Postmodern Plagiarisms: Cultural Agenda and Aesthetic Strategies of Appropriation in US-American Literature (1970–2010) 9783110379105, 9783110378955

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Mirjam Horn Postmodern Plagiarisms

Buchreihe der ANGLIA/ ANGLIA Book Series

Edited by Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf Advisory Board Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine, Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen, Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner

Volume 49

Mirjam Horn

Postmodern Plagiarisms Cultural Agenda and Aesthetic Strategies of Appropriation in US-American Literature (1970–2010)

For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/36292 Zugl.: Giessen, Univ., Diss., 2012

ISBN 978-3-11-037895-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-037910-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039426-9 ISSN 0340-5435 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface and Acknowledgments Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage. William S. Burroughs

While writing this book on plagiarism as a literary strategy of appropriation I have thought again and again about how I conceive of myself as an author and this book as mine. Writing a text or a song always involves issues of self, of owning and owing, holding dear and letting go. A text is that which requires you at once to claim and to release it as you are held accountable for your ideas, stylistic idiosyncrasies, and conclusions. It is a situation that I managed to come to terms with, after a while, as this sort-of finished product was enveloped in not only relief, but dignified pride. Since this is a book about accountability I would like to thank the individuals and institutions who have considerably shaped me and this manuscript. First of all, my husband Matthias for his patience, support and humor, for our life before, during and after a Ph.D.; my first supervisor, Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning, who generously accepted my proposal, for his advice, time, and opportunities to learn; my second supervisor, Prof. Dr. Greta Olson for her ongoing support, perspective, feminist fervor and shared opportunities to explore and, most importantly, to teach. I need to extend my thanks to the International PhD Program (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies” at Giessen University, especially to Dr. Sonja Frenzel; my colleagues at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture and the Department for English and American Literature and Culture, most notably Simon Cooke, René Dietrich, and Jutta Weingarten for feedback, criticism, support, and beer – and Rose Lawson for tea; to the Equal Opportunities Commission, Women’s Representative Council, and the President of Giessen University for presenting the Helge Agnes Pross Award to my project, thereby generously funding this publication; and to the German Association of Women Academics for their support and acknowledgement. I am deeply indebted to Lauren Greyson and Daniel Hartley for carefully proofreading this manuscript and to the IPP for generously funding this editorial support; to the editors of this series and the publisher who accepted this text for publication; to Vanessa Place for her conceptual determination and memorable conduct; to Hugh Tribbey for bringing Kenneth Goldsmith into my life; and to Sascha Pöhlmann for introducing me to Kathy Acker way back in 2005 – this book is actually your fault. Finally, this text would not exist without good, honest, ingenious friends and family: Nadyne Stritzke. Andreea Badea. Jens Röschlein. Philipp Sauer. Isa-

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belle Kerber. Marija Sruk. Ivan Žgela. Stephanie Brückel. Tobias Gabel. Farzad Boobani. Natalya Bekhta. Frank Ipgrave. Gero Guttzeit. Katharina Zilles. Michael Horn. My parents.

Contents 

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

Framing Plagiarism as a Postmodern Negotiation of Authorship and Text Sovereignty 20 21 . Authorship and Its Nemeses: Plagiarism as Unoriginal Practice .. The Commodification of Literature and the Economic Value of Authorial Attribution 21 .. The Extra-Aesthetic Notion of Plagiarism: The Case of Literary Theft 31 .. Under Siege: Challenging Textual Integrity 41 and Individual Authorship . Writing Beyond Petty Theft: Critifiction, ConText, 55 and Neo‐Conceptual Writing .. “Everything can be said and must be said in any possible way”: Stealing Away With Critifiction and Playgiarism 55 .. Disowning Meaning and Male Authority: 75 Feminist Plagiarist ConText .. Neo-Conceptual Uncreative Writing of the Twenty-First Century 90  Plagiarism as Writing Practice in US Postmodern Literature 114 . Practicing Theory With Critifiction: Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971/1991) 115 . ConText as Dissident Feminist Writing: Kathy Acker’s Empire 134 of the Senseless (1988) . Neo-Conceptual Appropriative Writing 164 .. Uncreative Writing as Constrained Transcription: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (2003) 164 .. Appropriating Legal Texts: Vanessa Place’s Tragodía I: Statement of Facts (2010) 196 .. Appropriate and Erase: Yedda Morrison’s Darkness (chapter 1) (2009) 220 

Conclusion: The Present and Future of Strategic Appropriation in the Arts 240

Bibliography Index

283

248

1 Introducing Plagiarism Beyond Illegitimate Plunder When it comes to explaining the objective of this research project, I oftentimes encountered certain reservations: literary history is paved with allegations against text kleptomaniacs, offensive epigones who adorn themselves with borrowed plumes and live off the creative endeavors of another author. Stealing text is considered a punishable offense corresponding to personal defamation with the ruthless ambience of deceit and unjust enrichment. Betrayed authors and intermediaries of the literary industry such as the publisher as well as the general public cry out for revenge against illegitimate appropriations, expect an explanation from the putative thief, and demand justice for his or her wrongdoings. The responses to plagiarism are so informed by an interest in the conviction and retribution that the term’s application still echoes its etymological basis: the Roman poet Martial, in his Epigrams, famously coined plagiarism the “elegant offense” (Alford 1995) of a fellow poet stealing another writer’s verses. Referring to this thief as plagiarius Martial adjudged a term that heretofore had described the abduction of free human beings, or even children, into slavery.¹ In this sense, plagiarism became personified as a textual offspring held captive, forced to belonging to the wrong father (child) or working for the wrong master (slave). The contemporary application of the term ‘plagiarism’ still echoes Martial’s confrontation of a righteous author-owner of an original text and another person who aims at the former’s superior status. Literary theft is therefore considered a direct personal insult, the worst charge brought against a writer and his or her status in the literary scene. Once initial suspicion has settled, the media delight in poring over the words, pages, or whole works in question, and compare ideas, plot lines, and verbatim passages. It does so because we take for granted the originality of the author-owner’s pre-text,² the major ideas, and the characteristic

 In epigram 1.52, Martial asks his friend Quintianus to defend him and reprimand all literary plunderers of his work: “when that fellow calls himself their owner, say that they are mine, sent forth from my hand. If thrice and four times you shout this, you will shame the plagiarist” (1968 [1919]: 63).  In this study, the term ‘pre-text’ is used to indicate all self-contained textual entities that precede a plagiarist implementation, for example the poem “Howl” (1956) by Allen Ginsberg appropriated in Kathy Acker’s plagiarist novel Empire of the Senseless (1988). In contrast to Gérard Genette’s use of ‘pretext’ (see 1997 [1982]), I included a hyphen to lose the homonymy with the signifier denoting ‘excuse’ or ‘pretense.’

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style and impact it has left in the minds of readers and critics, which, all in all, have qualified it as dear and sustainable for the literary canon of our culture. The plagiarist’s action thus deceives on at least three levels: first, by stealing text from the original author and, in the case of legal allegations, committing an infringement of intellectual property (individual level); second, by deceiving the public’s trust in the originality and individuality of the written material and its producer (public level); and, third, by betraying a culture’s collective archive that is consequently ‘contaminated’ with foreign substances (cultural level). The process of unearthing these three levels is consequently summed up in a public verdict of the convicted culprit that may derive from a detailed presentation of evidence and/or an examination of the plagiarist’s defense strategies and willingness to confess and repent. This public trial of plagiarism, which closely follows the structure of a classic literary or media scandal,³ therefore presents a resolution that may be more compelling and effective in its publicized inspection than an actual legal case in court. Philipp Theisohn, in his account on literary theft as an “unoriginal literary history” (2009; my translation), further stresses the importance of the public narrative plagiarism produces: “Plagiarisms occur because we narrate them. […] We are less interested in the mere fact of a text being copied than in the story we can tell about it: what we call ‘plagiarism’ only becomes visible against the background of a plagiarist narrative” (Theisohn 2009: 14, 15; my translation, original emphasis).⁴ The narrative we read and help fashion involves protagonists, textual cues as evidence and metatextual dialogues in the media, as well as a figurative language for the willful deceit that expresses general outrage, malicious glee, and/or open contempt in the face of a devalued literary practice.⁵ The language employed in this ‘plagiarist narrative’ offers further hints for examining the impact of literary theft: with respect to Martial personifying text as an abducted person, plagiarism is considered a “social abnormality […] imagined as despot On the literary scandal as collective indignation and public narrative see Steffen Burkhardt’s diagnosis of (media) scandals involving a “genealogy of indignation” (2006: 82; my translation) and their own narrative structure (see ibid. 206 – 232). In addition see Bösch (2011); Gasser (2007); Holzner (2011); Ladenthin (2007); Moritz (2007); Robin (2004: 31– 56); Zierold and Altnöder (2009).  “Plagiate entstehen dadurch, dass man sich von ihnen erzählt. […] Was uns an Plagiatsfällen interessiert, ist demnach weniger das reine Faktum einer Textkopie, sondern die Geschichte, die man sich von ihr erzählt: Das, was wir ‘Plagiat’ nennen, wird immer erst auf der Folie einer Plagiatserzählung sichtbar.”  The notion of plagiarism as public narrative in the literary marketplace is further developed in chapter 2.1.1 of this study.

