WHAT MATTER WHO’S SPEAKING (8)

I have been scouting around in the field of “book history,” and it is rich indeed. And of course the rest of the Internet:

[…] [L]iterary work by its very nature sets in motion many kinds of creative intentionalities. These orbit in the universe of the creative work—but not around some imaginary and absolute center. Rather, they turn through many different kinds of motion, at many structural scales, and in various formal relationships. The universe of poiesis no more has an absolute center than does the stellar universe we have revealed through our astronomy. What it has are many relative centers which are brought to our attention by our own acts of observation. The universe of literature is socially generated and does not exist in a steady state. Authors themselves do not have, as authors, singular identities; an author is a plural identity and more resembles what William James liked to call the human world at large, a multiverse.

Literary texts differ from informational texts by being polyvocal. Whereas “noise” is always a form of corruption for a channel of information, it can be exploited in literary texts for positive results. The thicker the description, so far as an artist is concerned, the better. (Minimalist styles of art thicken their media by processes of subtraction and absence.) A thickened text is a scene where metaphor and metonymy thrive (Coleridge’s “opposite or discordant qualities,” his “sameness with difference”). For [Hershel] Parker, the thickness comes from the artists’ imaginative resources, who can be counted on to put into their texts far more than they are even aware of. Parker’s “intention” includes, crucially, the vast resources of the unconscious and preconscious.

But thickness is also built through the textual presence and activities of many non-authorial agents. These agencies may be the artists’ contemporaries—these are the examples most often adduced—or they may not; furthermore, the agencies may hardly be imagined as “individuals” at all. The texts of Sappho, for example, gain much of their peculiar power from their fragmented condition […] [1]


[…] But what’s unique in the case of literature is that the text isn’t the finished work. A novel or short story isn’t a solid object. It’s just groundwork, and the reader’s imagination and reference points revive its content, extrapolate from its clues, and finish the work individually. In a way, when you’re writing a novel, for instance, you’re actually writing an unpredictable number of novels at once, and that number depends on how many copies end up being read. No other art form that I can think of involves that level of collaboration between artist and audience and disrupts the passiveness of being a work’s receiver with so much freedom and creativity. The high degree of interaction and codependence that the writer/reader axis makes possible is gorgeous and offers such a great opportunity to experiment with how text reacts when it comes in contact with the imagination. And writing allows you to play with the crapshoot decision of when a work is finished or, rather, when something is ready to be placed outside of your control and then finished by other people in largely unknowable ways. […] [2]


[…] But texts shape the response of readers, however active they may be. As Walter Ong has observed, the opening pages of The Canterbury Tales and A Farewell to Arms create a frame and cast the reader in a role, which he cannot avoid no matter what he thinks of pilgrimages and civil wars. In fact, typography as well as style and syntax determine the ways in which texts convey meanings. […] The history of reading will have to take account of the ways that texts constrain readers as well as the ways that readers take liberties with texts. The tension between those tendencies has existed wherever men confronted books, and it has produced some extraordinary results, as in Luther’s reading of the Psalms, Rousseau’s reading of Le Misanthrope, and Kierkegaard’s reading of the sacrifice of Isaac. […] [3]


[…] To this point I have been taking the word “text” to signify the linguistic text, the verbal outcome at every level (from the most elementary forms of single letters and punctuation marks up to the most complex rhetorical structures that comprise the particular linguistic event). And even if we agree, for practical purposes, to restrict the term “text” to this linguistic signification, we cannot fail to see that literary works typically secure their effects by other than purely linguistic means. Every literary work that descends to us operates through the deployment of a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes, on one hand, and the bibliographical codes on the other.

We recognize the latter simply by looking at a medieval literary manuscript—or at any of William Blake’s equivalent illuminated texts produced in (the teeth of) the age of mechanical reproduction. Or at Emily Dickinson’s manuscript books of poetry, or her letters. In each of these cases the physique of the “document” has been forced to play an aesthetic function, has been made part of the “literary work.” That is to say, in these kinds of literary works the distinction between physical medium and conceptual message breaks down completely. […] [4]

1. Jerome McGann, “The Socialization of Texts,” The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 42.

2. From an interview with author Dennis Cooper that is part of the HTMLGiant “What is Experimental Literature” series of posts. You can read the whole interview (which is great) here.

3. Roger Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 21.

4. McGann, 43.

RECEPTION IS PRODUCTION (4): MUD LUSCIOUS PRESS NEPHEW SERIES

The other day I received an email announcement from Mud Luscious Press, which is run by newly anointed NewLights author J. A. Tyler. The announcement was for the new book in their Nephew chapbook series, Meat Is All, by Andrew Borgstrom. It caught my attention for a few reasons: 1) the cover, shown above, looks great, 2) the excerpt available is weird & interesting, and 3) the edition, or the mode of production-distribution of it, was described as: “This book will be available for 90 days or until 150 copies are sold, whichever comes first.”

I was intrigued by this idea, so I wrote to Mr. Tyler asking him to explain a bit more. Here’s his response:

We take orders for our Nephew titles for either 90 days (max.) or for 150 copies (max.) and we don't print the book until we have reached one of those two points. This allows us to guarantee that we only print exactly as many copies as are ordered (zero waste, more effective production cost structures) and it also allows us to guarantee buyers that even if a title doesn't sell out immediately, they will be waiting a maximum of 90 days to receive their books (not a bad wait time for a pre-order of an exclusive title).

