marks on the edge of a book cannot tell us the exact type of guillotine used for the trim. a panel from Bob Cobbing's Destruction in Art (1986). bibliography and textual criticism are conceived as either preliminary or tangential to criticism and interpretation.7 See Diagram 8. This critical neglect of documentary aspects of poetical discourse—this failure to incorporate documentary studies into modern hermeneutics —has obscured that horizon of the poetics where the work's ideological dimensions are clearest.8 Radical. publishing and distribution—the options that are open to them in these matters— locate what one might call the 'performative' aspect of the poetic: what poems are doing in saying what they say. by nature of its historical specificity. further study awaits the publication of an exciting book that documents a particular nexus of activities 34 . Such matters are taken to be accidental rather than substantive to the nature of the poetic.
and its involvement in the quasi-tradeunionisation of the poetry scene. involving a struggle between the ideals of an artist-led organization. such as the link–up with his organisations Writers Forum. from 1971 to 1977. who sought to further the 'anti– modernist counter–revolution' of the 1950s. in the summer of 1977.. Poets Conference (no apostrophes in either). Poetry Review. then print-shop manager at the National Poetry Centre. but nobody in the 70s who was seriously interested in poetry could ignore it. I will quote from selected portions of Peter Barry's soon-to-be-published Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (2006) to give a quick sense of historical precedent: An odd thing happened in British poetry in the 1970s. and the ALP (The Association of Little Presses). . writes: A struggle for control of the most prominent organization for poetry in England took place.. the spirit of the latter being the impetus for much of the political desires expressed in the previous chapters. and the neo–conservatives. a poet who was at the centre of the international movement in 'sound texts' and 'visual poetries' (also known as Concrete Poetry). largely dependent upon voluntary labour. and he was at the centre of most of the key developments. Then. in the late 1960s. and the rising ideals of "professionalism" in the arts which foreshadowed that 35 . such as the Society's basement print-shop. For now.So the present book is.. among other things. one of the most conservative of British cultural institutions.10 And cris cheek. the key figure was Bob Cobbing. Some revered it. He was the driving force behind the most radical aspects of the Poetry Society in these years. its journal. He had been among the first of the radicals to be elected to the Poetry Society's governing Council.. others reviled it. it was over. a case study of the inevitable frictions and tactical struggles between an avant–garde and a 'mainstream'. and for a period of six years.falling at (and actually beyond the so-called) end of the British Poetry Revival. and a major figure generally in the London 'counter–culture' of the 1960s and 70s as a performer and small–press publisher.In terms of what happened on a daily basis at the Poetry Society's headquarters at 21 Earls Court Square. A small group of 'radical' or 'experimental' poets took over the Poetry Society. who sought to continue the 1960s revival of the early twentieth–century's 'modernist revolution'. polarizing the rift between the 'neo–modernists'.. which together brought a form of 1960s left–wing collectivism to the highly individualistic business of writing and publishing poetry.the conflict at the Poetry Society was a key moment in the history of contemporary British Poetry. was the most startling poetry magazine in the country. but the full story has never been told. almost as suddenly as it had begun..
the National Poetry Centre was a comprehensive approach to poetry as the nexus for a web of social relationships and a temporality of fluid laboridentities rather than a cog in a commodity structure. a selection of notes taken while conducting biblio-material analyses of the complete run of Poetry Review at SUNY-Buffalo's poetry archive: From Vol 65 Nos 2/3 1975 to Vol 65 No 4 1975 there is a notable difference in the structure of the journal as a book object. Brown Ltd. Also note shift from A4 (?) to large format (A5?). the crudeness of this aesthetic (or simply. Poetry Review was printed out of the National Poetry Centre's basement for only five numbers before the literature branch of the Arts Council cracked down on the "radicals. Vol 65 No 4 1975 also marks the shift from a mat finish on the cover to a rough cover stock. / Helena St. a centimeter to the left. In Poetry Review's first issue after the gradual abandonment of the print-shop. Top left corner of the back cover of Vol 66 No 1 1975—black thumb-print inked from the offset machine.11 Now." spurring them to quit the Poetry Society en masse.12 Scanning the spines from Vol LVII No 1 Spring 1967 to Vol 67 Nos 1&2 1977—the two issues registering the DIY shift in the review's material production. Though edited by Eric Mottram since Vol 62 No 3 Autumn 1971 and thus publishing a wider range of experimental aesthetics than ever before. The cut marks on the book blocks. On the other hand. taped or glued bits of paper with the spine information typed upon them stuck on the master and copied.managerial trauma which Thatcherism came to personify. the patterns of the cut over the four large format issues indicative of a common machine. rush) evened out in further issues.H. a situated labor. Works. Burley". no matter how many copies were made. / Litho Division. "Printed by F. The aura of that print on this copy. rather than the commercial (read: professional) printer of the last issue prior to its DIY publication. have spines where the title runs off the allotted space. Was this mark encoded onto the plate and reproduced in all of the editions? It's not close enough to the edge that it would have been cut off had the spine been aligned. Vol 65 No 4 1975 and the subsequent Vol 66 No 1 1975. Vol 65 No 4 1975 sees a critical change in the peritext: issues of Poetry Review from this issue through Vol 67 Nos 1/2 1977 were printed at "the National Poetry Centre in the Printshop of the Poetry Society / London Consortium of Small Presses". the aesthetics of this informatic noise. an issue printed commercially but oddly lacking epitextual acknowledgement of the issue's designer or printer—a willed ignorance of material production and implication in structures of Capital—an editorial note reads: 36 .