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ic – contagious, sickening, unnatural, and terminal […,] a bastard offspring, an illegitimate child that enacts a primal crime: patricide (murdering its origin) followed by incest (breeding monsters out of its own flesh)” (Groom 2002: 27). Here, the crime of kidnapping is linked to two other heavily tabooed practices: on the one hand, it measures up to homicide in the family for its betrayal of cultural and textual heritage; on the other, it corresponds to illegitimate sexual intercourse (“incest”) that only produces “bastard offspring,” i. e. impure text. That way charged with some of our society’s most abhorred taboos, stealing material that has previously been published and therefore acknowledged as ‘original’ by the discourses of law, the literary economy, and educational institutions is therefore an intensely pathological act, the most damaging misbehavior within the production of art and especially literature. Plagiarism as a disease qualifies as “the severest charge that one writer could lay on another” as it points towards “the defining ethical position of the writer, scholar, and critic, and of the profession of the humanities as a whole” (ibid.). An author thereby assumes the parental responsibility for the social salvation and moral health of a culture. This responsibility, in turn, is mirrored in a culture’s accepted modes of creativity and an understanding of authorship as individual ownership as they echo some significant facets in and for the history of ideas of modern (Western) civilization: individual maturity and accomplishment, order and progress as well as reasoning and replicability. An author in his or her assigned position to observe, narrativize and negotiate ideas and images, events and experiences, perspectives and paradigms embodies and preserves these facets. The contemporary author has to fill the role of an individual writerly subject, an instance the public – economic intermediaries, the media, and the reader/bookstore customer – can relate to. Building on Michel Foucault’s concept of the author function (see 1968) that addresses the supposed originator of text as a phenomenon rather than a historical person, I relativize the biographical author by referring to him or her as an ‘authorial subject.’ This subject serves to order, attribute meaning and value, as well as assist in canonizing and sustaining a certain amount of text we have come to call ‘a work.’ Consequently, in its ethical legitimacy mentioned above, the author subject is asked to follow a culture’s dominant regulations assuming individual originality as a key feature. In turn, an author has no (copy)right to seize texts that are fixed licensed entities since appropriate authorship in a free-market culture necessarily links literary property with ethical propriety as well as the aesthetic notions of authorship with that of the legal and economic system. Looking again at the imagery that communicates plagiarism’s destructive force with respect to these Western concepts and implications for individual cre-

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ativity, Martial, in another epigram, compares misappropriated material to “a black raven, perchance wandering on the Cayster’s banks, [that] is laughed at among Leda’s swans: so, when a sacred grove is afire with the varied tones of the tuneful Athenian nightingale, an impudent jay jars on those Attic notes of woe” (1968 [1919]: 64 – 65). The cunning raven and thieving jay betray the beautiful, the “tuneful” ideals of Western cultural productivity by wresting them from their rightful ranks, drowning the song of righteous authors. Thus, plagiarism is driven by the interest, as Richard Hurd claimed in 1751, “to creep servilely after the sense of some other” (qtd. in Groom 2002: 26), of the genuine author who is acknowledged as the original source for the painting, design, chess problem, narrative, or lyrics. With the plagiarist narrative under way, that original creator is pitied as the victim, re-acknowledged and endorsed as a productive member of the literary “field of cultural production” (see Bourdieu 1993 [1983]) and therefore can be compensated on a legal basis (e. g. Copyright, German Urheberrecht). Chapter 2.1.2 of this study, “The Extra-Aesthetic Notion of Plagiarism: The Case of Literary Theft,” will take into account the legal backup for the notion of authorial individuality and textual integrity, and it will address the difference between the broad phenomenon of plagiarism and the specific legal enforcement of intellectual property rights that protect “the music of the tuneful nightingale.” Beyond the interrelations of the literary-economic and legal positions towards literary theft as well as the metaphoricity assessing the notoriety of plagiarism in Western culture and literary history, we may further look at the culprit’s motives to commit textual theft. This is especially of interest since the motivation for the strategies of literary appropriation presented in this study significantly differs from ‘standard’ plagiarist intention, that is literary theft with the goals of deceit and self-enrichment. Therefore the following distinction will assist in narrowing down the objective of this book. We usually recognize a plagiarist to deceive the public for personal unjustified gain. Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, for instance, met allegations of plagiarism after the publication of her debut novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life in 2006. She had taken consecutive phrases from five other novels, received $500,000 for a two-book-contract with Little, Brown and Company, and pleaded not guilty holding her photographic memory responsible for the verbatim coincidences (see Smith 2006a and 2006b). Although so-called cryptomnesia, the condition of unconsciously memorizing events (and texts) past, often serves as a popular defense argument for obvious parallels in source materials and is even supported by psychological and neurological expertise (see Juskalian 2009; Swan 1994; F. Taylor 1965), the public interest nevertheless lies in establishing a forethought of self-enrichment through deceit – and thus asks for public redemption of the fraud.

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With an eye to the academic discourse in general and the obtainment of doctoral degrees in particular, textual poaching in recent years has seen a dramatic increase concerning prominent figures from politics. In Germany, for example, former German defense minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg as well as members of the European Parliament Silvana Koch-Mehrin and Georgios Chatzimarkakis were stripped of their degrees for extensively plundering various newspapers, scholarly articles and books, and federal documents in their dissertations. These cases were interestingly disclosed in the collaborative efforts of online communities that meticulously ploughed the submitted documents for verbatim appropriation. On the online forum GuttenPlag Wiki, by self-definition a “collaborative documentation of plagiarism” for zu Guttenberg’s dissertation, for example, the results were visualized with an animated barcode and commented as follows: “1218 plagiarist fragments from 135 sources on 371 of 393 pages (94,4 %) in 10421 plagiarized lines (63,8 %) as of April 3, 2011” (2012: n.pag.; my translation). These exceptionally fast discoveries presenting numerical evidence as well as the public outcry and open letters by academic interest groups forced the alma maters in charge to initiate proceedings against zu Guttenberg, Koch-Mehrin, Chatzimarkakis and others who intended to keep their titles. The exhaustive documentation and public trial of policy makers who heavily rely on their authenticity and integrity with voters discredited them and sparked an animated discussion on academic malpractice and counter-measures to be taken by universities to safeguard their integrity as well as marketing endeavors promoting Germany as an international state-of-the-art educational location (Bildungsstandort).⁶ The case of German debut novelist Helene Hegemann serves as a third example for contemporary plagiarist scandals for reasons of unjustified personal gain. At first, Hegemann confirmed the media’s appraisal of a wunderkind authoress with the immaculate talent to capture contemporary urban subculture and hedonist lifestyle in her debut novel Axolotl Roadkill (2010). Yet, similar to Viswanathan, she soon met allegations of plundering various sources such as literary blogs, other novels, and theater plays.⁷ Hegemann, with her publisher Siv Bublitz, quickly summoned acknowledged plagiarists including political dramatist René Pollesch or French avant-garde writer Maurice Blanchot to defend her writ-

 Following pressure from the public, academia, and his own party, zu Guttenberg in the end resigned his mandate in the German Bundestag and from his office as defense minister. Both Chatzimarkakis and Koch-Mehrin filed suits against the revocation of their titles and retained their seats in the EU Parliament.  For comments on this case see Theisohn in Moos (2010); Krausser and Draesner in Kölner Stadtanzeiger (2010).

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ing ‘strategy’: both demanded a “detachment from this excess of intellectual property by means of a right to copy and transform” (Hegemann and Bublitz 2010: n.pag.; my translation).⁸ A self-defensive paraphrasing of a postmodernist ‘anything goes,’ this reasoning sparked a medial backlash with Günter Grass, Christa Wolf and Sybille Lewitscharoff signing the “Leipzig Declaration for the Protection of Intellectual Property” protesting against Hegemann’s nomination for the Leipzig Book Award (see Bartels 2010). Despite the fact that these examples derive from different writerly and professional contexts, they all share a gradual disclosure of plagiarist practices in the traditional sense: in a first step, the authors and respective texts were deemed original, praised for their both authentic and innovative scholarly, literary or political style and received conventional media labels and taglines like “one of the year’s biggest fiction titles” (on Opal; Nayar 2006: n.pag.), “politician of the year” 2009 (on zu Guttenberg; RP Online 2009: n.pag.), and ‘wunderkind.’ In a second step, the texts were dissected for similar phrases or passages copied verbatim to match identified pre-texts, and their ‘compilers’ were interrogated for motives and usually unconvincing defense strategies. Last, all three culprits subsequently withdrew from the public scene with their publishers or dissertation supervisors either denying any knowledge of the misappropriation or halfheartedly defending the accusations they and their protégés were faced with.⁹ In retrospect, the plagiarist narrative has testified the evildoers’ dishonest motive of unjustified gain, despite the writers’ individual alleged forethought and posthoc justification. What can be considered another major reason for committing plagiarism is systemic ignorance, that is the ignorance of conventionalized rules in practice, or the prevention of negative consequences, a phenomenon again frequently the case with the infringement of academic standards: students, for example, fear to submit a poor paper due to faulty time management, an essay that may result in failing a course or the suspension from university;¹⁰ post-graduate scholars worry about financial cuts of (external) funding if they present no cutting-

 “[eine] Ablösung von diesem ganzen Urheberrechtsexzess durch das Recht zum Kopieren und zur Transformation.”  While Little, Brown and Company terminated the contract with Viswanathan, Hegemann’s German publisher Ullstein immediately offered and published a revised second edition of Axolotl Roadkill that included a four-page appendix of all acknowledged sources.  This inadequacy ultimately involves restrictions to certain job markets, a significant loss in self-esteem, or the demand for accountability to peers and family. On the motivations for giving in to deceitful actions see e. g. Aspetsberger (2008); Brost et al. (2011); Fröhlich (2006); Rieble (2010); Sattler (2007); Sonnabend (2011); Di Trocchio (1994).