Then I asked him how they were actually making these books, and he said:

Our printing is done by our regular Mud Luscious Press printer, facilitated by David McNamara at Sunnyoutside - this printer allows us to do runs as small as 25 copies and as large as we like (David is fantastic!).

That’s a damn smart & practical way to handle the production of a book. And the idea of a time-based edition could yield other interesting results. Speculation aside, this approach is a concrete example of the way that new printing technologies (print-on-demand, digital presses capable of quality printing and short runs) and new distribution the technologies (the Internet) are changing the ways that small press books are produced. This kind of approach would not have been possible (at least in this streamlined of a form) 10 years ago. These kinds of innovations and changes are extremely important. And it helps to reinforce my conviction that this is the most exciting time to be engaged in textual culture since Gutenberg made that crazy invention of his.

WHAT MATTER WHO'S SPEAKING (3)

The clip above is from Emile de Antonio's 1972 film Painters Painting. The film itself (highly recommended, by the way) is made up of interviews with artists, collectors, critics, and dealers. This clip shows part of the interview with Andy Warhol. Note how he's also holding a microphone, as if he's conducting the interview as well. Warhol's "film crew" can also be seen in the background/mirror.

IT IS 6:14 AM ON DECEMBER 6, 2010. I AM SITTING AT MY COMPUTER. I CAN TELL ALREADY, BLINKING SLOWLY, THAT I WILL WEAR MY HEAVY JACKET TODAY

Going to take a break from the hand-mechanical, at least writing about it, at least for a day, and try to put something up here that’s a little more human(e) perhaps. But what’s more human than being connected to a machine? What’s more humane than a simple, quiet task to accomplish? But no, not today, and at any rate, there are books, always & infinitely.

I have been reading Alan Loney’s The books to come, hot off the Cuneiform Press. Alan Loney is a writer-printer-bookmaker from New Zealand, who now lives in Australia. His new book is a collection of essays on the Book, the book, books. Right now all I will say about it as a whole is that it is an interesting read (I am preparing to write an actual review of it, hence this post, this blog acting as a thinking and reading space). It is not a hard, linear, straight-through kind of a book, but is divided into small sections, and the pace wavers, doubles back, accumulates slowly (festina lente) and deeply, somewhere out there, somewhere in here, in a quiet domestic space, in an infinite literary space. What shabby portals we are. From the book, the Book, the books to come:

[…]

my library does not belong to me, or, I can own a volume but not a composition, own a book, but not a text, not even a text of my own composing. Could we say: no border crossing between books and texts is possible, for if this were not so, one would have to deny that the principle of indeterminacy operates here. And yet there is a plethora of claims thruout the world of the book about blurring boundaries, extending borders, hybridization, category transgressions and so on every day. Do not these claims rely upon a fixity of category formation that was actually never true. The supposed edges of the categories always were straw edges, and the language of their apparent violent demolition was always a straw victory

reading a book and reading a text is an example of indeterminacy. We cannot do both at once. There is instead a sort of shuttling back & forth (loom-shuttle, weaving, textura) however rapid, between the two. Even in the case of the books of William Blake. It is simply that human attention is monocular, and our stereoscopic vision merely gives us a depth of field. And wouldn’t being able to see both sides at once imply that our experience is atemporal, permitting us to transcend the detail, the particular, the contingent that would pin us down. But in any articulation of any experience we speak or write as anyone does, one word after the other, one word or element or object at a time. Unless one’s understanding of time & succession is all wrong, and that ‘one word at a time’ is an inaccurate way of talking about how we talk and how we write. For at this point I remember that the writing of the ancient Greeks prior to the 5th century BC knew no word spaces. But looking at one word renders all other words in its vicinity almost invisible. Looking at an image renders the environmental context of that image invisible. Foreground/background, reading/viewing, focus/panorama, detail/overall impression, indeterminacy everywhere

what single written composition does one’s own library, one’s own collection of volumes, make. What sort of a book is one’s library. What book does the accumulated libraries of all of us amount to. Louis Zukofsky famously avowed that all one’s life one only wrote one poem. It allows the nice possibility that all poems from a certain context, all L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems for example (let’s allow for the moment that such things do exist), are a single poem, parts of which are distributed about various, diverse, even conflictual writers. It reminds me of a Terry Riley composition in “Cadenza on the Night Plain” where a Dream Collector has a specific and finite number of dreams to distribute and redistribute thruout the populace after collecting them from the dreamers in the morning. So the library at large, that collection of books scattered yet gathered over the planet, is itself a single book, containing a unitary text, the variety and complexity of which is unencompassable by any individual, any tribe, any nation, any book, even the entire populace, those millions who every day die and are born, dropping as a species, as it were, into & out of the text

[…]

Those three passages actually do fall in that order, in tandem, in the fourth chapter of the book, “What book does my library make.” Full Citation! Alan Loney, The books to come (Victoria: Cuneiform Press, 2010), 88 – 90!