In "Punk as Poetry: cris cheek and his offset press 37 . The print shop was open in the sense that anybody who wanted to try their hand at printing a book of poems or stories could do so.15 Meanwhile."14 The projection of this trace as an illuminated utopian blueprint onto the circuitry of society at large is what I will call the work of a fractal imagination. countless reference-books on publishing market themselves as Guides to various writers' Markets.13 As ciphers of an everyday phenomenology of anti-capitalist employments of Statefunded printing machines. The radical poli-aesthetics set spinning at the National Poetry Centre were an explicit subversion of any notion of agency that isolates agency from individual (and/or spontaneously collected) subjectivities. division of life. to make poetry available through available means. There's a blantant socio-metaphyscis to these dominant conceptions of writing and reading. Ouroboros'. arguing for the necessity of literary Agents (read: Agency) to mediate between author and publishing.17 The community orientation conceives of agency as an inherent presence akin to notions of spirit and energy. Poets turned up with manuscripts and left with editions of books. from "Sky Tails: An Encryption of Dispersal": Through Bob Cobbing's initiation. ethic. a passive appeal to an anemic vision of democracy that articulates (and thus reproduces) individuals as monads in discrete isolation from power: the poet needs an insider's guide because the poet is not the agent.The change in the magazine's format has been necessitated by practical economics.i. all of them poets. The Poetry Society hopes that this will not greatly inconvenience regular readers of the Review. the Consortium of London Presses fostered an artist-led d.16 The market orientation conceives of agency as a result of money and money as a result of agency. making agency tautologically consonant with the dollar and all the conventions that smooth out its avenues of circulation. Plantarchy was conceived of and realized in the spirit of such histories as the National Poetry Centre and the anarcho-pastoral of Xexoxial Editions: two contemporaneous struggles—unequal parts pragmatic and utopian—for spontaneous modes of social re-organization as principled by intimate collectives of cultural production.y. Division of labor. cris cheek. Networked free power. community-organized publishing collectives saturate the mechanical space of object-production with a fundamental agency. There were people on hand to help. often pamphlets but sometimes sizeable volumes. books of experimental poetry made in print-runs of 100 or 200 at the National Poetry Centre—when totalized by what McGann terms "document" rather than simply "text"—trace the radical buzz of a micro-"social circuitry.
collaborations" William R.g. Tom and Marilyn Ross assume "self-publishing" (also called "vanity publishing" and akin to Rigney's libertarian alternatives) to be pursued for the achieving of market-oriented desires: "Not everyone self-publishes for the same reason."21 These "alternatives" to "publishing" are far from the radical labor of a critical pragmatism. the work represents a diverse range of practitioners who were all contacted directly for their work. the journal cannot be considered terribly radical if one notes the nods to power that are made on the acknowledgements page and elsewhere. raw and unpolished feel [of cheek's London-based handmade poetry editions in the 1970s and early 80s] reflected punk's deep suspicion of the glossy."20 is a libertarian "alternative" to the ordered bourgeois labor demanded by the book within which it is framed in the jargon of "difference. slick media and bourgeois façades of normalcy and implied relevancy. a price. This is in point opposition to notions of publishing that situate desire in a cult of democratic appeal. and even the relatively high production values that under-wrote the hours of sew-binding and taping. Melanie Rigney's brief report in Poet's Market 2003. However. include the ISSN. A variegated making. e." It's pragmatic insofar as its being a kind of realization of subjective imaginations via the channeling of passive and abstracted labor—money. the Copyright logo. "A Look at Alternatives in Publishing. Howe describes how: [the] blatant. and so the "Contributors" page is the document of a certain kind of mediated intimacy. the jury'll rule in my favor.19 While Plantarchy was printed and bound in my living room using machines that were either purchased with grant money or built with the help of William R. book-making and correspondence as two points on a pleasure-map of diverse laboring. Howe.18 It is "implied relevancy"—as communicated via the jargons of paratextual convention—that a radical writing/publishing praxis avoids at all costs. choose this alternative for financial gain. The market orientation imagines the realization of desires to be far-off rewards withheld as both quantity and quality in exchange for a temporalized quantity of specialized labor. See Diagram 9 for a page from 405-12-3415's REGIST ER FOR MORE (2006) which was composed under the guise of my social security number as a critico-practical response to knowledge of the territorialization of the National Poetry Centre. however. an unspecialized anarcho-Marxism. Most. If my work isn't bad enough. The community orientation imagines the realization of dreams to be the material reorganization of everyday reality according to immediate desires. Creative engagement with the means of the production is a metonym for dreams of the material (and 38 . Radically metonymic labor: poets controlling the means of their poetry's production in all the many forms of labor that this production takes.