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edge data, publish insufficiently or in journals of low reputation. Verbatim copying or taking up essential ideas from others may overcome this fear of a highly competitive academic ‘marketplace’ persistently producing results and groundbreaking discoveries. Insufficient institutional conventions for ‘good practice’ and scientific integrity may additionally provide ample loopholes for careless research that is rarely enough faced with serious consequences.¹¹ Both deception for unjustified gain and the evasion of negative consequences lead to a similar diagnosis of plagiarist practice. They represent a violation of systemic conventions (literary authorship, academic ethics) built on established notions of originality, authenticity, and productive effort, i. e. the described ideal of imaginative writing or the application of rigorous analytical methods considered essential for a work ethic based on creative ingenuity and proper craftsmanship. The literary material under scrutiny in this study makes use of the plagiarist narrative without ultimately confirming motivations of self-enriching pretense and public deceit. Similar to the cases of Hegemann and Viswanathan, the novels and conceptual poetry still feature text that can be assigned to other authorial subjects: by including several lines from Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poem “Howl” (1955) in the dystopian novel Empire of the Senseless (1988), for instance, Kathy Acker meets the criteria of both copyright infringement and public deceit. Readers as well as representatives of Ginsberg’s textual heritage may object to the lines incorporated without the necessary markers such as quotations marks, footnotes, or parenthetical referencing. These texts thus follow the majority definition of plagiarism, i. e. the unmarked appropriation of another authorial subject’s ideas and language presenting them as one’s own. Yet the authorial subjects analyzed in this study – Raymond Federman, Kathy Acker, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, and Yedda Morrison – further admit to and conceptualize their appropriative acts in unconventional terms. Their texts therefore qualify as a provocative discussion of conventional notions of and reactions to plagiarism as a mode of deceitful composition. The primary texts in this book illustrate programmatic practices of textual theft with a critical and theoretical background, hence with a conceptual basis that clearly distinguishes them from cases of common literary theft outlined above. This difference is played out in at least three ways: first, these texts negotiate a wide array of material from narrative fiction, drama, poetry, language

 This argument acknowledges positions by scholars such as Finetti and Himmelrath (see 1999), Volker Rieble (2010), Stefan Weber (see 2007), and Debora Weber-Wulff (see WeberWulff and Wohnsdorf 2006).

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theory and philosophy, as well as journalism, law, and advertising and they include this multitude in English letters, Persian script, drawn dream maps, tattoos, numbers, symbols, in French, in columns, double spaced, as sound poems, hidden behind correction fluid, etc. One central claim of this study implies that text becomes not only modified in the acts of appropriation and incorporation, but that literary text is also freed from its limitations of literary usage with respect to form, content, and function. Second, the novels and conceptual texts draw on and openly reflect about theoretical attitudes towards authorship, textuality, and meaning-making that arise from post-structuralist and deconstructionist language criticism. Radical concepts such as the ‘Death of the Author,’ the transition from unified work to fluid text (see Barthes 1967 and 1971), the demystification of the author as a function (Foucault), or Derrida’s différance offer a theoretical background for understanding text and creative composition in terms of textual subversion and dehierarchizing strategies, aspects that always include the contested idea of authorship as ownership. In their close alignment with post-structuralist and deconstructionist positions of the strong linguistic turn (see e. g. Losonsky 2006, Petterson 2012), the strategies and case studies of this book thus communicate a high level of language criticism and propose a fundamental, all-pervasive ‘textuality of culture’ (see Bachmann-Medick 1996). As a third difference to ‘ordinary’ plagiarism I find a cultural agenda with each of the three strategies: Critifiction/Playgiarism, ConText, and Neo-Conceptual uncreative writing. While Helene Hegemann retroactively accounted for her novel as a “lie” that approaches the truth asking for copy-paste as a contemporary mode of composition (see Hegemann and Bublitz 2010: n.pag.), postmodern plagiarists promote their practice in critical texts and retreat from the notion of the eclectic contemporary authorial subject into conceptualism and a textuality that is seen as corrupted from the outset. Each case study of this investigation communicates an aesthetic program devoted to challenging conventions of creativity and authorial signification as well as the consequences of these conventions for literary production. The plagiarist literature I narrowed down to postmodern examples from 1970 to 2010 therefore amounts to the strategic infringement of conventionalized authorial rights, textual entities, and public notions of creativity as well as an ethical position awarded to the author in our culture. Looking at the theoretical and methodological ‘emplotment’ for investigating postmodern plagiarist practices with this cultural agenda raises an important question: Why do we need to investigate yet another concept to describe strategies of appropriation when there are well-researched modes of intertextuality? How are the strategies of literary theft branded in this study different from allu-

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sion or appropriation in, for example, post-colonial re-writing? And what is its surplus value when it comes to outlining the impact of postmodern plagiarism for the study of literature and culture? Intertextuality as a subcategory of transtextuality (sensu Gérard Genette) involves the formalist categorization of plagiarism as the undeclared “actual presence of one text within another” (1997 [1982]: 2) in contrast to a quotation as the simplest and to an allusion as the most complex form of designating that presence. The plagiarist strategies and case studies at hand, however, rather correspond to Genette’s hypertextual operations of transformation and imitation (see ibid. 14– 18) in that they create “literature in the second degree” and consider transtextuality a “fundamental aspect of textuality and […] literarity” (ibid. 19). Yet again, this category proves insufficient with respect to the theoretical content of language criticism and philosophy we find invested in Critifiction/ Playgiarism, ConText, and Neo-Conceptualism, respectively.¹² The cultural agendas of these conceptual appropriative practices ask for a more contextual approach that takes the various discourses into account that participate in the production of contemporary authorship, the notions of originality and creativity as well as the implementation of these aspects in the literary field (sensu Bourdieu). As a consequence, already established variants of appropriative writing that recall ‘classic’ investigations by Genette and others share certain aspects with postmodern plagiarism, yet they also considerably differ from it. Modernist literary collage/montage (e. g. in Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer) and avant-garde cut-up (e. g. by William S. Burroughs), for example, also involve the disruption and non-linearity of image, text, and narrative as well as a symbolic layering of authorial subjects and textual fragments that follow a conceptual imperative; nevertheless, these practices tend to emphasize coincidence and spontaneity to communicate, for example, the randomness of modern life with its acceleration, multiperspectivity, and the estrangement of the individual from society. Postcolonial rewriting shares an indirect implementation of pre-texts with the literary plagiarisms discussed in this study. Both serve the purpose of canon revision and a subversion of hegemonic discourses (see e. g. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2001 [1989]: 37– 76). Rewritings as well as postmodern plagiarisms likewise provide a critical comment on the conditionality of literature, i. e. on the authors and texts deemed worthy of becoming recognized by majority

 The same argument can be made for the otherwise comprehensive categories developed by Ulrich Broich and Manfred Pfister (1985), who suggest a model of degrees of intensity of intertextual referencing with respect to referentiality, communicativity, autoreflexivity, structurality, selectivity, and dialogicity. Again the charging of the conceptual practices with radical language criticism asks for an increasingly complex discussion.