LIKE AN OLD BALLOCKS

& a reader of this blog, or some of my other book-things might notice that I am obsessed with beginnings:

It was he that told me I’d begun all wrong, that I should have begun differently. He must be right. I began at the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that? Here’s my beginning. Because they’re keeping it apparently. I took a lot of trouble with it. Here it is. It gave me a lot of trouble. It was the beginning, do you understand? Whereas now it’s nearly the end. Is what I do now any better? I don’t know. That’s beside the point. Here’s my beginning. It must mean something, or they wouldn’t keep it. Here it is...

& also with non-beginnings in that whenever I want to emphasize a beginning I begin with an ampersand, partly as a nod to the decorated initials of illuminated manuscripts but mostly as way to stress the idea that every beginning is only provisional, imaginary, mythological, because everything, always is part of, subject to, the great continuity.

I am meditating on beginnings here, now, at the end of the day, in the bleeding of night into day, because I find myself slowly making my way into yet another. Another new life that will hopefully be a refined continuation of the old life—better, always better, a little bit anyways, if we are willing to work for it.

& of course beginning again, and doing something over again, or reading something over again, can yield attention to new things. In the case transcribed below (taken from Karl Young’s essay “Notation and the Art of Reading.” Reprinted in A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections about the Book and Writing, Steven Clay and Jerome Rothenberg, eds. (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 47-8.) I can once again see how this new beginning is another link in the great and vibrant history that we are all a part of:

[…] A large portion of the audience for contemporary poetry gets involved in publishing the work of other poets at some time in their lives, and this becomes a further means of participation. They may act only as a magazine’s assistant editor for a short time, or they may edit their own magazines, or run their own presses. For some, this becomes a way of life. Poet-publishers tend to read manuscripts carefully and critically in determining whether or not to publish them, and they put a great deal of effort into the means of producing those they decide to publish. This type of activity tightens the bonds between poets, opens channels of communication with a larger audience, gives the editors a sense of proportion in terms of nature, size, and scope of their audience, and, again, can encourage the intimacy with the text latent in copying. Publishing requires commitment and encourages the poet-publisher to be textual analyst, literary critic, and graphic designer. Working with layout, type, perhaps presswork and binding, has suggested new kinds of notation and presentation and has inspired work that would otherwise not have been done. The method of production a poet-publisher uses often effects or reflects her or his work: offset publishers often write differently from letterpress printers. The mimeo format of d.a. levy publications continues to be an integral part of the outlaw urgency of the work, even though levy’s been dead for many years. The austere design and impeccable typography of Elizabeth Press Books underscores the restrained precision of the poets published in that series. The limited press runs and personalized distribution of most poetry publishers creates a sense of intimacy and fellowship not unlike that created by the circulation of manuscripts in Donne’s time. […]

& in the section after that he actually goes on to talk about artists’ books, but let’s hold back a little, but let’s save a little, maybe for tomorrow, maybe for our next false beginning, true & brilliant in the brilliant light.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 7b

Figure 12.09.07
El Lissitzky, page from Pro Dva Kvadrata, Skythen-Verlag, Berlin, 1922.

Part 7b, where we continue yesterday’s questioning of formalism—the “restricted” formalism of shape and the “expanded” formalism of structure, of structuralism. [Thought: what happens when all this attention to structuralism runs into its post?]

The second main complaint against “formalism” that one often hears (and this is the criticism that I am most sympathetic to) is that it is apolitical and anti-social—that it does not look beyond the artwork, that it retreats into the old “ivory tower” of aestheticism, that to concentrate on an artwork’s form is to concede it its autonomy and cut off art from life.

And art-cut-off-from-life is something for rich people to buy and professors to argue about.


Figure 12.09.08
El Lissitzky, Propaganda Board in Street, photograph, 1920.

There are some of us who refuse that state of affairs. And there are some of us that believe, as part of a deep commitment to making art relevant and useful, that work on form is always necessary.

Our friend Brecht was one of them:

alienation-effect A translation of the German Verfremdungseffekt, coined by the dramatist BRECHT (1949, 1962) to describe the effect produced by his EPIC theatre and the style of acting appropriate to it.

Brecht’s dramaturgy breaks with the traditional values and conventions of naturalism and psychological realism, rejecting empathy, suspension of disbelief and unity of action on the grounds that they are expressions of a bourgeois IDEOLOGY that has no place in a scientific modern society. In order to create a revolutionary socialist theatre, a new style of writing and acting is essential. Brecht’s objective is encourage the audience to take a detached and critical attitude towards what they see on stage. The audience must be made aware that they are watching a reproduction of incidents drawn from real life, but must not be allowed to forget that they are in a theatre. The spectator’s attention is drawn to the artificial theatricality of the play by the songs that interrupt the action, by the slogan-painted placards that are brought on stage, and by the actors who step out of character to address the audience directly. The audience [is] thus encouraged to think about what has caused the incidents they are watching.

[…] To the extent that it involves an ALIENATION from theatrical conventions that are so familiar as to appear natural, Brecht’s theory has something in common with RUSSIAN FORMALISM’s concept of OSTRANENIE or defamiliarization. Written at a time when he was actively promoting Brecht’s theories as a model for popular theatre (1956), BARTHES’s demystifying studies of the MYTHOLOGIES of everyday life (1957) are intended to produce a cultural alienation-effect. [1]

This appears to be going around in circles. TO BE CONTINUED, as always, as we try to break these linkages and get to a larger picture…. [I think I see the aforementioned POST up ahead.]

