Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis


Book Description

"Home is a novelist, art agitator, and documenter of art terrorism... The art terrorist's art terrorist." "Modern Review." "Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis" is concerned with what's been happening at the cutting edge of culture since the demise of Fluxus and the Situationists. It provides inside information on the Neoists, Plagiarists, Art Strikers, London Psychogeographical Association, K Foundation, and other groups that are even more obscure. "




A Neoist Research Project


Book Description

"A Neoist Research Project" is the first comprehensive anthology and source book of Neoism, an international collective network of mostly anonymous and pseudonymous subcultural actionists and speculative experimenters. It consists of more than one hundred Neoist texts and two hundred images documenting diverse Neoist interventions, Neoist Apartment Festivals, definitions and pamphlets of Neoism and affiliated currents, language and identity experiments, and Neoist memes such as the shared identity Monty Cantsin. From the contents: "Neoist Chair and Chair Action," "Death Mauses Meat Pieces," "Kline Bottle Pieces," "Street performance actions against false infinity," "APT 4, Low Theatre, Montreal," "Neoist Parking Meter Action: Pay Me to Go Away," "Direct Address," "Contract," "The Ceiling Crashes in," "Neoism 101: Thought Projection," "Our Tactics against Stockhausen," "Seven Scripts for One Week of Neoist Activity," "Hypnotic Movement: Concrete Life Examples," "Macmag Virus," "March 24," "Cogito of the pseudo-scientist, experimenting with mild trauma," "Physics," "The Comb," "the gold flag of near neologisms: the striped page," "The White Head," "APT 5," "What is an uh, uh, Apartment Festival," "Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear-Piercing," "Impractical Seriousness," "Krononautic Divector Field Didaction," "Chronicle of the Neoast Observer at the So-Called Millionth Apartment Festival," "3 part action," "Neoist haircut," "non-participation," "Philosopher's Union soapbox stand," "anything is anything," "language constructions," "Dyslexia," "Continuity Poem (cinematic version)," "A note from the editors of SMILE," "Dialectical Immaterialism," "Formula," "The Last Words of Wilhelm Reich, continued," "Theology," "Plenial Wer," "anti-art is art," "Censorship - the oldest of suppressed traditions," "Proletarian Posturing and the Strike which never Ends," "Neoism is simple," "What is Neoism?," "The First Announcement of Neoism," "The Generation Positive and Neoism," "Origins of Neoism Illuminated," "Bread + Pain + Love = Total Sex," " anti-post-actualism++++++," "Western Cell Division," "Akademgorod," "Why Neoists do not drink alcohol," "The Eroticism of Boredom," "The Concept of Monty Cantsin," "Stupid Undergrounds," "Neoism propaganda sheet 1: SMILE," "Lt. Murnau," "Luther Blissett," "SMILE," "Blood, Bread and Beauty," "Plagerism," "The Curse of Originality," "The 56 Laws of Neoism."




Shift Linguals


Book Description

Shift Linguals traces a history of the cut-up method, the experimental writing practice discovered by Brion Gysin and made famous by Beat author William S. Burroughs. From the groundbreaking works of Dada and Surrealism that paved the way for Burroughs’ breakthrough, through the countercultural explosion of the 1960s, Shift Linguals explores the evolution of the cut-ups within the theoretical frameworks of postmodernism and the avant-garde to arrive at the present and the digital age. Some 50 years on from the first ‘discovery’ of the cut-ups in 1959, it is only now that we are truly able to observe the method’s impact, not only on literature, but on music and culture in a broader sense. The result of over nine years of research, this study represents the first sustained and detailed analysis of the cut-ups as a narrative form. With explorations of the works of Burroughs, Gysin, Kathy Acker, and John Giorno, it also contains the first critical writing on the works of Claude Pélieu and Carl Weissner in English, as well as the first in-depth discussion of the writing of Stewart Home to date.




