#jed rasula

[garadinervi]

Imagining Language. An Anthology, Edited by Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998 [room 3o2 books, Ottawa. Cover Art: © Tom Phillips]

[jacobwren]

“The faction, on the other hand, was more than willing to identify the progressive artist as a combatant against “lyrical arbitrariness” and “the tyranny of the subjective in art.” They denounced the Düsseldorf exhibition as little more that “a warehouse stuffed with unrelated objects, all for sale.” Most poignant, though, was the faction’s admission of its own precarious status: “Today we stand between a society that does not need us and one that does not yet exist.” On the floor of the congress, van Doesburg had read the “Creative Demands of ‘De Stijl,’” and when published in De Stijl he indicated that two of the points were roundly applauded: one calling for the elimination of art exhibitions in order to make way for demonstrations of teamwork and another point demanding the annulment of any distinction between life and art.” – Jed Rasula, Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century

[artofcompost]

From blog to book

From blog to book

It’s a bad idea to turn your blog into a book. And, looks like that’s not going to stop me. About a week ago, revisiting my first posts, I realized there’s a coherence to what I’ve been up to here, and this blog began to look like the foundation of another project.

Gonna take a few years to do right. And some study – of desktop publishing software, and of typesetting and manuscript traditions,…

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[adjacent-thoughts]

[heteroglossia]

To be a reader is not to be unoriginal, not to be a primitive under instruction of the civilized author, not to be a castrated writer. 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. To take on this responsibility is to be willing to regulate one's Desire as an individual energy occurring within a social field. To persist in the writerly fantasy of originality is to succumb to the hideous fantasy of reproduction without sex.

Jed Rasula, “Statement on Reading in Writing,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

[heteroglossia]

My hope is that we’ll come to be less willing to confuse this [transformative comprehension] with writing, and understand writing again someday as a function of repetition, of which reading is the clearest sensual link we have with the invisibility of Desire.

Jed Rasula, “Statement on Reading in Writing,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

For me, this is the most polarizing and isolating aspect of being in an MFA program; I will always privilege the act of reading over the act of writing; the voice of the other over the voice of the I. Reading is internalizing, allowing, without the capitalistic impulse of dispersal and commodification. If language is, as we believe, violent, then writing is warfare, is complicity, while reading is the silent revolt on a stranger's terrain (la terra).

[fluffysingler]

My most recent review in Rain Taxi Review of Books. 

[artofcompost]

A taste of rhizome mind

A taste of rhizome mind

From Poetics of the Rhizome. A course set to start soon.

Before the World Wide Web, there was a worldwide web. Human beings are recent guests in that web, guests often rude and destructive, but sometimes stunned with awe, or love.

[T]he Great Subculture which runs underground through all history … [a] tradition that runs without break from Paleo-Siberian Shamanism and Magdalenian cave-painting;…

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