1. David Macey, Dictionary of Critical Theory, (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 8.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: PART 7 (FORMALISM)

Figure 12.09.04
Frank Stella, installation shot of Aluminum Paintings, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1960.

From Daniel Scott Snelson’s “Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions:”

[…] Importantly, for Brecht, Barthes, and many writers and artists to follow, the anti-neutrality of language led to an emphasis of artifice (for Brecht, the lights, set, and material of the theatre, for later Barthes, the Text) always charged with political significations (against the woozy seamless instrumentality of Nazi rhetoric, for example). From this Brechtian formalism, we can derive Barthes’s famous dictum: “a little formalism turns one away from History, but a lot brings one back to it.” Bois correctly points out that this distinction of the two “formalisms”—Lukacs's “restricted” morphological formalism, versus Brecht’s formalism of historical-structural signification—is “essential to a retrieval of formalism (as structuralism).” […]

The work of the NewLights Press could be labeled “formal” or “formalist.” And indeed it has. Some would apply that label negatively. But let’s be clear about which kind of formalism we’re talking about here (and so into Danny’s source text for the above passage):

[…] Thus the term “formalist” was an insult that Lukacs and Brecht tossed at each other, but the word did not have the same sense for each. For Brecht, a formalist was anyone who could not see that form was inseparable from content, who believed that form was a mere carrier; for Lukacs, it was anyone who believed that form even affected content. […] The antiformalism that was prevalent in the discourse of art criticism in the seventies can thus be explained in great part by a confusion between the two kinds of formalism, one that concerns itself essentially with morphology (which I call “restricted” formalism) [Lukacs], and one that envisions form as structural—the kind embraced by Brecht when he sorted out the “continuity” of Goering’s and Hess’s speeches as an essential part of their ideological machine. […] [1]

[More on the political agency that attention to form allows later.]

There are two main complaints about formalism in day-to-day art discourse. The first is that if a work is formal, or pays attention to form, then the work must be devoid or scant on “concept” or “content” (these two terms are often used interchangeably, but do not in fact mean the same thing). And if a work is devoid of “concept” or “content” then it must be devoid of thought, it must be merely pretty, it must be decorative. (“The decorative” has always been the evil twin of abstraction.) This complaint rests on two (false) presuppositions: 1) that a formal artwork, if decorative, is not and can not be theoretically rigorous; and 2) that form and content are mutually exclusive areas that an artwork can engage, that paying attention to one necessarily excludes the other (and now we’re back to Brecht). I have two answers, and both can be used for both of those presuppositions:


Figure 12.09.05
Pablo Picasso, Bowl with Fruit, Violin, and Wineglass, mixed media, 1912-13.



Figure 12.09.06
Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, enamel on canvas, 1959.


1. Yves-Alain Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 33.


TO BE CONTINUED: the second complaint to formalism, that of political agency

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 5 (The Personal Touch, or Form Letter/Letter Form)

Another overlapping reading:

[…] Bois recalls Barthes’s distinction between two formalisms. Focusing on Brecht’s “extreme attention to the form of Nazi texts, [the seamless flow of their rhetoric]

Figure 12.09.01
Bruce Nauman, Pay Attention, Lithograph, 1973. One of the best prints ever made.

which he followed word for word in order to elaborate a counterdiscourse,” up against Lukacs’s “fetishization” of realist novels, that more “restricted” formalism that “remains at the superficial level of form-as-shape,” much like the autotelic texts written by New Critics like Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Clement Greenburg. [1]

More on that tomorrow, but to continue this fissure:

Brecht’s formalism—hand in hand with the self-reflexivity and anti-illusionism of modernism—demonstrated that “language was not a neutral vehicle…but had a materiality of its own and that this materiality was always charged with significations.” [1] […]

Figures 12.09.02a and 12.09.02b
Form Letter/Letter Form
This is as real as it gets. Structures do penetrate, regulate, and administer the world. It is time to let the institutions of the world embrace us with their paperwork, blandly.

[…] Bois correctly points out that this distinction of the two “formalisms”—Lukacs’s “restricted” morphological formalism, versus Brecht’s formalism of historical-structural signification—is “essential to a retrieval of formalism (as structuralism).” [2] […]

1. Yves-Alain Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 33.

2. Ibid. “The parentheses belong to Bois.”

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 4

Figure 11.09.03
Sol Lewitt, Floor Structure Black, 1965, painted wood, 18.5” x 18” x 82”.

Terms, movements, ideologies:

[…] demonstrated that “language was not a neutral vehicle…but had a materiality of its own and that this materiality was always charged with significations.” [1] Importantly, for Brecht, Barthes, and many writers and artists to follow, the anti-neutrality of language led to an emphasis of artifice (for Brecht, the lights, set, and material of the theatre, for later Barthes, the Text) always charged with political significations (against the woozy seamless instrumentality of Nazi rhetoric, for example). From this Brechtian formalism, we can derive Barthes’s famous dictum: “a little formalism turns one away from History, but a lot brings one back to it.” […]

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&


Figure 11.09.04
Page spread of Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, Vol. 8, 1965, 80-1.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

[…] ostranenie The Russian term can be translated as “making strange” or “defamiliarization,” and is an important feature of the poetics of RUSSIAN FORMALISM. It is especially associated with Viktor SHKLOVSKY (1917, 1925).