Improper Names


Book Description

Improper Names offers a genealogy and theory of the “improper name,” which author Marco Deseriis defines as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors. Although such names are often invented to pursue a specific social or political agenda, they are soon appropriated for different and sometimes diverging purposes. This book examines the tension arising from struggles for control of a pseudonym’s symbolic power. Deseriis provides five fascinating and widely varying case studies. Ned Ludd was the legendary and eponymous leader of the English Luddites, textile workers who threatened the destruction of industrial machinery and then advanced a variety of economic and political demands. Alan Smithee—an alias coined by Hollywood film directors in 1969 in order to disown films that were recut by producers—became a contested signature and was therefore no longer effective to signal prevarication to Hollywood insiders. Monty Cantsin was an “open pop star” created by U.S. and Canadian artists in the late 1970s to critique bourgeois notions of authorship, but its communal character was compromised by excessive identification with individual users of the name. The Italian media activists calling themselves Luther Blissett, aware of the Cantsin experience, implemented measures to prevent individuals from assuming the alias, which was used to author media pranks, sell apocryphal manuscripts to publishers, fabricate artists and artworks, and author best-selling novels. The longest chapter here is devoted to the contemporary “hacktivist” group known as Anonymous, which protests censorship and restricted access to information and information technologies. After delving into a rich philosophical debate on community among those who have nothing in common, the book concludes with a reflection on how the politics of improper names affects present-day anticapitalist social movements such as Occupy and 15-M.




Original Copy


Book Description

'"Originality" is only plagiarizing from a great many', remarked Rupert Brooke, stealing the line from Voltaire. Questions of originality, and accusations of plagiarism, are as old as literature, but different literary cultures have interpreted the relationship between originality and plagiarism in startlingly dissimilar ways. Original Copy investigates and documents the drastic reappraisal of literary originality and plagiarism which occurred over the course of the nineteenth century: from the heroic visions of original authorship that characterised the 1820s and 1830s, through to the stickle-brick creativity of Oscar Wilde and Lionel Johnson at the century's end. It reveals how ideas of originality and plagiarism were not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided many important Victorian writers - Eliot, Dickens, Reade, Pater, Wilde, and Lionel Johnson among them - with a creative resource. Moving between numerous different fields of thought and knowledge - literary criticism, the history of science, manuscript culture, anthropology - and written in a supple and elegant style, this book shows that the ideas of originality and plagiarism were the subjects of nineteenth-century literature, as well as what it was subject to.




London calling


Book Description

“Eravamo anti-sistema in tutto e per tutto, nella musica e nell’arte. Volevamo distruggere qualsiasi cosa avesse regole prestabilite, tutto quel che c’era di asfissiante, tutte le certezze. Eravamo decisi a infrangere tutte le regole in tutti i modi possibili”. La Londra di Barry Miles è quella della cultura underground che nasce fra le macerie della Seconda guerra mondiale ed esplode nel corso degli anni Sessanta e Settanta, concentrandosi sul West End e su Soho, le zone in cui era confluita un’eterogenea popolazione di personaggi creativi e fuori dalle righe, intolleranti nei confronti delle costrizioni della cultura e del costume ufficiale: scrittori, poeti, registi, musicisti, artisti, pubblicitari, architetti, stilisti, e una miriade di più anonimi personaggi decisi a fare della propria vita un’arte. È la storia di una rivoluzione culturale determinata a ottenere una “totale confusione dei sensi”, che si sviluppa fra le vie di una metropoli artisticamente onnivora, fatta di locali, librerie, club, pub, teatri, piazze, vicoli, scantinati, case occupate o case borghesi. Una storia di sconvolgente energia vitale e al tempo stesso autodistruttiva, raccontata sul filo di quell’ironia che solo un testimone diretto può comunicare. Mettere in fila i nomi che si incontrano fra queste pagine fa tremare l’idea stessa di ‘controcultura’, poiché vi si ritrova molta della creatività che animerà per ibridazione la cultura ufficiale del Novecento: Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, i Situazionisti, il cool jazz, il rock ’n’ roll, Mary Quant, Kingsley Amis, J.G. Ballard, i Rolling Stones, i Beatles, William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, i Pink Floyd, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Townshend, Yoko Ono, Derek Jarman, David Hockney, i Clash, i Police, Gilbert & George, Vivienne Westwood, i Sex Pistols, Boy George, Charles Saatchi, Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst e moltissimi altri. Un libro-mondo brulicante di storie e di personaggi, il ritratto più preciso e divertente mai scritto sull’avventura gloriosa e infame di un’epoca oggi entrata nella leggenda.




