Thanks to Tim for opening this up, & to Keston, cris, Ric & Robert for their
responses--there's been lots to chew on here for me. I found it interesting
that, in cris's post, Mottram should find himself a paragraph away from
Barrett Watten--two very different examples of writers at the interface of
poetics and cultural studies. Incidentally (and related), an addition to
cris's list of Watten's published works is the essay _The Bride of the
Assembly Line: from Material Text to Cultural Poetics_--just out as the
October issue of Moxley/Evans's Impercipient Lecture Series--in which Watten
develops some of the ideas first presented at the Assembling Alternatives
conference last year, primarily his concern for developing a historically
specific, cultural poetics of "analogy" which distinguishes itself from the
(in Watten's terms) synchronic politics of non-identity and poetics of
"possibility" of Charles Bernstein. There's also a fine discussion of Clark
Coolidge's vital 70s works, "Made Thought" and _The Maintains_.
Two books of L-related theory/essays which I've found especially useful,
Keston, even though they're quite old now, are Alan Davies's _Signage_ and,
particularly, Steve McCaffery's _North of Intention_. There do seem to be
occasions when (certain) Langpos seem reluctant to take on a writing which
was written either outside of America, or before Whitman...dunno, perhaps
this is just how it seems to me (an exception being Russian Formalism, of
course, and I
think you're right, cris, that much more attention is going to be paid to
Robert Smithson--I've just been reading Paul Virilio's _Open Sky_, which has
decidedly Smithsonesque overtones here and there)...but McCaffery's essays
bring French theory to bear on the writings of his contemporaries in
interesting ways--suggesting, on occasion, a dialectical reading of
referentially problematised texts which allows for both the usual
constructive Marxian reading, but also for the possibilities of
non-utilitarian semantic discharge and libidinal flow within (in Bataille's
terms) a general rather than a restrictive economy. I guess some of the
essays are twenty years old now. They still boil my potatoes.
I was glad to see Tim's use of a haiku as a subject header. My own
favourite of Anselm Hollo's wld have to be:
round lumps of cells grow
up to love porridge, later
become The Supremes
Woof, woof, &c.,
Miles
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