Ostranenie denotes the poetic use of devices such as disrupted metrical patterns, long descriptive passages, METAPHORS and other figures of RHETORIC to produce a semantic shift which makes the habitual appear strangely unfamiliar, rather as though it were being perceived for the first time. The distortion of form produced by the poetic device destabilizes the relationship between the perceiving subject and the object of perception, slowing down the act of perception and making it more difficult. It thus serves the poetic function of promoting seeing, as opposed to recognizing something that is already familiar and known. […]

Although […] making strange is intimately bound up with the poetics of formalism and FUTURISM, it is not difficult to relate it to BRECHT’s ALIENATION-EFFECT or to the analysis of mythologies undertaken by BARTHES in the 1950s. In all three cases, there is an implicit contrast between the AVANT-GARDE or experimental work of art which challenges received perceptions by forcing the reader or viewer to perceive its formality or artificiality, and the conventional work in which the formal devices are concealed in such a way as to make it appear natural and ahistorical. […] [2]

Towards a concerted effort of deferred action. We move back so that we can move forward (or at least to the side a little bit, for some air, for some space to breathe, some room to think amidst all this racket).

1. Yves-Alain Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 33. This looks like a great book. Thank you, Danny.

2. David Macey, Dictionary of Critical Theory, (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 284-5.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 3

All things are pierced. All things are permeable. We collapse. We turn outward.

[…] The first editorial line of Form launches the arc of argumentation that the magazine will follow over its robust three year run. This compact credo resonates unidentified among the three editors: geometric architect Philip Steadman, translator and concrete poet Stephen Bann, and avant-garde historian Mike Weaver. In italics, the trajectory of the magazine is then repeated in every subsequent issue:

“The aims of Form are to publish and provoke discussion of the relations of form to structure in the work of art, and of correspondences between the arts.” [1]

[…] Distinct from the pell-mell variety of articles in the common periodical, Form stands as a coherent whole, a meta-magazine, an argument through commentary, arrangement, and citation: exploring the relations of form to structure in the periodical work of print. […]

No thing is ever simple.

The cuttings above become an editorial challenge. Suddenly the periodical is no longer just a collection of work that the editors think is “good,” perhaps loosely arranged around a subject or theme, but the magazine becomes a specific, sustained investigation, developing in time, in a single issue and over a series of issues. What are the necessary/essential (or better yet potential) qualities of a magazine?

We collapse. We turn outward.

[Second Idea, Related & Released: This is also a potential model for a rigorous curatorial practice. (What is the difference between editing and curating? Is it simply a matter of the objects arranged (textual or physical) or the final outcome (magazine or exhibition)? Where, or what, is the exhibition catalog?)]

Some sort of fog, or cloud, grinds against our eyes. The implications remain uncertain. A feeling of dread pervades.

[1] Editorial Note, Form, no. 1 (1966): 3.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 2

Different readings of the same text yield different results. These multiple readings overlap, connect to new things, and connect to each other. They cluster and disperse. Time moves, time is re-covered in the reading and remembering subject. All that fall from Monday + thinking through images differently + the text continues to render = a new reading opens out, the living reading expands. Deferred action. The trauma of the text.


[…] this inherent medium, the flow of renegade bodies in the “mimeo revolution.” […]

The phrase “renegade bodies” makes this all sound a lot sexier than it usually does. The pleasure of the text. Where and how does the reader’s desire intersect with the “renegade body?” What are you looking at, reader?

[…] the only way to approach Language poetry is via a close reading of the periodical—its formal characteristics and structural cohesion, how it relates texts in space-time, and the questions of distribution and editorial vision proper to the space of the little magazine. […]

form + content + production + reception

[…] From this it follows that the spectator space will become part of the film space. The separation of the “projection surface” is abolished. The spectator will no longer observe the film, like a theatrical presentation, but will participate in it optically and acoustically. […] [1]

1. Theodore van Doesburg, “Film as Pure Form,’ trans. Standish Lawder, Form, no. 1 (1966): 7-8. Quoted in Danny Snelson's Mimeo Mimeo essay.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 1

I spent this past weekend reading Daniel Scott Snelson’s contribution to Mimeo Mimeo #3. It’s a really interesting article, and, like all good essays, it spurred my thoughts on its subject (“little magazines”) in new directions, particularly about what I can and will do with the NewLights journal-to-be Et Al. I would like to spend the next few posts here (during this blissfully short, gorgeous, holiday week) dwelling on and in sections of Danny’s essay. The goal is not to perform a close, critical reading, but to use collage, notes, and hyperlinks to elaborate on the ideas that I have found compelling.

BUT FIRST, a brief description of the overall essay:

[…] In Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions, Daniel Scott Snelson discusses the relationship between structuralism and the poetries of the mimeo era by presenting a detailed analysis of Form (a Cambridge-UK magazine published in 1966) and Alcheringa (a journal published by Boston University in 1975), two exemplary gatherings that brilliantly illuminate the historical, material and social circumstances under which theory informed art (and vice-versa) in the early works of some of today’s most celebrated experimental writers.

