discursive lacerations

Dada is a CLUB, founded in Berlin, which you can join without commitments. In this club every man is president and every man can have his say in matters. Dada is not a pretext for the ambition of a few literary men (as our enemies would have you believe), Dada is a state of mind that can be revealed in any conversation whatever, so that you are compelled to say: this man is a DADAIST - that man is not; the Dada Club consequently has members all over the world, in Honululu as well as New Orleans and Meseritz. Under certain circumstances to be a Dadaist may mean to be more a businessman, more a political partisan than an artist - to be an artist only by accident - to be Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to oppose all sedimentation; to sit in a chair for a single moment is to risk one’s life (Mr. Wengs pulled his revolver out of his pants pocket).

They centered their critique on the notion that poetry expresses lyric feeling and subjectivity. In their writing, they enact the poststructuralist view that the coherent self is an ideological illusion. “Various selves” create a poem, according to Michael Palmer, and Lyn Hejinian states that writing begins “not in the self but in language,” in “the not-I.” Taking the Marxist view that normative syntax and grammar enforce political oppression, these poets try to make visible the contradictory discourses hidden within language and the restrictive norms that threaten to homogenize speech. Rejecting rationalist transparency in communication, they foreground the materiality of language—its sounds, shapes, and structures, the look of words on the page. A poem, in Susan Howe’s view, is not a seamless discursive unity but a collagelike assemblage, and its sutures should be left frayed and exposed. For her, as for other Language poets, the linear or narrative flow of language needs to be interrupted, even garbled, to reveal its multiple vectors, its hidden multiplicity, fractures, and instability. Despite their radicalism and iconoclasm, the Language poets—many now in university positions, some in the Academy of American Poets—build on long-standing practices and theories of open form, including avant-garde modemism, surrealism, Dada, Objectivism, the Black Mountain school, and the New York school, as well as the Russian formalist theory of “defamiliarization.

Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Language Poetry is awesome. NPF 1980s conference should be interesting: Feminism, New Formalism, Language poetry.

(via uutpoetry)

(via dialoghost)

The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.

Pranks can also be disruptive to the normal routine. For example, at Blue Cross of Northern California where I worked as a temp in 1974, there were a few hundred VDT operators. Each operator had a set of procedures to follow to bring her terminal “up,” after which the words “Good morning, happiness is a sunny day!” would appear on the screen. No key entry clerk is in the mood to see that at 7:30a.m. One morning someone in the notoriously weird claims input department figured out how to change the program that ran the start-up procedure. When the 250 or so terminal workers powered on their machines that morning they were greeted with the more pleasing “Good morning, happiness is a good fuck!” On top of being good for a laugh, it caused management to shut the computers down until a systems analyst came in and fixed the program.

Once again, Vesalius was wedded to his research. Immersed in his studies, he shuttled back and forth from the laboratory to the lecture-hall, from the lecture-hall to the laboratory.

Here is a lesson you should draw from this, all you young women ripe for marriage: if you have a strongly passionate nature, make sure, if you can help it, never to marry a university professor, nor a member of the literary academy, and especially not one of those demigods of the forty-strong Académie Française with its everlasting dictionary.

At the end of Faust, Goethe was already asserting that the “eternal feminine takes us above”.I’m sorry but I find such statements rather obscene. Love doesn’t take me “above”, or “below”. It is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentered point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity.

We are not going to be owned by anybody other than ourselves!

In reality, the decomposition of all social forms is a blessing. It is for us the ideal condition for a wild, massive experimentation with new arrangements, new fidelities. The famous “parental resignation” has imposed on us a confrontation with the world that demands a precocious lucidity, and foreshadows lovely revolts to come. In the death of the couple, we see the birth of troubling forms of collective affectivity, now that sex is all used up and masculinity and femininity parade around in such moth-eaten clothes, now that three decades of non-stop pornographic innovation have exhausted all the allure of transgression and liberation. We count on making that which is unconditional in relationships the armor of a political solidarity as impenetrable to state interference as a gypsy camp. There is no reason that the interminable subsidies that numerous relatives are compelled to offload onto their proletarianized progeny can’t become a form of patronage in favor of social subversion. “Becoming autonomous,” could just as easily mean learning to fight in the street, to occupy empty houses, to cease working, to love each other madly, and to shoplift.

Community was central to Processed World in more ways than one. The magazine long depended on collating parties, a modern-day urban version of the barn-raising. A week or two prior to the finish of printing, a leaflet would go out to the entire Bay Area mailing list, inviting people to help collate the forthcoming issue. Many, isolated at their jobs, would delight in coming to the collating party as their main opportunity to contribute more than money to the PW effort, and as their chance to attend a kind of radical intellectual gathering. From noon to as late as midnight, 50-100 people would pass through and take a shift sitting before a tall pile of pages. Amid clouds of marijuana smoke, bottles of beer, and a rich potluck buffet, each person slowly passed the folded pages along, adding their two or three, until collated copies were boxed at the end of the line, ready for the bindery. Collating parties lasted through issue 18; by then every joke about assembly lines and free labor had been thoroughly exhausted.