reading. uploading) that itself questions dominant modes of social behavior. for / example.fluid) reorganization of civilization itself according to principles of spontaneous mechanical intervention. a metonymic model for imagining / experience. Fractal imagination means that each experience is metonymic for concentrically more expansive scales of experience. 39 . publishing. leading us into dynamic constellations of material potentials. the dynamics & / contours of its formal proceedings may suggest. Fractal imagining should wander before us. just as the poem does the same. As Charles Bernstein writes of reading poetry: "But even when a / poem is read as a formal exercise."22 The directive then would be one that calls for the construction of experiences that function. as opacities of generative play. reflexing against Bernstein's metonymic models for imagining. Let the first socialization of the poem be a critical performance (via binding.
But what's interesting is that Plantarchy. building web-sites. It remains a unique niche in the historical constellation of radical occupations of space. 774) 3. 243 2. jacked into the experimental publishing network day-and-night through the mail and the internet." and such a discussion took place as a chaired event at p o s t_m o ot. like most books these days. having parties. trapping raccoons. (McGann. Texts were both copied into the document from text files and keyed in by hand from hard copy. collecting water in jugs from a pipe coming out of the bottom of a hill. playing music. 74-75) 2. 311 3. began as an InDesign file. type-setting and designing Peter Lamborn Wilson's Gothick Institutions (Xexoxial Editions. Hegel 1821. making my work and sending it out to magazines. "The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy" in Internationale 40 . and myself. Deleuze and Guattari. This is rich grounds for a discussion in terms of McGann's "initial production. shooting video. 3. 2005). "Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859). making plans. NOTES CHAPTER ONE 1. Howe. "a convocation of unorthodox cultural and poetic practices" that took place at Miami University from April 14-16th.INTRODUCTION 1. going to Wal-Mart. cris cheek. 2006 as organized by William R. Dreamtime Village is given fuller mention in Peter Lamborn Wilson and Bill Weinberg's Avant Gardening (Autonomedia. discrete things act with discretion. The blur between analog and digital means is effectively a blur of their a/effects as ontological structures of transfer. In public. taking kids to school and entertaining visitors.org – Gardens in the morning. this was all field experience in an attempt at a hyper-rural Situationism. 1999). (Leitch. Karl Marx. http://dreamtimevillage.
. the Situationists proceeding after a century of Marxian theorizing and the communist shadow having grown long in the evening.. From "Some Theoretical Questions to be Treated without Academic Debate or Speculation" in Internationale Situationisste 10. 4. 157). haunting not only Europe but the Americas. With the continued absence of heavy industry. who digested his theoretical legacy and projected it with lucidity onto the politico-economic milieu in which they found themselves as conflicted artists.. 41 . We can observe the same point of view developing in the analyses of the Frankfurt School" (Watson 1996. and the future of that struggle will surely be telling. The font of the Spectacle. March 1966 (Knabb.Situationniste 10. September 1955 (Knabb. the Maghreb. the Belgian Raoul Vaneigem proposes a strict redefinition of knowledge in order to deal with the old mind/body dualism for which the theory/practice rift is a foil: "Knowledge is inseparable from the use that is made of it". But Smith's theory limits this study's sights to the industrialized nations.. as the font of the Spectacle. 6) 6. it can hardly be said that the political economies of these nations have changed significantly since Khayati's writing. as the will to nationalize resources in many of the post-colonial States during the 1960s and '70s was argued by the Algerian Mustafa Khayati to be no more than "a realized neomercantilism". as the personification of Capital. The few citations of Marx himself will serve as sign-posts. On this split.. It should be noted that my frequent citing of Hegel and Ken Knabb's Situationist International Anthology is a product of Marxist ideology—Hegel preceding Marx.[the] Internationale Situationisste as an object of hatred. Ben Watson writes: "As the saviour of postwar capitalism in Europe. which is a popular site of criticism against radical political agendas.. Surely the US occupation and "democratizing" of Iraq is a significant alteration to the country's politico-economic structures. the United States is the inevitable antagonist. From "Contributions Towards Rectifying Public Opinion Concerning Revolution in the Underdeveloped Countries" in Internationale Situationisste 11. and parts of Asia. and in particular the United States. "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography" in Les Lèvres Nues 6.It figures in the pages of. 168) 5. Smith's theory is only applicable to industrialized nations. online). 7.this will be a pivotal qualification as English grammar becomes a site of political critique in the following chapter. 221). October 1967 (Knabb. leaving the profit of his work to be articulated by the Situationists. March 1966 (Knabb.