Any day now, any minute now, the NewLights Press will be starting a new journal, a journal that will hopefully deconstruct and expand the idea of what a journal is or can be. Some ideas on the operating table: how it operates as a decentered, nomadic community. How it arranges, orders, and materializes a variety of texts, suturing together a sort textual-mechanical monstrosity. How it identifies and authorizes its contributors. How it is disseminated, dissipated, and continuously rebuilt among its readers.

The problem is, I have no idea how one is supposed to edit a journal. Oh well, I guess I’ll make it up, conjure it, carefully. I can already feel the water in my lungs.

First Idea, Random: change the title of Et Al to TIME MAGAZINE.

[…] the most accurate and concise definition of a Language poetry “group” is the consistent roster of writers who published each other in a relatively closed economy of independently produced magazines—This, Hills, Tottel’s, 100 Posters, Sun & Moon, La-Bas, Roof, Joglars, Tuumba Press, and later, critical journals like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Open Letter, and Temblor—these publications wrote, carried, and delivered the definition of the Language movement. The poetics of Language cannot be extracted from this inherent medium, this flow of renegade bodies in the “mimeo-revolution.” More precisely: the only way to approach Language poetry is via a close reading of the periodical—its formal characteristics and structural cohesion, how it relates texts in space-time, and the questions of distribution and editorial vision proper to the space of the little magazine. […]

ART, ECONOMICS, ACADEMIA (a digression’s digression)

Fig. 09.09.01
Unknown Photographer, The UNOVIS Delegation to the First All-Russian Conference of Teachers and Students of Art, 1920.

The text and photographs in this post were taken from the highly-recommended book: T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999). 264-5, 247.

[…] The most evocative of all UNOVIS documents [fig. 09.09.01] shows them setting off by train in June 1920 to a Conference of Teachers and Art Students in the capital. Malevich holds center stage. He grasps a Suprematist plate under his left arm and makes a clenched-fist salute with the other. One of his followers (or is it his wife?) puts a restraining hand on his sleeve. Black Squares are much in evidence: pinned up on the carriage door, worn in his lapel by a man in the foreground, stuck in the impish Iudin’s hair (?) top left, and, by the looks of it, sewn onto El Lissitzky’s sleeve—El Lissitzky is the character in the soft felt hat and light-colored jacket, directly under Malevich’s fist. They are a wild-looking bunch. […]

Fig. 09.09.02
El Lissitzky, cover for Booklet of Vitebsk Committee for the Struggle against Unemployment, lithograph on paper, 1919.

ON THE ECONOMICS OF THE SMALL PRESS

As the returns dwindle, the sources accumulate. Below, more on the economics of this crazy “biz.” Originally from Charles Bernstein’s “Provisional Institutions: Alternative Presses and Poetic Innovation,” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1995); reprinted in Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips, From a Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, (New York: Granary Books and The New York Public Library, 1998), 259.

Poet Charles Bernstein on the economics of small press literary publishing, using Sun & Moon Press as an example:

The printing bill runs from $2600 to $4000 as you go from 1000 to 2000 copies. [Douglas] Messerli estimates the cost of editing a 100-page poetry book at $300: this covers all the work between the press receiving a manuscript and sending it to a designer (including any copyediting and proofreading that may be necessary as well as preparation of front and back matter and cover copy). Typesetting is already a rarity for presses like Sun & Moon, with authors expected to provide computer disks wherever possible. Formatting these disks (converting them into type following specifications of the book designer) can cost anywhere from $300 to $1000, one of those variable labor costs of small press operations. The book designer will charge about $500. The cover will cost an additional $100 for photographic reproduction or permission fees or both. Publicity costs must also be accounted for, even if, as at Sun & Moon, no advertising is involved. Messerli estimates publicity costs at $1500, which covers the cost of something like 100 free copies distributed to reviewers, postage and packing, mailings and catalog pages, etc. The total cash outlay here, then, for 2000 copies is around $6800. (For the sake of this discussion, overhead costs—rent, salaries, office equipment, phone bills, etc.—are not included; such costs typically are estimated at about 30 percent more than the cost of production.

If all goes well, Sun & Moon will sell out of its print run in two years. Let’s say Sun & Moon prints 2000 copies of the book and charges $10 retail; let’s also say all of the books were sold. That makes a gross of $20,000. Subtract from this a 50 percent wholesale discount (that is, most bookstores will pay $5 for the book) and that leaves $10,000. Subtract from this the 24 percent that Sun & Moon’s distributor takes (and remember that most small presses are too small to secure a distributor with a professional sales force). That leaves $7600. Now last, but not to be totally forgotten, especially since I am a Sun & Moon author, the poet’s royalty; typically no advance would be paid and the author would receive 10 percent of this last figure or $760. That leaves [a] $6840 return to the publisher on a cash cost of about $7000. As James Sherry noted years ago in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: a piece of paper with nothing on it has a definite economic value. If you print a poem on it, this value is lost. Here we have a vivid example of what Georges Bataille has called general economy, an economy of loss rather than accumulation. Poetry is a negative—or let’s just say poetic—economy.