British Low Culture


Book Description

Identifying 'permissive populism', the trickle down of permissiveness into mass consumption, as a key feature of the 1970s, Leon Hunt considers the values of an ostensibly 'bad' decade and analyses the implications of the 1970s for issues of taste and cultural capital. Hunt explores how the British cultural landscape of the 1970s coincided with moral panics, the troubled Heath government, the three day week and the fragmentation of British society by nationalism, class conflict, race, gender and sexuality.




Postmodern Plagiarisms


Book Description

This monograph takes on the question of how literary plagiarism is defined, exposed, and sanctioned in Western culture and how appropriating language assigned to another author can be considered a radical subversive act in postmodern US-American literature. While various forms of art such as music, painting, or theater have come to institutionalize appropriation as a valid mode to ventilate what authorship, originality, and the anxiety of influence may mean, the literary sphere still has a hard time acknowledging the unmarked acquisition of words, ideas, and manuscripts. The author shows how postmodern plagiarism in particular serves as a literary strategy of appropriation at the interface between literary economics, law, and theoretical discourses of literature. She investigates the complex expectations surrounding the strong link between an individual author subject and its alienable text, a link that several postmodern writers powerfully question and violate. Identifying three distinct practices of postmodern plagiarism, the book examines their specific situatedness, precepts, and subversive potential as litmus tests for the literary market, and the ongoing dynamic notion of the concepts authorship, originality, and creativity.




Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of 'Consensus'


Book Description

This book examines youth cultural responses to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes that affected Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. In particular, it considers the extent to which elements of youth culture and popular music served to contest the notion of ‘consensus’ that historians and social commentators have suggested served to frame British polity from the late 1940s into the 1970s. The collection argues that aspects of youth culture appear to have revealed notable fault-lines in and across British society and provided alternative perspectives and reactions to the presumptions of mainstream political and cultural opinion in the period. This, perhaps, was most acute in the period leading up to and after the seemingly pivotal moment of Margaret Thatcher’s election to prime minister in 1979. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary British History.




Avant-Garde / Neo-Avant-Garde


Book Description

This collection of critical essays explores new approaches to the study of avant-garde literature and art, film and architecture. It offers a theoretical framework that avoids narrowly defined notions of the avant-garde. It takes into account the diversity of artistic aims and directions of the various avant-garde movements and encourages a wide and open exploration of the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of the great variety of avant-gardist innovations. Individual essays concentrate on cubist collage and dadaist photomontage, on abstract painting by members of the Dutch group De Stijl, on verbal chemistry and dadaist poetry and on body art from futurism to surrealism. In addition, the collection wishes to open up the discussion of the avant-garde to a thorough investigation of neo-avant-garde activities in the 1950s and 1960s. For decades the appreciation of neo-avant-garde art and literature, film and architecture suffered from a general and all-inclusive rebuke. This volume is designed to contribute to a breakthrough towards a more competent and more precise investigation of this research field. Contributions include a discussion of Warhol’s multiples as well as Duchamp’s editioned readymades, forms of concrete and digital poetry as well as the architectural “Non-Plan”. The main body of the volume is based on presentations and discussions of a three-day research seminar held at the University of Edinburgh in September 2002. The research group formed around the Avant-Garde Project at Edinburgh will continue with its efforts to elaborate a new theory of the avant-garde in the coming years.