I see what you mean Bob, but I think Andrews is not against randomness as such, but works that use it based on a system or procedure that is designed to produce similar patterns of randomness. Such works, for Andrews, displays (as Charles Bernstien would say) too much of the mechanisms of its own production to allow readers to fully engage exegetically with the text. This is why Andrews criticises the work as being just as authoritarian as the School of Quietude, to use Silliman’s term.
When I write poems chance is used a lot, though I do select from the random data words and phrases that I like, or that I think allow more exegetical possibilities for readers than other chance word or phrase combinations may allow. For me, how this is manufactured is as unimportant as the artist's paints, brush and palette are in the creation of a painting.
Original Message:
I can't see how you can avoid doing both: you can't even roll dice
without intending to do so (and use the result in an artwork), nor can
you decide in advance every minute detail of some work you want to
compose--chance will pop certain unexpecteds into your mind.
Ultimately, too, that you are you is the result of chance, and your
choices available by chance--for instance, your by chance happening to
be alive in 2010 rather than in 1322.
Aside from that, I don't understand what readers have to do with
anything. If you choose to make something of words, aren't you
necessarily trying to communicate with someone else? Or, if you're
"merely" constructing an object of beauty, how can it not be for others,
as well as yourself? I suppose it's theoretically possible to be
totally solipsistic, but very difficult and rare. It might also be
biologically impossible.
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