There is also an interesting interview with Adam Robinson of Publishing Genius talking about the success of one of his press’s newest books, Light Boxes, a novel by Shane Jones (a true small press success story: first, Spike Jonze bought the movie rights to the book, and then Penguin picked it up for re-publication). What is success for a small press anyway?

OLD, NEW, ALWAYS

From Steve Edwards’s chapter “‘Profane Illumination:’ Photography and Photomontage in the USSR and Germany,” in Art of the Avant-Gardes, ed. Steve Edwards and Paul Wood (London: The Open University/Yale University Press, 2004), 408-409:

[…] Rodchenko’s extreme viewpoints can be seen as a version of the Russian Formalist theory of “defamiliarization” or “making strange” […]. The Formalists were literary and linguistic scholars, working before and immediately after the First World War, who argued that everyday perception was dull, static and habitual. “Our perception has withered away,” suggested the prominent Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, “what has remained is mere recognition.” The Formalists advocated literary techniques that sliced through routinized views of the world. The principle way that they thought this could be achieved was by “foregrounding the device,” or calling attention to the construction of the literary text as a way of increasing the reader’s attention. By focusing on the techniques and procedures employed to make works of art, the Formalists believed, the world could be made to appear strange again, heightening consciousness of the artwork. Prewar Formalism was largely apolitical, but after the Russian Revolution the theorists associated with LEF gave these ideas a left-wing turn, arguing that atrophied perception was a consequence of bourgeois consciousness. Capitalist ideology, they claimed, mystified perception, because it was based on mere appearances rather than on the actual relationships that structured society: bourgeois perception was deemed individualist, static and formal, rather than dynamic, contradictory and collective. According to the left avant-garde, the first condition for any critical art was to draw attention to its own status as representation or ideology: art was to be used to reveal the illusion, not to conceal it. This politicized version of Formalism came to be known as the “formalist-sociological method.” Rodchenko’s unusual points of view should be seen in the light of this theory. His extreme angles of vision draw attention to the role of the camera in making images and invite the viewer to consider new ways of looking at everyday life. These unusual perspectives were designed to pull viewers up short, causing them to reflect on what they were seeing. Elizar Langman, a photographic colleague of Rodchenko, summed up this perspective, claiming his own tilted horizons were intended to “irritate the viewer with something, to kick him out of a dull standard.” […]

[emphasis added]

EMERGENCY

From Andrew Joron’s incredible essay “The Emergency,” found in The Cry at Zero (Denver: Counterpath Press, 2007) 7-9:

“[…] Within the complex system of language, a word’s meaning is ‘edged’—and chaotically conditioned—by the meanings of all other words. Communication attempts to crystallize this chaos by establishing fixed relations between the meanings of particular words. But such language-crystals melt and reform constantly in response to their (subjectively mediated) surroundings. (Complex systems are typically open systems to which rigid concepts of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ do not apply. Such openness allows them to extremely sensitive to changes in the environment.) In this process, communication proves susceptible to structural failure. The abyssal turbulence of language as a whole, always brimming beneath the surface of stabilized meaning, can initiate a spontaneous phase transition that accelerates words far beyond equilibrium, toward the condition of poetry.

Poetry is the self-organized criticality of the cry.

(The concept of ‘self-organized criticality’ can be illustrated by pouring a quantity of sand onto a tabletop: the fallen particles will build up into a conical pile. This shape is the product of self-organization, for the pile maintains itself around a critical vertex, a balance-point between order and chaos. Once this critical point is reached, the effect of a single particle’s impact on the pile can no longer be predicted. One particle may cause a chain reaction of cascades upon impact, while another may rest where it falls. Not only have the system’s elements spontaneously organized themselves in response to an influx of energy, but the system as a whole has ‘tuned’ itself toward a state of criticality, where single events have the widest possible range of effects.)

A poem tunes itself toward a state of criticality, a condition of language in which single words have the widest possible range of effects. […]”

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMIN

I literally peeled this out of a book yesterday. It’s a quote from Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street:

[…] Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out into the street…. If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on the sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed work entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular. […]

INSPIRATION, THE STOLEN, THE MEDITATIVE, THE HAND-MECHANICAL

1) “The only literature is voluntary literature.

If I may refer to the henceforth famous dictum in Odile, we can add to this notion the considerable consequences resulting from the fact that: The really inspired person is never inspired, but always inspired. What does this mean? What? This thing so rare, inspiration, this gift of the gods which makes the poet, and which this unhappy man never quite deserves in spite of all his heartaches, this enlightenment coming from who knows where, is it possible that it might cease to be capricious, and that any and everybody might find it faithful and compliant to his desires? The serious revolution, the sudden change this simple sentence introduced into a conception of literature still wholly dominated by romantic effusions and the exaltation of subjectivity, has never been fully analyzed. In fact, this sentence implied the revolutionary conception of the objectivity of literature, and from that time forward opened the latter to all possible modes of manipulation. In short, like mathematics, literature could be explored.”

2) “Deep thanks to Richard O’Russa and Situations Press for the republication of several pages from O’Russa’s Elastic Latitudes. The section “Zeros and Ones” was written directly out of a process of copying the pages of Elastic Latitudes, a typewriter-written poem made entirely of the numbers 0 and 1, into duplicate lines with the numbers spelled out. By the end of each page I would be in a trance-like empty state and write what turned out to be all the poems that make up that middle section.”