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conventions and standards for literary communication. Compared with the practices under scrutiny in this book, however, postcolonial modes of appropriation rather aim at a revision of canonized works that effect an unbalancing of the pretext’s power dynamics in favor of the previously neglected or oppressed positions, for example by emphasizing Jane Eyre’s minor character Bertha in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).¹³ Rewritings as well as their close generic associates parody and satire can still be elements in the cases of strategic appropriation addressed in this study; alone they nevertheless fall short of covering the complex interrelations I consider relevant for the assessment of the context and cultural agenda of these practices. Therefore postmodern plagiarisms call for an approach that takes their radicalism into account and that acknowledges the historical embedding and writerly agenda of these strategies. This program always includes: first, a negotiation of plagiarism as a taboo challenging the etiquette of literary production; second, a critique of the structures in the literary “field of cultural production” (Bourdieu 1993 [1983]); and, third, a renegotiation of conventions that concern authorial agency, authority, and intentionality with respect to post-structuralist and deconstructionist positions of de-subjectivization and a pluralization of meaning. A survey of the academic debate on practices of literary theft further assists in legitimizing an analysis of strategic plagiarist practices as different from established accounts of intertextuality and the like. Since this study will explore and identify the similarities and crucial differences of common notions of literary theft with three distinct plagiarist strategies, this survey accounting for the state of the art indicates a broad spectrum of scholarly literature. I will therefore attend to selected discussions of the author and authorship, plagiarism in general as well as in connection to postmodern literature and, finally, to literature on the ‘primary’ sources.¹⁴ First of all, the author as such is examined in a plethora of studies from a historical perspective. This includes, for instance, Seán Burke’s Authorship from Plato to the Postmodern from 1995. In large parts a reader, the volume focuses on relevant readings by key thinkers and their understanding of forms, norms, and functions of authorial productivity. Andrew Bennett’s 2005 account The Author likewise follows a diachronic approach and addresses the contrastive theo-

 In part, this applies to the strategy of ConText as a feminist practice that aims at unbalancing structures of patriarchal discourse (see chapter 2.2.2).  Needless to say, all sources given represent only a careful selection of relevant literature in the field. I deliberately decided on scholarly discussions that stand out as particularly interdisciplinary and with a clear emphasis on the impact issues of authorship, copyright, and plagiarism have with respect to the study of culture.

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retical debates while Heinrich Detering’s equally canonized edited volume Autorschaft. Positionen und Revisionen (2002 [2001]) assembles a wide range of essays from the rhetorical construction of the author as genius (e. g. Berndt, Begemann) to productive forces in contemporary film (Struck) to the distinction between author and narrator (Jannidis), a range that continuously pits the extremes of “the autonomous and the heteronomous author” (2002 [2001]: 3 – 175), “individual and collective authorship” (ibid.: 177– 325), “the explored and the simulated author” (ibid.: 327– 453), and “the absent and the public author” (ibid.: 455 – 589) against each other. After the relativization brought about by the strong linguistic turn and a subsequent shift of attention away from the author to the text and the reader, other publications by the end of the 20th century re-pan the spotlight on authorial aspects, even, as an answer to Roland Barthes’ proclaimed ‘death of the author,’ announcing a Return of the Author. Fotis Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, Matías Martinez, and Simone Winko, for instance, in their collected volume of the same name indicate “the renovation of a contested term” and consequently assemble various essays that examine, for instance, the potential of the author in connection with his or her intention for the textual product, politics and history, and the redefinition of authorship across changing medial environments.¹⁵ Other studies are predominantly concerned with the author in connection with the emergence of the literary marketplace. Here, the professionalization of authors in capitalist terms is taken into account against the backdrop of medial and technological paradigm shifts and the transition from an era of patronage to that of a ‘free’ literary market. While Martha Woodmansee investigates The Author, Art, and the Market (1994) as a “rereading [of] the history of aesthetics” by focussing on literary aesthetics in the 18th-century middle class of Germany and England, Catherine Ingrassia’s Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit from 1998 investigates “historically contingent symbolic practices” (1998: 2) in the dawning literary marketplace in early-18th-century England, analyzes the connection of this economic progress with the rise of popular writing in general and the novel in particular, and, interestingly, focuses on “[t]he interplay between the material participation of women in financial and literary milieus and the symbolic characterization of certain subjects and activities as ‘feminized’” (ibid.). With a similar emphasis on the literary market, David Dowling in his Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market (2009) takes into account

 Other historical approaches are featured in, for instance, Agamben (2007), Horn (2010), Kindt and Müller (2006), Mark Rose (1993).

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the thorough commercialization of literature in the United States in the mid-19th century and outlines the reciprocal influence of economic, legal, and philosophical developments on the emerging professional writer. James L.W. West’s American Authors and the Literary Market Place Since 1900 (1990 [1988]), finally, traces “the commercial factors that influence[] the composition and publication” of literary works by, inter alia, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald into the 20th century and devotes each chapter to the discrete elements that constitute the modern profit-oriented literary industry, for example “Authorship,” “The Editor,” “The Agent,” or “Subsidiary Rights.” A couple of publications consequently extrapolate the relation between the literary author and the law. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi in the exhaustive edited volume The Construction of Authorship gather examinations from a variety of disciplines such as the history of law and copyright, property rights versus the text as a common good, or legal aspects of collaborative composition in writing pedagogy. In a similar vein, Mark Rose in his comprehensive volume Authors and Owners (1993) introduces the various parties that engaged in the construction, or “invention of Copyright” in 18th-century Britain thereby including informative material on incipient court cases such as Pope vs. Curll and Donaldson vs. Becket. Law scholars Lionel Bently, Jennifer Davis, and Jane C. Ginsburg in Copyright and Piracy: An Interdisciplinary Critique (2010) published in the Cambridge Intellectual Property and Information Law series equally emphasize the necessity for multiple scientific perspectives as well as transnational comparisons between Anglo-American Copyright, German Urheberrecht, and French droit d’auteur, and provide insights into the role of linguistics, information studies, and criminology, respectively. A transcultural comparison, that between British and French Copyright, also takes the center stage in Stina Teilmann-Lock thesis from 2009 while, finally, in The Cultural Life of Intellectual Property (1998), Rosemary J. Coombe puts forth a fascinating investigation of authorship from an ethnographic point of view that she links to legal aspects to discuss the everyday impact of intellectual property law via trademarks, brand names, and copyright imperialism in commodified cultural environments. Plagiarism furthermore attracts attention in historical surveys of the phenomenon of literary theft in connection with literary and cultural history. These include Alexander Lindey’s traditional overview Plagiarism and Originality from 1974; Rebecca Moore Howard’s Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators (1999) that discusses writing pedagogy against the backdrop of historical author concepts and theories; Thomas Mallon’s agitated harangue Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (1989); Judge Richard Posner’s comprehensible Little Book of Plagiarism from 2007 in which he clearly demarcates the historical difference between legal aspects of intellectual property

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infringement and plagiarism as a broader cultural phenomenon of illegitimate authorship (see also chapter 2.1.2 of this book); Marilyn Randall’s Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power (2001) with a focus on plagiarism’s potential to constitute authorship ex negativo in a perpetual struggle over definatory power with respect to originality, creativity, and property. Philipp Theisohn’s Plagiat. Eine unoriginelle Literaturgeschichte (2009) likewise takes a diachronic perspective in tracing the circumstances, economic and philosophical contexts of literary theft finally identifying a so-called plagiarist narrative that is regularly put into practice to expose illegitimate appropriation (see also chapter 2.1.1 of this book). Beyond the historical discussions of plagiarism, it additionally attracts the attention of scholars with respect to issues of writing pedagogy in composition studies. Lise Buranen (1999), for instance, investigates plagiarism as a serious pedagogical issue and questions modes of teaching and examining students. L.M. Dryden introduces the reader to the particularities of “plagiarism and intellectual property in Japanese education” (1999) thereby taking a transnational perspective that yet again points towards the cultural specifics of property management and writerly ethics. German jurist and professor of labor law Volker Rieble in his already notorious indictment Das Wissenschaftsplagiat. Vom Versagen eines Systems (2010) deplores the excessive loss of scholarly integrity and the resulting collateral damage for the academic community, and he demands a greater juridification of academic practice to counteract these developments. Alice M. Roy finally investigates the inconsistent attitudes towards academic plagiarism in school and university faculties and the conundrum arising with teaching “the concreteness of texts, the reality of authorship, of both words and ideas, and a well-defined role of the reader as receiver of the message” (1999: 56) in a postmodern environment. The connection between plagiarism and postmodernism becomes prevalent for this review of scholarly literature from the vantage point of intertextuality. In this respect, literary theft is framed as a parodistic aspect in postmodern literary texts without necessarily accounting for its programmatic application. In this vein, the contributions in Alfonso (1996) as well as Marcel Cornis-Pope’s Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting (2001a), Christian Moraru’s Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (2001), and Matthias Voller’s Parodistic Intertextuality and Intermediality in Postmodern American Fiction (1997) may serve as interpretations of postmodern texts that move in the direction of postmodern plagiarism, though without defining the respective literary phenomena as such. With an eye toward the authors whose texts feature prominently as the case studies of this investigation, Raymond Federman and his work is discussed in an experimental mock-encyclopedia edited by Thomas Hartl, Larry McCaffery and