17. If only they weren't invisible." Now this quote from Debord. Vaneigem 1967. But class is a private affair in the United States. Charles Bernstein points out in his preface to The Politics of Poetic Form (1990) that the American poet George Oppen revised Shelley's dictum to: "poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world" (Bernstein. Vaneigem 1967. Vaneigem 1967. Watson and Leslie. 39 13. 149 42 . 52 9." 12. From "Instructions for Taking Up Arms" in Internationale Situationisste 6. Hegel 1821. 243 16. vii). 18) 15. August 1961 (Knabb. the notion of politicians as public servants is exposed as one of the many contradictions of capitalist democracy. Consider the wage-slaves and the working poor who labor behind closed doors. In Defence of Poetry (1821). after-hours. 131 10. in factories of which the average consumer hardly receives images in the media.8. these workers would deserve the label "public servant" more than any bureaucratic role-player. Percy Bysshe Shelley writes that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world. 63). online 18. Considering the notion of public/private space. relevant to the Situationists with their "psychogeography" and "unitary urbanism. Avineri. "Qualitative totality" rings of Robert Redfield's theorizing of pre-urban cultural economy as organized in "folk societies"—autonomous. communalist micro-societies saturated in sacred everyday rituals—a poetic thesis with a distaste of the urban city influenced by Louis Wirth's study of urban ecology in Chicago. "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret" (Marx 1867. 119. "Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action" June 1957 (Knabb. pre-literate. during night-shifts. homogenous. on "the passivity relation" as a product of division: "reduced to the role of spectators of those among them who are the most qualified in politics conceived as a specialization". 14. online) 11.
Trans Ken Knabb (Vaneigem 2003) 23. 313) 30. Althusser 1965. 42 20. Josiah Warren. See Diagram 1: "Pyramid of Capitalist System. Safety 24. Equitable Commerce. August 1961 (Knabb. 29. "Dissolving the State in the Economic Organism" (Krimerman and Perry." circa 1911 agitprop for Industrial Worker. 37. 325) 21. Vaneigem 1967. Power: the degree to which an organization can "[change] the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols" From "Communique 6" of the Association for Ontological Anarchy (Bey 1985. This message is still being reproduced in contemporary samizdat poetry journals such as the Detroit-based STRUGGLE. 90 32. 131-132 26. Prema Murthy's web-art installation "Mythic Hybrid" in the e-journal Drunken Boat 7 explores "the shifting boundaries of space. 39) 27. culture and modes of embodiment" as they relate to women laborers in Indian microelectronics factories. I found STRUGGLE in Poet's Market 2003. "Instructions for Taking Up Arms" in Internationale Situationisste 6. "Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result now from a 43 . Risk 25. Ironically. Quoted in "The Pattern of Life in an Individualist Anarchist Community" (Krimerman and Perry. "Dissolving the State in the Economic Organism" (Krimerman and Perry. Bey 1985. (New Harmony.19. "From Wildcat Strike to Total Self-Management" (1974). 65) 22. "a Magazine of Proletarian Revolutionary Literature" edited by Tim Hall. Indiana: 1846). 28. 324) 31.
132 38.. online) 39. From "Communique 6" of the Association for Ontological Anarchy (Bey 1985. to withdraw from the area of simulation.already possess the fixed quality of natural forms of social life before man seeks to give an account. but it's useful as a parallel to what Hakim Bey identifies as the "rigid vacuity" within which one is saturated in attempts at confrontations with capitalism (Bey 1985. It is important to note here the Marxist undertones of Barthes' frustration.head-on collision with the terminal State. a rigid vacuity.. Barthes... 211). It should be note that they are specifically referring to the psychological affect of social institutions such as nursing homes. 11. 98. Vaneigem 1967. while our meager weaponry finds nothing to aim at but a hysteresis.. Make Believe. 199 40. 98) 43. Barthes. but of their content and meaning. "the fundamental contradictions. 133. not of their historical character. The term's scope is more limited than the significance I give it. Althusser 1971. 160 41. and prisons. Marx wrote in "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret": "The Forms which stamp products as commodities.Its guns are all pointed at us. 23 34. for in his eyes they are immutable. schools for marginal students. to disappear" (Bey 1985. 100) 33.. 39) 36. 2005) 35. Deleuze and Guattari.in most cases the best and most radical tactic will be to refuse to engage in spectacular violence.between the system and human desires." (Marx 1867. "The Storm on Her Birthday" on Shock of Being (Chicago: Flameshovel / Polyvinyl Records. 42 42." 37. "The goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols".. Althusser 1971. "May '68 Did Not Take Place" (Kraus and Lotringer. Hegel 1999. 44 . Louis Althusser's "know-how" resonates as a product of Pierre Bourdieu's "habitus..