1. Jean Lescure, “Brief History of the Oulipo,” Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, ed. Warren F. Motte, Jr. (Illinois State University: Dalkey Archive Press, 1986), 34.

2. Anselm Berrigan, Zero Star Hotel, (Washington D.C.: Edge Books, 2002), copyright page. This quote is from the thanks/acknowledgements section.

SIGN-CHAIN #3: DIS-

From Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press/October Books, 1996), 2-3:

“In ‘What is an Author?’, a text written in early 1969 in the heyday of such returns, Michel Foucault writes in passing of Marx and Freud as ‘initiators of discursive practices,’ and he asks why a return is made at particular moments to the originary texts of Marxism and psychoanalysis, a return in the form of a rigorous reading. The implication is that, if radical (in the sense of radix: to the root), the reading will not be another accretion of the discourse. On the contrary, it will cut through layers of paraphrase and pastiche that obscure its theoretical core and blunt its political edge. Foucault names no names, but clearly he has in mind the readings of Marx and Freud made by Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, respectively. (Again, he writes in early 1969, or four years after Althusser published For Marx and Reading Capital and three years after the Ecrits of Lacan appeared—and just months after May 1968, a revolutionary moment in constellation with other such moments in the past.) In both returns the stake is the structure of the discourse stripped of additions: not so much what Marxism or psychoanalysis means as how it means—and how it has transformed our conceptions of meaning. […] The moves within these two returns are different: Althusser defines a lost break within Marx, whereas Lacan articulates a latent connection between Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure, the contemporaneous founder of structural linguistics, a connection implicit in Freud (for example, in his analysis of the dream as a process of condensation and displacement, a rebus of metaphor and metonymy) but impossible for him to think as such (given the epistemological limits of his own historical position). But the method of these returns is similar: to focus on the ‘constructive omission’ crucial to each discourse. The motives are similar too: not only to restore the radical integrity of the discourse but to challenge its status in the present, the received ideas that deform its structure and restrict its efficacy. This is not to claim the final truth of such readings. On the contrary, it is to clarify their contingent strategy, which is to reconnect with a lost practice in order to disconnect from a present way of working felt to be outmoded, misguided, or otherwise oppressive. The first move (re) is temporal, made in order, in a second, spatial move (dis), to open a new site for work.”

SIGN-CHAIN #2: THE HAND-MECHANICAL

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Begin (Vivi)Section 1: Lupton, Ellen, Thinking With Type, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 29.::::::::::::::::::::“In the early 1990s, as digital design tools began supporting the seamless reproduction and integration of media, many designers grew dissatisfied with clean, unsullied surfaces, seeking instead to plunge the letter into the harsh and caustic world of physical processes. Letters, which for centuries had sought perfection in ever more exact technologies, became scratched, bent, bruised, and polluted.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++Barry Deck’s typeface Template Gothic, designed in 1990, is based on letters drawn with a plastic stencil. The typeface thus refers to a process that is at once mechanical and manual. […]” [italics mine]::::::::::::::::::End (Vivi)Section 1&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&Begin (Vivi)Section 2: Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real, (Cambridge: MIT Press/October Books, 1996), 63-66&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&“In time, however, seriality could not be avoided, and this recognition led to demonstrations and counter-demonstrations of its logic. Consider, for example, how Rauschenberg tests this logic in Factum I and II (1957), each canvas filled with found images and aleatory gestures that are repeated, imperfectly, in the other. Yet not until minimalism and pop is serial production made consistently integral to the technical production of the work of art. More than any mundane content, this integration makes such art “signify in the same mode as objects in their everydayness, that is, in their latent systematic.” And more than any cool sensibility, this integration severs such art not only from artistic subjectivity (perhaps the last transcendental order of art) but also from representational models. In this way minimalism rids art of the anthropomorphic and the representational not through anti-illusionist ideology so much as through serial production. For abstraction tends only to sublate representation, to preserve it in cancellation, whereas repetition, the (re)production of simulacra, tends to subvert representation, to undercut its referential logic. (In future histories of artistic paradigms, repetition, not abstraction, may be seen to supersede representation—or at least to disrupt it most effectively.)++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++Since the Industrial Revolution a contradiction has existed between the craft basis of visual art and the industrial order of social life. Much sculpture since Rodin seeks to resolve this contradiction between “individual aesthetic creation” and “collective social production,” especially in the turn to processes like welding and paradigms like the readymade. With minimalism and pop this contradiction is at once so attenuated (as in the minimalist concern with nuances of perception) and so collapsed (as in the Warholian motto “I want to be a machine”) that it stands revealed as a principal dynamic of modern art. In this regard, too, the seriality of minimalism and pop is indicative of advanced-capitalist production and consumption, for both register the penetration of industrial modes into spheres (art, leisure, sport) that were once removed from them. […] Both minimalism and pop resist some aspects of this logic, exploit others (like mechanization and standardization), and foretell still others. For in serial production a degree of difference between commodity-signs becomes necessary; this distinguishes it from mass production. Indeed, in our political economy of commodity-signs it is difference that we consume.”::::::::::::::::::::::::End (Vivi)Section 2:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::