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Doug Rice (1998). In 2002, the Journal of Experimental Fiction dedicated a special issue to the French-American writer while a posthumously edited volume on his work and main topics by Jeffrey Di Leo (2011) contains numerous articles by Federman’s contemporaries such as McCaffery, Welch Everman, or Jerome Klinkowitz. Their contributions are concerned with Federman’s impact for self-reflexive metafiction, Holocaust experience and the literary processing thereof, the significance of continental theory as well as his impact as a bilingual author. Since her death in 1997, literature on Kathy Acker has thrived including a volume on Kathy Acker and Transnationalism edited by Polina MacKay and Kathryn Nicol (2009). It addresses the novels’ pertinence with respect to debates on space and place as well as questions concerning global identity that arise with the protagonists’ effortless wandering between real and counterfactual locations from Jean Genet’s Tangier to the fallen paradise of Haiti and a post-revolutionary Paris. With respect to feminist literary criticism Acker is furthermore prominently featured in Nicola Pitchford’s Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter (2002), which especially takes the respective negotiations of sexuality and obscenity into account. The essays in Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker edited by Michael Hardin in 2004 attend to the author’s dominant subjects of madness, pornography, writing as radical self-empowerment as well as the female body and her politics of sexual identity. The Neo-Conceptualist authors, which provide this study with the most recent examples for strategic appropriation, have received less scholarly attention than Federman and Acker. Nevertheless, Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory dedicated a special issue to “Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics” edited by Barbara Cole and Lori Emerson in 2005, while his work is also discussed in Rankine and Sewell (2007) and Perloff (2010a). His own view on conceptual practices in Uncreative Writing (2011) also features the work and publishing activities of Vanessa Place with Les Figues Press. Apart from this reference, Place has not been been discussed extensively, yet she has co-edited a comprehensive volume on conceptual work by women writers, I’ll Drown My Book (2012). Yedda Morrison, finally, is the least researched author, so far only highlighted in an essay on new materialist poetics (see Nickels 2006) that briefly addresses Morrison’s volume Crop (2003) in terms of the poems’ emphasis on material production of commodities in agriculture. What becomes obvious from this survey is not only the wide-ranging scholarly interest in authorship and plagiarism and the various socio-cultural discourses both phenomena are bound up in, but also the necessity to investigate aesthetic plagiarist practices as an interdisciplinary research topic par excellence. Literary plagiarism is conceived of as transdisciplinary, covering fields

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of aesthetics, economics, law, philosophy, and literary criticism, and as transcultural since its inclusive investigation heavily relies on the dynamics of an evaluation of plagiarism within and across national economies, legal frameworks, and cultural concepts of authorship, ownership, and creativity. The figure of thought of ‘in-between-ness’ emerging with interdisciplinarity and transculturality also profoundly reverberates in the literary examples themselves, their ‘embedding’ in socio-economic-legal frameworks of the literary marketplace and their negotiation of avant-garde and mainstream modes of production. Despite an attempt to keep the avant-garde promise of radical innovation and invention, the strategies and literary examples at hand cater to the modalities of mainstream literary production and also fulfill them to a certain extent. They continuously negotiate the interrelations between avant-garde marginalization and the significance for the majority culture with an interest in experimentation and provocation and the established conservative attitude towards authorship represented in canonical literature. Postmodern plagiarisms may consequently assume the role of an interface for debates on contested authorship between literary economic interests, legal regulations, and aesthetic innovation against the background of post-structuralist language criticism as well as ideo-historical paradigm shifts. In contouring these implications for textual material commonly classified as postmodern, this study examines to fashion literary text the writerly mode of which exceeds the ruling conceptual limits articulated by the participating discourses – economic, legal, philosophical – in the field of cultural production. The present analysis of this transgression comes at a time when changing media environments, literacies, and alternative modes of textual dissemination in the digital sphere indicate revisions and expansions of the concepts at stake: these developments help to realize collective and anonymous authorship, fast and cheap distribution, or untraceable sourcing, and they foster open source policies, a ‘legal lag’ in the digital realm (e. g. with Google Books, VG Wort, etc.),¹⁶ and the highly competitive digitization for global archives.

 The ‘legal lag’ refers to the inevitable situation of the legal discourse trailing behind the technological innovations that include peer-to-peer file sharing, accelerated up- and downloading, and easy access to copyrighted material. An example is Google Books as a much-frequented service to scan, access, save, and search commodified texts (since 2005). The Google Book Search Settlement with the publishing industry involves a compensation for right-holders of books and only became initiated in late 2008. Although the case was scheduled to go to court by mid-July 2012, as of December 2012, no agreement has been reached by the parties involved (see Publishers Weekly 2011a).

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In assessing the potency of plagiarist strategies, the main goal of this study is twofold: If, first, we agree on aesthetic plagiarism – in all its conceptualist, theoretical and strategic depth – as a valid option for literary production, and if the inscribed modes and ‘messages’ of these texts carry a programmatic quality, then the dimensions of this techné call for an attempt to delineate a poetics of literary plagiarism. In a second step, this framework, which will facilitate a concise distinction of its most relevant features with the three appropriative strategies, will allow me to draw conclusions on the potential of postmodern plagiarisms for literary practice and, ultimately, on the interesting consequences for shared notions of individual ownership and textual integrity. A poetics of postmodern literary plagiarism asks for a programmatic basis of postmodern characteristics that, on the one hand, openly incorporates, discusses, and reconceptualizes theoretical, here post-structuralist and deconstructionist, postulations, and that, on the other, differs significantly from already acknowledged phenomena such as pastiche or ‘postmodern parody’ (see Dentith 2000; Hutcheon 2000 [1985]; Nünning 1999; Marg. Rose 1993: 191– 274). While often sharing the quality of parody as a “cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice” (Dentith 2000: 9), the implications of the postmodern plagiarisms at hand do not exclusively serve to that end of ridicule and satire. In encompassing the three discourses of economics, law, and literary theory, the strategies of radical appropriation discussed in this book perform vital cultural-political work in that they address a complex spectrum of issues surrounding the key concepts of authorship (as ownership), creativity, originality as well as authorial and textual authenticity. This examination beyond the confines of established concepts such as parody therefore contributes to the study of culture in three vital respects: first, I will evaluate the literary field and corresponding standards for literature and authorship as parts of an environment that is thoroughly commodified and regulated. Second, I will contribute to the ever-so complex (re‐)negotiation of textual property that sees authorship as ownership tied to a homogenous amount of alienable text. Third, I will qualify literary plagiarism as an indicator of cultural values pertinent within an ever-changing legal, economic, and aesthetic sphere of literary production. These three steps call for an appropriate methodology that satisfies the demands for investigating the plagiarist authorial subject(s), the literary textures and narrative instances, and the readers’ interpretations. In meeting these demands, this study provides a contextual investigation, or ‘wide reading,’ of authorship and plagiarism. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to the “field of cultural production” (1993 [1983]), this involves a literary-economic perspective

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on literature as a commodity (sensu Tietzel 1995), i. e. a good with a certain exchange and use value indispensable for the literary market place. This conceptualization involves an understanding that the illegitimate appropriation of literary text corrupts this good and the processes of the literary-economic environment (see chapters 2.1.1 and 2.1.2). In need for an interdisciplinary examination, the following chapters will deal with the ‘field of cultural production’ before post-structuralist and deconstructionist language criticism are put to test with respect to their key theorems and concepts (see chapter 2.1.3). These theorems encompass the well-known desubjectivization and de-centralization of literary text, a shift from the concept of ‘work’ to that of free text, and hence a pluralization of meaning that continuously evades stable signification and dismisses a historical author person as center. In assessing these challenges in contrast to the dominating perception and enforcement of individual authorship and textual integrity, one central challenge of this study is addressed. Although post-structuralist and deconstructionist positions claim the liquidation of systemic and textual borders and the dissolution of clear-cut categories into self-writing écriture, the examination of the strategies’ characteristics and agenda heavily relies on identifying particular pre-texts in the case studies of chapters 3.1 to 3.3. Thus before proceeding with the three distinct strategies of Critifiction/Playgiarism, ConText, and Neo-Conceptualism (see chapters 2.2.1 to 2.2.3) and the exemplary analyses of plagiarist literature from 1970 to 2010, I will determine the plagiarist texts as ultimately ‘unreadable’ (sensu Paul de Man), that is as constantly evading an unambiguous resolution due to their uncountable layers of text. Following de Man’s “allegories of reading” (1979), my interpretation of the cases invite what he called strong readings or misreadings that allow for an intricate engagement with the pre-text’s form, content, and context. Since I promise a spectrum for plagiarist writing I courageously term ‘poetics,’ this study’s research object – literature, after all – has to be emphasized. The misappropriation of literary text in comparison to other arts reveals a different approach in terms of creative potential and (counter‐)canonical relevance. I see conceptual literary plagiarism lagging behind the visual arts in that an acknowledged ‘art of appropriation’ similar to the practices in this study can be found, for example, with Pablo Picasso and George Braque seizing art and non-art objects for their synthetic Cubist paintings. Likewise Marcel Duchamp declared the readymade an apt artistic strategy that answered modernist claims for originality with the anarchic reproduction of the Mona Lisa in his “L.H.O.O.Q.” (1919). Around the same time, Dadaism with Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, or Tristan Tzara as well as later Surrealism linked the programmatic freedom to appropriate to an interest in unusual combinations aiming at a communication of