"Everyone seeks spontaneously to extend such brief moments of real life" (Vaneigem 1967. TNWK (things not work keeping).. cf. Vaneigem 1967. rather. August 1964 (Knabb. "Instructions for Taking Up Arms" in Internationale Situationisste 6. 12) 56. April 1962 (Knabb. let it not be assumed that I imply any one definition of significance. Bey 1985." (Debord. "Boredom is counterrevolutionary. a long-term collaboration between Kirsten Lavers and cris cheek. August 1961 (Knabb. Vaneigem 1967. 39 45. it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. ix 57. unable to control the fantastic accumulation of material possibilities that they produce. 199 50. 37 55." From "The Bad Days Will End" in Internationale Situationisste 7. Hegel 1821. 193 53. 98 46. Watson 1996. 64) 54. 338) 44. For a corpus of multi-media arts projects addressing this issue explicitly. "Questionnaire" in Internationale Situationisste 6. 134) 52.com 48. 1965 & 1969 (Knabb. 86) 51. Vaneigem 1967. Knabb. Bey 1985." From "Untitled Programmatic Statements" by the Italian Section of the S.The social force that has an interest in—and is alone capable of—resolving these contradictions is all the workers who are powerless over their own lives.thingsnotworthkeeping. "The spectacle is not a collection of images. The perception of significance being a function of culturally specific value judgments. 81 49. Online at: http://www.I. online 45 . In every way. 138) 47.
141) 66. 45) 64.bopsecrets. 252 68. the Industrial Expression of Anarchism" (Krimerman and Perry. 81. 279 46 .org/CF/graffiti. "becoming. August 1961 (Knabb. 39 65. September 1969 (Knabb. 16) 59. Nowak and Paprzycki." From "Instructions for Taking Up Arms" in Internationale Situationisste 6. "Syndicalism Not a Form of Anarchism" (Krimerman and Perry. 37. Bey 1985. 38) 61. 68. 191 72.of the workers movement in Europe. only the most radical current is worth preserving: that centered on the program of workers councils." 67. Lautréamont. Vaneigem 1967. 289) 63. Trans Ken Knabb (Vaneigem 2003. 31. Or in Deleuze and Guattari's Heraclitean terminology.. "Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalized Self-Management" in Internationale Situationisste 12.58." (May '68 graffiti reproduced at the Bureau of Publics Secrets website: http://www. "From Wildcat Strike to Total Self-Management" (1974). "Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving / it as you would like to find it on entering. 115) 70. 88 71. "Syndicalism. "Of the tendencies. 47) 69. "Questionnaire" in Internationale Situationisste 9. 63) 62. August 1964 (Knabb. "An Individualist Attack: Communists Cannot Be Anarchists" (Krimerman and Perry. Vaneigem 1967. "All the King's Men" in Internationale Situationisste 8..htm) 60. January 1963 (Knabb.
September 1969 (Knabb. we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities. "IF EVERY WORD SPOKEN IN NEW YORK CITY DAILY / WERE SOMEHOW TO MATERIALIZE AS A SNOWFLAKE.. a use value. Trans Albert Hofstadter. 1999) 76.Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: 47 .. Eric Mottram. such as iron.. September 1955 (Knabb. (Leitch.Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity. "Editor's Note" in Poetry Review Vol 66 No 1 1975. "Statement on Reading in Writing" (Bernstein and Andrews.73. "Avant Gardening" (Wilson and Weinberg.. something useful. pragmatics refers to the descriptive study of language as actively used in particular social contexts. In the linguistics jargon. 489) 7. such as dozens of watches. 38 CHAPTER TWO 1. "Language" (1950). "Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalized SelfManagement" in Internationale Situationisste 12.. 77." (Goldsmith. 11) 75. Wolman and Guy Debord's notion of "literary communism". yards of linen. it has no existence apart from that commodity. Cf. Gil J.When treating of use value. 115) 5. From "Methods of Detournement" in Les Lèvres Nues 8. "The utility of a thing makes it a use value. Jed Rasula. 5). 1121) 3. 39. or tons of iron. is therefore. A commodity. 2. Raoul Vaneigem." (Barthes. so far as it is a material thing. 53) 4. / EACH DAY THERE WOULD BE A BLIZZARD. Bey 1985.. corn. emphasizing relations between speakers. Martin Heidegger. "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography" in Les Lèvres Nues 6. 6. in which one speaks about the first. Moore. 287) 74. May 1956 (Knabb. Roland Barthes coins the term "metalanguage" to refer to "a second language. or a diamond.
