Monday, January 22, 2018

Methods for substitution include straightforward word shifts within text that is otherwise not disruptive — intra-textual cuts and pastes, say — as well as extra-textual processing of found passages, more often now digital copy and hybrid processing from search algorithms, remixed with other types of found or authored material.

To employ terms like ‘authored’ or ‘intra-textual’ is to risk not paying enough attention to the bigger point that cut-and-paste pastiche has evolved into a vernacular strategy for disruption, including wrenching formal droplets from their generic management.
Poetics of the last decade or so continues to foul up methods and standards. A direction that looks facile and promising is genre-swapping, appropriating and incorporating whole chunks of alternative discourse within plain speech (scanning other people’s suffering, one readymade example).

Panicked, we stood and talked it over until, with Trump-ish aplomb, his stand-in lifted the tarp and showed it to us.