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paradoxes, non-sense, and life’s utter bizarreness and heterogeneity. From the late 1950s to the 1970s, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns with their ‘combines’ as well as Andy Warhol’s mass-produced screen prints of cultural icons furthered the practice while the 1980s saw Appropriation Art thrive with Sherrie Levine’s photographic reproductions of Walker Evans’ images of the Great Depression and Richard Prince’s re-photographs of iconic Marlboro advertisements. Neo-Conceptualist writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith frequently refer back to the widespread approval of examples from visual art and call for a similar acceptance of literary appropriation. Popular music likewise puts the common practice of unmarked poaching on view. Extracting samples from other ‘canonical’ songs and rearranging them for a ‘new’ piece of music is accepted as an artistic method in mainstream productions. Quoting without necessarily marking the original source points towards musical bits and pieces that convey a shared knowledge or archive and a more progressive notion of authorship, creativity, and originality than is the case in literature (see also the conclusion to this study). In order to distinguish it from practices of the visual arts and musical sampling, literary plagiarism challenges the written word as textual unit and unity that qualify as easily commodifiable goods. With respect to Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971/1991) and Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988) this challenge is explicitly directed at the novel genre. This genre represents the literary epitome of an educated middle class the success of which is again related to the eighteenth-century market reform that enabled a ‘rise of the novel’ and the formation of canonical classics. Plagiarizing other narratives and labeling the resulting texture again as a novel therefore also implies a critique of the role of literature and its distinct categories and organizing principles, for example in the attribution of genre. Neo-Conceptual writing furthermore contributes to the notion of literary plagiarism in this study. The three examples by Kenneth Goldsmith (Day, 2003), Vanessa Place (Tragodía I: Statement of Facts, 2010), and Yedda Morrison (Darkness (chapter 1), 2009) attend to questions of the basic character of literature in that they redefine what qualifies as a literary text after all: the transcript of a newspaper issue in Day turns the seemingly unpoetic mass of all linguistic signifiers found in The New York Times of September 1, 2000 into an 800+-page volume of poetry (see chapter 3.3.1); Statement of Facts reveals a factual narrative in legal appellate briefs that interfere with our culture’s attitude towards sexual offenders (see chapter 3.3.2); and in Darkness, finally, the practices of appropriation and erasure applied to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness reinforces the theoretical assumption that (literary) language indeed preceeds any consciousness in that

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human interference with the natural world can never be fully eliminated (see chapter 3.3.3). The close alignment of the case studies to post-structuralist and deconstructionist assumptions, and a regular assertion that postmodern narrative lacks actual commitment and formative guidance (see e. g. Callinicos 1990: esp. ch. 3; Hogue 2009: 36 – 39; Jameson 1991) receive a crucial upgrade as the texts under scrutiny suggest a comprehensive cultural agenda of appropriation. This program takes not only a short-term subversion of the rules of the literary marketplace or of the dominant modes of cultural production into account; it also represents a fundamental challenge to conceptualizations of text as a unit and commodity, to the possibility of a homogenous, or at least reconcilable, narrative, and to a steady relationship between the participating agencies. The three strategies of radical appropriation establish a mode of literary resistance as a quest for, on the one hand, redefining the static parameters of written text and, on the other, confusing the notion of a textual entity’s authorial subject. They employ this mode of resistance as a challenge to the literary economy and that system’s need for an exploitable authenticity of the individual author. In addition, they serve to uproot the implications of the canon and thereby point towards an ongoing change in our volatile notions of authorship and creative originality. The cultural agenda that features prominently in this study in order to assess the full potential of postmodern plagiarist writing in US literature consequently aims at updating the debate on cultural hegemonic relations and thus ultimately attends to the vitality of literature, its philosophy, formative promise, and ethics.

2 Framing Plagiarism as a Postmodern Negotiation of Authorship and Text Sovereignty In pursuing the objective of suggesting three distinct ways of radical appropriation from the 1970s to 2010, a frame for plagiarist practices as a distinctly postmodern negotiation of this study’s central concepts is vital. Here, the investigation and subsequent challenge of authorship as ownership and the close interrelation between an individual authorial subject and its guaranteed textual entity takes place against the background of several discourses, which consist of the literary-economic, the legal, and the literary-philosophical. The first of these discourses arises from the economic processes that constitute literary writing as material products and therefore engage in the commodification of literature within the broader literary system (cf. ch. 2.1).¹⁷ These observations necessarily ask for juridical aspects that co-create and defend an authorial subject as a legal entity and sanction this warranty’s infringement in prosecuting acts of illegitimate appropriation (cf. ch. 2.2). This represents a routine that determines copyright violation and contributes to the notions of plagiarism as public narrative, corrective, and litmus test for cultural assumptions on authorship as ownership and the overall valorization of what is deemed ‘original.’ The juridical-economic synthesis of authorial configuration in this sense aims at establishing the creation of value that arises with the attribution of an individual authorial source, a value plagiarism fundamentally calls into question. This sanctioning exercise implies and constantly reproduces individual authorship and the attending paradigms of authorial originality, writerly authenticity, and textual integrity as normative standards – the infringement of which involves a violation of the law’s authority. Following these socio-cultural formations of the economic and legal discourses, the language describing plagiarism resorts to metaphors from the

 ‘Literary system’ designates the functional environment that participates in the production, distribution, reception, and secondary mediation of literary writing. It takes into account the manifold contextual elements such as the literary industry, the institutional reception in feuilletons, or literary prizes that negotiate and therein contribute to the literary product, its meanings, purposes, and effects. For introductory definitions of the ‘literary system’ see e. g. Nünning and Nünning (2009: 12– 14); Klausnitzer (2004); for definitions within the constructivist sociology of literature (esp. system theory), see Luhmann (1995: 215 – 300); Werber (1992; 2011: 2– 9); for definitions with an empirical emphasis that argues for a verifiability of literature as a discourse of social agency, see Schmidt (1980: 11 ff.; 1982).

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legal (‘literary theft,’ ‘patricide’) and medical/biological sphere (‘bastard writing,’ ‘parasite authors’). Both domains thereby interact with the frameworks of the literary industry and intellectual property jurisdiction, and they fashion plagiarism, which started out as the metaphorical abduction of slaves or children (see introduction to this study), as an ethically most despicable practice of second-hand literary ‘creation.’ Finally, this chapter marks the shift in focus from ‘ordinary’ plagiarism, for the sake of unjust personal enrichment with respect to commercial success and gained reputation, towards strategic practices and pronounced agendas of postmodern plagiarism as programmatic appropriation. In tracing this shift, the theoretical assumptions of post-structuralism and deconstruction that underlie these agendas are investigated to identify textual integrity and individual authorship as the two central conceptions at stake and under siege (cf. ch. 2.3). The criticism these positions offer concerns notions of ‘center’ and ‘margin,’ desubjectification in the well-known ‘death of the Author,’ the role of language as the comprehensive determinant of world and text perception, and the ensuing impossibility of conclusive interpretation that is implied by proposing literature’s unreadability (following Paul de Man). These notions comprehensively prepare the crucial premises, which then fan out into three distinct strategies that appropriate beyond the phenomena of petty theft: Critifiction/Playgiarism, ConText, and Neo-Conceptual writing.

2.1 Authorship and Its Nemeses: Plagiarism as Unoriginal Practice 2.1.1 The Commodification of Literature and the Economic Value of Authorial Attribution The emergence of the contemporary notion of literature as a commodified product, or “an alienable commodity” (Mark Rose 1993: 18) – with authors as the producers of cultural as well as recipients of economic capital and texts as their material authenticators – is, of course, inextricably connected to the economic environment that promotes this product. This environment is made up by the so-called corporate creative industries that act as a literary product’s commercial intermediaries, such as the publishing press and distributing bookstores. With respect to the objective at hand, these intermediaries come into the picture in three distinct ways: first as the institutional agency that ideally accepts a manuscript for publication and assists the author (as historical person) in accommodating a targeted readership and modifying the text to be published (aspects of

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acquisition and editing); second as the effective manufacturers and economic processors of the article ‘book’ (material production and distribution); and third as the promoters of the textual entity ‘book’ and its individual, authenticated authorial subject that, if plagiarized, is victimized and subject to rightful compensation (promotion and vindication).¹⁸ With the economic domain significantly determining and perpetuating crucial qualities of the ways in which intellectual property and illegitimate appropriation are addressed, the notion of literature as commodified product and ownable property shall be established in the following discussion. As economic theorist Manfred Tietzel outlines in his account on literary economics (Literaturökonomik, 1995), literature in the creative industries is conceptualized as an exceptional market good, i. e. an economic product that satisfies human needs in some ways similar to, but in others different from, comparable neo-classical goods, such as a car or chewing gum. Tietzel defines neo-classical goods inter alia as possessing “fully specified, exclusive and freely enforced property rights,” as “being of greatest and immediate utility for the demanding household,” and as “not being subjected to regulations apart from the state enforcement of property rights” (Tietzel 1995: 10; my translation).¹⁹ A pack of chewing gum and literature consequently share qualities when we focus on the material manifestation of a body of text, the book, in that both are marketed entities that follow the principles of supply and demand. Yet literature is only realized as a profitable good for the consumer if certain “inputs” (ibid. 11) such as time and education are invested. The book thereby acts as a ‘pre-conditional market good’ that enables the utilitarian process of ‘reading.’ Reading results from the combination of the market product ‘book’ and the central utilities of ‘entertainment’ and ‘instruction’ (see ibid.) as necessary investments, and is consequently understood as a commodity or ‘household good.’ This commodity in turn relies on “literature-specific human capital resources” (ibid. 13), such as the ability to read, a certain standard of living, a certain level of education, and also a substantial amount of available leisure time.