41) 15.. Sutherland 2005. 97) 10. J.H." Genesis Breyer P-Orridge writes that "alchemists always used the most modern equipment and mathematics." (de Certeau. the ludic syntax of a language system is mapped on to determinations and coercions which by invasion cast their weights and shadows parasitically into the playing-fields. they are." (Carnie. Prynne writes in "A Letter to Steve McCaffery": "But in the political question of reference to a world in which social action is represented linguistically and its consequences marked out by economic function and personal access to social goods (justice.. articles. de Certeau. the material depositories of exchange value." Dick Higgins writes: "The process of forming words. and placards. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. in addition.. In "Magick Squares and Future Beats: The Magical Processes and Methods of William S. 146) 12. 98 11. Kirby Malone. Andrew Carnie writes in Syntax: A Generative Introduction: "This matching of situations with expressions is a kind of mathematical relation (or function) that maps sentences onto particular situations. part of the divine game of realizing things out of their underlying numbers or letters. 13. In "Pattern Poems. freedom. the most precise science of their day" (Metzger. "The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to statements uttered. cris cheek. no pagination 9.they also constitute the substance of all wealth. brochures.. whatever may be the social form of that wealth." (Bernstein and Andrews." (Marx 1867. Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines" (Benjamin 1996. 14) 14. 87) 48 ." (Dorward 2000. online) 8. 444). "TV TRIO present CAREER WRIST" (Bernstein and Andrews. In the form of society we are about to consider. 113) 16. it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious. universal gesture of the book—in leaflets. Walter Benjamin writes in "One-Way Street": "Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing. a very sacred one indeed. brown bread). Marshall Reese.
. online 22. 142) 24. Morenberg.H. In "Rejection of Closure" (1985). Herndon. 44) 21. 27 26. 78) 28.. Jow Lindsay. 654) 31. machines numerous enough for me to avoid the issue of typology in general. 1198) 29. "Wind Section" from 3 (katKO. Adorno 1991. Bruce Boone. 444 32. Mikhail M. 'Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself. Power and Activity" (Bernstein and Andrews. J.17.in human languages my guess is that all evolved societies have built evolved dialectics representing the space of their internal and external contradictions" (Dorward 2000. Lyn Hejinian writes: "As Francis Ponge puts it. brackets mine) 49 . Prynne writes in "A Letter to Steve McCaffery": ". Trans Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. v 30. From "Artifice of Absorption" (Bernstein 1992. (Leitch. John 1:14 18. Bernstein 1990. "Writing. 81. Benjamin 1955. 256 19. Bakhtin. by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world" (Hoover. (Sutherland 2006. vii 20. Carnie. 12) 27. "Discourse in the Novel" (1934-35). (Herndon.' Instead it seems to be located in language. See Diagrams 2a and 2b for structural diagrams of "the human speech mechanism. Trans Keston Sutherland." a model from which we can draw parallels to the material functionalities of writing apparatuses. 6. 33 25. 44) 23. Benjamin 1996.
Morenberg. Mind all mine. becomes the body politic—corpora—or bodies politicized by social theory. (Carnie. It's fascinating language. See Diagram 7. Carnie. 93 43. 80 42. 173 40. 303) 45. Herndon. (Carnie. Also: "These procedures are part of our minds. 27 38. There is perhaps a distinct ontological foundation to the spatial reference in this metaphor. Patterns and Purpose is appropriately a part of the "Effective English Series" as edited by James A." Questions: What else is part of our minds? What is minding our parts? The parts of our mind? The mine of our parts? Answers: All mined.33. (Carnie. Herndon. Note the metaphoric reference to the base—"foundation stone" (Herndon. consider the socio-political implications of hierarchy and constituency being used to describe structural features of language. Carnie. Carnie's prose accompanying these trees—reproduced in the Diagrams section along with the trees as they appear together in the textbook— is particularly interesting. 299. Bureau: a chest made of stacked drawers. 122) 36. Carnie. In light of discussions around hierarchy and divisions of labor in the previous chapter. 41. 144 44. vii 34. 47. Note the metaphor of the political body—corpus—which when ordered in the social. 10) 39. vi 46. vii) 35. whether read beneath or outside of the light of its implications—spell-binding. 5) 50 . Epperson (Opdahl. Morenberg. 37.
No free signifiers: no unvalorised process: no free lunch!" (Dorward 2000. Kittridge's Advanced English Grammar. Hagar's The English of Business. One example: "Grammarians analyze sentences in order to understand how language works in social or psychological or literary contexts. no pagination) 58.48.H. Carnie. Doing grammar in the way suggested in this book should make you a more perceptive observer of language. xiv 56. Eric Mottram. we'll look at how sentences function in literature and in our own writing so that we can become more thoughtful writers and readers. J. 24 53. Prynne in "A Letter to Steve McCaffery": "I do not believe that 'freedom' from this aspect of the social order is more than illusory.. Opdahl. the National Book Awards." etc. 93) 51 ..." (Bernstein and Andrews. Polemic. (Bernstein 1992. 182) 57. Carnie. "The official cultural apparatus. Modern Language Association's InHouse Tyle Sheet. Stein's How to Write. "'Declaring a Behaviour': The Poetry Performance" (cheek 1977. as it applies to American poetry—what I've called 'official verse culture'—is most clearly revealed in the publishing and reviewing practices of the New York Times. and the Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships." (Morenberg. more knowledgeable teachers of writing and reading. Marin and Ohmann's Logic and Rhetoric of Exposition. Strunk and White. Morenberg. viii 55.. when we get through analyzing sentences. by the Pulitzer Prize. 7 52. and Eichler's Book of Etiquette. or more discerning editors. 49. Raleigh's Style. "Sources include Follett's Modern American Usage. 3) 50. 41) 51. by such presenting organizations as. 3 54. Thus. and a number of old-line literary quarterlies.
