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Showing posts from September, 2005

The arrival of a captive audience

Earlier in the week, I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Grenier off the plane from San Francisco at Manchester Airport. Although having exchanged photos so we would recognise each other I thought to be on the safe side I would print out one of his recent drawn poems and stand with it opposite the arrival gate like people do with notices such as “TAXI – MR SMITH”. And something quite unexpected happened: virtually everyone who came through the gate paused to read the poem (without realising that it was a poem of course). I actually began to feel like I was doing a performance. One daft old American Fascist walked up to me, tapped me on the chest through the poem and said “I’m not Osama Bin Laden” - presumably mistaking Bob’s use of line with Arabic. But otherwise people seemed genuinely to be caught be the unexpected textual intervention. Another passing reader actually left the building and then returned to ask what it said! As well as making a mental note that this could well be

Questions of Ideology and Ideological Apparatus

…from Trehy’s Althusser’s Machiavelli’s Poetics (a work in progress) reading it yourself. Rather, these are two competing realizations of the work, each with its own set of advantages & limitations. Moreover - Charles Bernstein how why what why – the marginalisation of poetry, questions locating the battleground in reading and public rituals within the material existence of one ideological apparatus – culture. Is it possible to locate answers in an act of reading itself? Reading a reading of a reading? On the question of power (and assuming it) who better to read than Machiavelli? In questioning from marginalisation who better than the self-marginalised Althusser? (When a Marxist theorist murders a communist partisan [1] and the stillpoint of his emotional life, it takes 30 years to be theory again – how culture operates as an ideological state apparatus.) So what better than Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli? Not Discourses nor The Poet (which discredited recredited Althusser d