 On the alternative assessment of the literary environment and the respective roles of action within this literary system – the author, the publisher, and the reader – as argued within the empirical study of literature see Schmidt (1980: ch.5).  Tietzel additionally concedes that “[n]o single good fully corresponds to the neo-classical ‘ideal type’ since none possesses all these qualities at the same time” (ibid.). On the definition of neo-classical goods, see also Tietzel (1989: 53 – 55).

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Thus the consumer’s respective investments are fully integrated in the productive cycle of the literary market.²⁰ Since the simple ownership of the material product ‘book’ does not provide the consumer with the demanded satisfaction,²¹ we can identify literature ultimately as an investment-intensive experience good that requests the consumer’s exclusive collaboration. The promotion of the market good ‘book’ consequently calls for certain assets and incentives that make the consumer want to readily provide this investment, assets that exceed the mere consumability of the literary text. The mentioned intermediaries, i. e. the creative industries, assume the role of providing this incentive. The creative industries comprise the private share of the cultural sector covering the varied fields of design, advertising, fashion, performing arts, software, architecture, television, music, as well as arts and publishing.²² The UK government Department for Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) identifies this sector as “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS 2001: 4; my emphases). These lines of business, including of course the intermediaries of the publishing industry, are therefore based on an individual author, the translation of this author’s emanating creativity into economic capital based on the “exploitation” of ownership rights, and the proliferation of this capital to create national and global economic environments that support more than the initial author. According to UNESCO, consequently, it is the creative industries’ potential to generate “[…] local capacities and facilitat[e] access to global markets at national level [sic!] by way of new partnerships, know-how, control of piracy and increased international solidarity of every kind” (UNESCO 2007: n.pag.; my emphasis).²³

 On the particularities of the literary market see also e. g. Heinrichs (2006: 188 – 193); Plachta (2008); West (1990 [1988]: 22– 33).  In this ideal case, the purchaser of a book corresponds to the actual reader. The purchase of books as gifts in which purchaser and consumer vary, follow different lines of satisfaction and initial interests in purchase.  For a full list of activities that are classified as parts of the creative industries see e. g. DCMS (2001: 4); Howkins (2001: 88 – 115). These industries are usually ranked according to the primary products they market, as well as to the kind of work that their contracted artists perform on a regular basis.  It is worth noting that it is UNESCO that holds the annual World Book and Copyright Day on April 23, cooperating with non-governmental organizations and networks such as the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the International Publishers Association (IPA) (see UNESCO 2008). UNESCO thus promotes knowledge and advises “international solidarity” that, in their account, necessitates a “control of piracy” by joining forces

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The submarkets for music, literature, print media, arts and crafts, design, etc. rely on the acquisition and maximization of profits and therefore have to emphasize the necessity to prepare, produce, sustain and guarantee especially the ownership elements of artistic production, cultural mediation, and medial circulation. These existential interests are secured by means of both being mostly part of the corporate sector under the legal form of private ownership and legal governing via intellectual property regulations that follow positive law (acknowledging and defending property qua origin or accomplishment).²⁴ Cultural products are hereby understood in terms of trade and exchange value, as commodified entities that require both modes of security for corporate maintenance within the economic value chain. Concerning the significance of literary commodification for both (domestic) economy and individual authorial existence, a two-stage market can be identified:²⁵ the first stage is made up of the relation between the promoted individual author and his or her representative intermediary, the publishing house that disposes of the relevant means for acquisition, production, distribution, public relations, and market requirements such as target group acquaintance and pricing policies. After initial contact is established and the manuscript submitted to and accepted by the mediating agency, both parties enter into a contract in favor of both the author’s interest to get his text published and the publisher’s concern to generate revenues in sales. The second stage of the literary market takes place between the publisher and the end consumer, the potential recipient who obtains a book as a definite quantity of the edited material, the economic textual entity as a market good that he or she has to turn into a household good by the complementary process of

with representatives such as the creative industries and a library system that is increasingly financed by the private sector. On the latter phenomenon see e. g. Oder (2004); Roberts (1998: 77 ff.); Schuman (1998).  At this point in the book, intellectual property law comprises the shared systemic characteristics of the Western, in this case European and US, legal environment, since the objective of this study focuses on literary products and publication processes in this distinct cultural context. Nevertheless, in the following chapter 2.1.2, “The Extra-Aesthetic Notion of Plagiarism,” differences in national jurisdictions and their legal-theoretical background are accentuated to situate the ensuing strategies and case studies in the US-American legal context.  The dyadic structure of the literary market for this argument in parts derives from economist Manfred Tietzel’s remarks on literature and economics and, in particular, the market good ‘literature’ and its characteristics (see 1995: 7– 30). Another equally structuralist assessment of the literary market is also provided by the empirical study of literature (see Schmidt 1982: 87– 90).

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reading.²⁶ In so doing, the demand of the end consumer primarily lies in the sufficient supply of work copies, of the ‘experience good,’ the quality of which may only be assessed in retrospect.²⁷ The existential conditions, i. e. how the promoted communication between author and reader via the text comes into being, in the publishing business since the end of the nineteenth century are permeated with what I want to call the proxy quality of literary market relationships: while ostensibly promoting the direct literary connection and dialog between the alleged individual producer and the consumer-recipient, the various producing intermediaries – which apart from the publishing house include, for example, literary agents, free-lance editors, outsourced production sites, and franchise bookstores – as well as the equally numerous processing instances – feuilleton critics, literary societies and foundations, book fairs and prizes, as well as further media adaptations, etc. – act as gatekeepers who control cost/benefit relations and as structuring agents of the literary scene to prompt “economic properties of creative activities” (Caves 2000: 1). Maintaining the basic relationships and interdependencies of these “economic properties” for the discussion of plagiarism as unoriginal practice, takes the individual authorial subject and its alienable textual entity for granted. Before outlining this necessity of authorial attribution, the term ‘authorial subject’ deserves an explication. In the course of my argument I understand and use the term as a functional expression that encompasses three aspects: first, the authorial subject is, of course, distinct from the historical person; it nevertheless relies on and exploits certain features of, for instance, Ernest Hemingway the person for reasons of, second, authenticating, legitimizing and valorizing him and his work: thus Hemingway’s enlistment in the army during World War I as an ambulance driver on the Italian front and his return home after having been seriously wounded is often regarded as formative for writing A Farewell to Arms (1929). Finally, the authorial subject fulfills the function of communicating an individuality and stipulated uniqueness, i. e. a subjectivity that intermediaries, legal discourse, and readership likewise demand and engender. In contrast, this indi-

 The term ‘complementary’ in this line strictly refers to the reader-consumer’s investment of economic capital and the human capital resources that are crucial from an economic perspective. Thus the term should not be confused with the paradigm of complementarity that reader-response critical positions by Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, or Stanley Fish suggest.  Other demands, for example, refer to a successful pricing policy or supporting instances of information and evaluation, such as the sanctioning role of literary reviews that assist in allotting the consumer’s “literature-specific human capital resources.”