Bernstein 1992. 35) 64. 351 61. 69. Steve McCaffery. constructivist practice— the "primary assumption that code is ontological. McCaffery and Nichol. 32. Poetry as Praxis" (Bernstein 1990. Deleuze and Guattari. 39) 70. Poetry as Praxis." (Hayles. Watten. online) 65. Charles Bernstein quoted by Marjorie Perloff in "The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the 80's" from The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (ibid) 63." This is a rich approach if poetry is considered heuristically as a material. Perloff. Bruce Andrews. 16 66." (Bernstein 1990. Bernstein and Andrews. 17 60.59. no pagination 52 . see Stephen Perkins' essay on Neoism in Plantarchy 1. online) 67. "The Death of the Subject: The Implications of CounterCommunication in Recent Language-Centered Writing" (Bernstein and Andrews. "Poetry as Explanation. 56). Bruce Andrews. 11 68. Knabb. Hayles discusses the dynamic feedback cycles between metaphor and means: "what we make and what we (think we) are co-evolve together. "Poetry as Explanation. titled "Neoist Interruptus and the Collapse of Originality" (katKO. For a discussion of an openly plagiaristic school of cultural and poetic practice contemporaneous with the Language school. 116 73. Bernstein and Andrews. 218 62. 72 72. 160 71. Knabb.
31 85. 230 83. consumption. Cf. 4) 53 . Wilson and Weinberg 1999 3. Baumann and Johnson. Bernstein and Andrews. Bernstein and Andrews. Hoover. Bernstein 1992. 140 77." (Middleton. 72 84. no pagination 78. markets. Watten. Peter Middleton. Perloff. Bernstein and Andrews. Bernstein and Andrews. 31 CHAPTER THREE 1. from Distant Reading: "only by adding this diachronic analysis of the commodity can we understand the full implications of the changing status of an object that may at different times become a different sort of commodity or cease to be one altogether. cheek 1977.74. McCaffery and Nichol. and gift economies. 100 2. 140 82. 122 80. for theories of the commodity. 115 75. Bernstein and Andrews. no pagination 76. Bernstein and Andrews. Poetry Review Vol 65 No 3 4. 35 81. 653 79.
Cobbing. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. 53) 15. Jed Rasula. nearly all being contributors to one or more of the forty-one magazines in total. from "Sky Tails: An Encryption of Dispersal": "See Gérard Genette. Jane E. no pagination 9. McGann. cris cheek. "Sky Tails: An Encryption of Dispersal" (Dorward 2003. online 11. that meditate between a writer's text and a reader and/or receiver of that text. Furthermore. 15-50) 10. cheek.. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press. (Bernstein and Andrews. 1997). there are conventions within a book (the epitext) and conventions outside the book (the peritext) that combine through such patterns. Barry. ten of twelve pages are devoted to a listing of small experimental UK poetry magazines. trans.5. "The true image of the past flits by. No note is made of who should or shouldn't submit. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. compiled by cris cheek. Mottram. 10 7. What do I mean by "a temporality of fluid labor-identities"? In L=A=N =G=U=A=G=E Supplement 2.. Paratexts are those conventions within literature and printing that act as thresholds. 185) 12. 185) 8. 1960-75" (Hampson and Barry. 74-75 6. online) 13." (Dorward 2003. "The British Poetry Revival. Poetry Review Vol 67 No 3 1977 14. Note that the editors in cheek's listing are also practitioners. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. "Statement on Reading in Writing" (Bernstein and Andrews. 255) 54 . because the publication itself is intended for a specific and marginal community of readers rather than the mass market targeted by a publication such as Poet's Market. The market orientation assumes a specialization of labor while the community orientation assumes a comprehensive and hybrid fluidity of practice as both invention and community investment." (Benjamin 1955. Bernstein 1992.
16. Bernstein 1992. Howry. 10 55 . 16 19. See Diagram 9 18. no pagination 20. 243 22. 405-12-3415. Howe. Dorward 2003. 17-19 21. Breen. 185 17.
DIAGRAM 2 a b 57 .
DIAGRAM 6a 61 .
DIAGRAM 6b 62 .
DIAGRAM 8 Bob Cobbing from Destruction in Art 64 .
DIAGRAM 9 405-12-3415 from REGISTER FOR MORE 65 .
2006). Online at: http://alum. Benjamin. 1971). 1969). 1972). (Cambridge University Press. Ed Hannah Arrendt. Jennings. (Cambridge: Salt Publishing. Peter. 1968). At press as of this writing. "Culture Industry Reconsidered" from The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Benjamin. Charles. Shlomo. Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926.htm Baumann.txt Althusser.com/ books/sscp/1844712478. (London: Routledge. Mass & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.edu/~cmnF93/culture_ reconsidered. Theodor. 1996). Roland. Trans Ben Brewster. (Oxford: Critical Documents. Louis. (New York: Shocken Books. Selections online at: http://www. Louis. Trans Ben Brewster. Adorno. 2006). Avineri. Barthes. Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court. Althusser. (Newark and Delaware: International Reading Association. Walter. 1992). James F. Writing for Publication in Reading and Language Arts. A Poetics. Trans Harry Zohn. Walter. Illuminations (1955). (Harvard University Press. eds. and Dale D. Hegel's Theory of the Modern State. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. 1991). Eds Marcus Bullock and Michael W. (Cambridge. 67 .saltpublishing. 1991). (London and New York: Verso. 1972). (New York: Monthly Review Press. For Marx (1965). Barry. Trans Annette Lavers. (New York: Hill and Wang.BIBLIOGRAPHY 405-12-3415. Bernstein. Johnson.hampshire. Mythologies (1957). REGISTER FOR MORE.
1977). and London: University of California Press. Hakim.princeton.edu/eclipse/projects/ LANGUAGE/language. Removed For Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth.Bernstein. Andrew. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (London: The Association of Little Presses. Syntax: A Generative Introduction. De Certeau. Dorward. eds. The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Ontological Anarchy. Rawz 1. Charles. Deleuze. (Toronto: The Gig. The Practice of Everyday Life. The Temporary Autonomous Zone. The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. cris. Poet's Market 2003. ed. Bey. Destruction in Art (1986). Poetic Terrorism. Guy. cheek. ed. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Cincinnati: Writers Digest Books. ed. Charles and Bruce Andrews. ed. Los Angeles. 2003). cheek. Cobbing. Debord. 1985). cris. Trans Brian Massumi. Giles and Félix Guattari. Carnie. Nancy. Charles and Bruce Andrews. 2004). Dorward. 1987). (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. 68 . (New York: Roof Books. Nate. (Berkeley. Trans Donald Nicholson-Smith. 2003). (London: Writers Forum. (MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1984). ed. Bernstein. (London: bluff books. 2000). 1980). 2003). Bob. (Toronto: The Gig. Michel. Nate. Complete run online at: http://www. The Gig 7. 1984). 1990). Breen. eds. Trans Steven Rendall.html Bernstein. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. (New York: Zone Books. (New York: Autonomedia. A PRESENT. 1995).
B. Michelle. Robert and Peter Barry. Agents.humlab." Talk given at The Humlab. Plantarchy 1. Knabb. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.soton. 1970).uk/~bepc/forum/ cris cheek's offset press collaborations. Online at: http://blog. ed. Eds Laurence Dickey and H. 2001). 2001). (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.umu. William R. Ken. Situationist International Anthology. Krimerman. A Survey of Modern Grammars. Knox. (New York City: Granary Books. Hoover. Ohio: Critical Documents. jUStin!. eds. 1994).W. ed. 1981). Goerg Friedrich Wilhelm. Online at: http://www. Paul.ac. September 21. (Manchester University Press. 2006). Hatred of Capitalism: A Reader. Hegel. "The Computational Regime.pdf Howry. Howe. New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible. Nisbet. katKO. (Oxford. 2002). Editors.Goldsmith. 69 . Chris and Sylvére Lotringer. "Punk as Poetry: cris cheek and his offset press collaborations". 2005. (New York: Holt. (Oxford: Galaxy Books. and Lewis Perry.M. and You: The Insider's Guide to Getting Your Book Published.mp3 Hegel. Leonard I. Trans T. N. (Cambridge University Press. se/archives/20050921_hayles. Patterns of Anarchy: A Collection of Writings on the Anarchist Tradition. Political Writings. Katherine. eds. Soliloquy. 1999). Reinhart and Winston. Kraus. Kenneth. (New York: Anchor Books. Philosophy of Right (1821). Jeanne H. Hayles. (New York & London: W. 1967). (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e). Hampson. 1966). Goerg Friedrich Wilhelm. (Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books. Norton & Company. 1993). Herndon.
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January 28. Raoul." August 2003. (Brighton: Barque Press. Online at: http://www.htm Wilson. Collection of Desires. 72 . VA: Paper Street." Address to the Conference on the Situationist International Hacienda. Trans Donald NicholsonSmith. 1996. Quid 16. "The SI Bootsale: The Betrayal of Lettriste Poetics & Proletarian Politics by the Popsicle Academy. Peter Lamborn and Bill Weinberg. Vaneigem. Vaneigem. (Richmond.htm Watson. Sutherland. Watson. 1999). Online at: http://www. Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City & the World.militantesthetix. (Left Bank & Rebel Press." Unpublished lecture.co. Manchester.Poetry. (San Francisco: THIS. 1977). "Art after the Situationist International. 1967). 2003).co. DECAY. ed. 2005. Ben. Revolution of Everyday Life. Ben and Esther Leslie. 2006). (New York: Autonomedia.uk/ situationist/popsicle. eds.militantesthetix. Watten.uk/ situationist/aquasit. Raoul. Barrett. Keston.
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