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viduality is an awarded quality, granted by the productive forces surrounding and constituting it: the authorial subject is both an autonomous and heteronomous phenomenon that is part and parcel of what Bourdieu calls the “ideology of creation” (e. g. 1993 [1983]: 76). In this line, I neither fall back on a mere examination of the ‘author image’ or the implied author,²⁸ nor dissolve authorial functions and agency from the very beginning, but I intersubjectively investigate the author’s roles and necessities in and for the literary field. In the following discussion, the authorial subject will help in setting up and delineating relevant properties in terms of its historical incarnation, formative socio-cultural necessity, and the economic value of authorial attribution, these being the most significant aspects plagiarism threatens to nullify. These reflections rest upon Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of the “field of cultural production” (see Bourdieu 1993 [1983]: 29 – 73) as well as historical concepts of authorship (see Burke 1995; 2008 [1992]; Jannidis et al. 1999b; Martínez 2008 [1998]) that conflate in the contemporary configuration of the marketable author subject. By the end of this chapter, a notion of the authorial subject as an interface of these aspects will have evolved to emphasize the literary market’s crucial concern with the maintenance of the individual, original source, a concern plagiarism very much disturbs. This notion of the authorial subject then also prepares the ground for the legal dimensions that further determine and protect this subject’s achievements as well as its intermediaries’ revenue interests. Regarding the industry of cultural, i. e. literary, production as what Bourdieu calls a “space of literary or artistic position-takings,” or a “field of struggles” (1993 [1983]: 30; original emphases), we witness a basic tension between these participating “position-takings”: on the one side, there is the author as the alleged supplier of ‘original text’ and as the later marketable subject that is exploited for promotional reasons (public readings, interviews, literary prize acceptance speeches, etc.); on the other, there are the intermediaries acting as instances of demand that ask for the author’s supply and his or her profitable exploitation: the “field of position-takings […] is not the product of coherence-seeking intention or objective consensus” (ibid. 34), but of competing interests when it comes to issues of authoritative sovereignty over the text to be issued.²⁹

 On the implied author see e. g. Booth (1983 [1961]); Heinen (2002: 337; 2006: 41– 48); Kindt and Müller (2006: 84– 120); Nünning (1993; 2001).  Bourdieu continues to identify the intermediary position-taking as a mode of “power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer. The established definition of the writer may be radically transformed by an enlargement of the set of people who have a legitimate voice in

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In terms of a creation of value both from the authorial investment and that investment’s textual product in exchange for the commodity’s marketability, a transfer of cultural capital deemed worthy by the intermediary for investment to economic capital occurs: the writer produces a body of text and hands it over to the intermediary for publication. The resulting textual entity further unified by paratextual elements such as an individual title or a distinct International Standard Book Number (ISBN) enters the realm of economic exploitation the moment this transfer has been accomplished and the economic creation of value can set in. Consequently, Bourdieu’s “struggle” of authority over the cultural capital by the different positions is appeased by their consolidation for the creation of monetary value. Completing Bourdieu’s model on “forms of capital” with respect to the field of cultural production, we may identify the complementary development, i. e. from intermediary to authorial subject, as an awarding of ‘symbolic capital.’ This includes the increase of attention, prestige, and reputation that works as the warrant for the producer of cultural capital through the intermediary. Thus symbolic capital also represents the central incentive for the authorial subject to engage in the first stage of the literary market (see above) after all.³⁰ Against this background of the field of cultural production the authorial subject and its textual entity depend on an eclectic amalgam of authorial concepts. As outlined below, these concepts derive from a variety of historical developments and produce a contemporary authorial subject that has to meet a plurality of qualities that guarantee its marketability and that are ultimately de- and reconstructed by cases of radical appropriation as infringements of intellectual property, i. e. plagiarism. The eclectic mélange I see accompanying the contemporary authorial subject is comprised of the following features: first, the literary-economic environment asks for distinctive creativity that marks its maker as ‘individually imaginative,’ as representing the single source for ‘original’ content; second, it is meant to provide the reader with a progressive style, thereby creating the demand for an ‘innovative aesthetics of form’; third, it asserts that an author subject should be technically adept, a skillful writer who ‘methodically imitates’ the promising formulas for engaging literature; and finally, it is necessary to categorize an authorial subject within a certain literary tradition, to determine the degree it con-

literary matters […, who have] the monopoly of the power to say with authority who are authorized to call themselves writers” (1993 [1983]: 42). See also Bourdieu (1993 [1983]: 73 – 80).  On the function of symbolic capital, see Bourdieu (1984 [1979]: 244– 255; 1993 [1983]: 75 – 77). On symbolic goods see Bourdieu (1993 [1983]: 112– 141).

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forms to previous works and blends in with the potent impact of the literary canon (‘historically imitative’).³¹ Let me illustrate the complexity of these four influences with the authorial configuration of the renowned American author Richard Ford (born 1944): a Pulitzer-Prize laureate, Ford is pigeonholed as a representative of so-called dirty realism who follows the tradition of the American South of William Faulkner; he likewise adapts the modernist language economy of Ernest Hemingway and combines postmodern word play with a contemporary observation of masculine subjectivity;³² these seemingly contradictory pronouncements all nevertheless contribute to the marketable authorial subject ‘Richard Ford.’ As a contemporary author, ‘Ford’ thus merges affinities to tradition, mainstream as well as innovative aesthetics of form, a zeitgeist instinct, and a faculty of social abstraction in one individual public and commodifiable literary personality.³³ The economic utilization of literary writing and its respective authorial subject exhibits interdependencies that prove valuable for specifying the socio-economic necessity of authorial attribution to a textual entity. First, literary commodification exploits all these authorial characteristics for the sake of serving the broadest target group possible in that it charges authorship and the unified text with these historically disparate resonances and determines a specific exchange value for the literary product; the authorial subject thereby fuses multiple configurations from poeta vates to the individualized genius. It does so in

 These findings obviously proceed from well-known authorial models as, for instance, outlined in the contributions in Detering (2002 [2001]); Horn (2010: 324– 328; 2012: n.pag.); Jannidis et al. (1999b: 4– 7). These models comprise the poeta vates, the ‘seeing’ poet who is inspired by a transcendental source yet remains “merely the interpreter[] of the gods, according as each is possessed by one of the heavenly powers” (534e), as Plato significantly states in his dialog Ion; further we know the poeta faber or doctus as the ‘skilled writer,’ the “verbal craftsman” (Horn 2010: 325) who follows mímesis (representation through simulation) and applies rhetorical means to successful ends; the third sees the ‘imitation of the elder’ (imitatio veteris) as the most important quality, i. e. to fall in line with the literary predecessors while simultaneously adhering to the ideal of inspiration by super-individual institutions; and finally, the element of individual creativity derives from the unleashed imaginative power of the singular genius who brings letters into being beyond the confining limits of normative poetics.  On these selective impressions of Richard Ford, see e. g. Armengol (2007: 86); Bonetti (1987: 79); Lyons (1996); Paul (2001: vii).  What plays an equally significant role in the configuration of the marketable authorial subject is that subject’s visibility and physical presence. This may either occur with static authorial portraits on the book jacket and in feuilleton articles, the mediatized image in book show interviews and vignettes, or with the live experience at book fairs (‘meet the author’) and frequent tour readings. On the authorial image communicated by visibility and presence in author readings, see e. g. Esmann (2007); Grimm (2008).

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order to appeal to a heterogeneous audience that asks for incentives to invest their “literature-specific human capital resources.”³⁴ An individuation of textual material most commonly and effectively fulfills these demands. Second, resulting from the previous eclectic mélange of authorial figurations, the authorial subject is able to cash in five distinct aspirations: first of all, it is deemed the dominating point of reference for genuine individuality (aspect of authenticity); second, it holds systematizable and uniform validity (classification); third, it allows for the assignment of critical and monetary value (valorization); fourth, a corresponding long-term presence (sustainability) ensues; and, finally, an initiation to the ranks of established literati that have already accomplished the preceding qualities occurs (canonization). The contemporary authorial subject in the literary market place is an agent in Bourdieu’s terms, who co-creates a “tension” in the “field of cultural production” as a “field of struggles”; yet it is simultaneously created by this tension thus meeting Séan Burke’s dictum of the individual author as both a producer and product (see Burke 2008 [1992]: xv), as subjecting and being subjected. It is charged with the identified qualities of authenticity, individuality, originality, sustainability and canonical authority to serve as the unified source of literary productivity, i. e. for the integrity of the discrete work. Literary individuation is therefore indispensable for perpetuating and intensifying the economic value of authorial attribution to a ‘work’ that represents the commodifiable translation of ‘text.’ It is the close association between the originating individual source and an attending textual entity – ‘Richard Ford’ and The Sportswriter (1986), for example – that is finally challenged in the de-authorizing act of literary theft, radical appropriation, of plagiarism that seizes, in Philipp Theisohn’s words, “a text personality […,] looting and seriously invading the personal coding of literature” (Theisohn 2009: 23; my translation).³⁵ Literary theft in this sense violates the per-

 This is, of course, not to say that each and every book is targeted at an anonymous mass of potential readers. Book marketing is very much oriented towards market research identifying the relevant population strata that guarantee a steady sales market (e. g. in so-called Sinus-Milieus® that inform about the socio-economical background of the targeted readership). On this aspect see e. g. Bourdieu (1993b [1986]); Huse (2011: 20 – 26); Sinus-Institut (2012: n.pag).  Theisohn, in his “unoriginal literary history” of plagiarism, traces the scandalization of literary theft by means of identifying an authorial subject’s text with its originator, since “thinking about plagiarism assumes a physiognomy of writing that is to be seen and re-cognized as the composer’s signature” (Theisohn 2009: 18; my translation: “[…] dass Plagiatsdenken dem Schreiben eine Physiognomie unterstellt, die als Signatur des Verfassers gewertet und wiedererkannt werden kann”). The quote above in the original reads: “eine ‘Textpersönlichkeit’ [… als ein] Raub und als schwerer Eingriff in die personale Kodierung von Literatur.”

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sonal rights implied with authorship in cutting off this strong link, the umbilical cord, between author and work. It appropriates a considerable amount of text that the pre-text’s authorial subject considers its own and that the intermediaries as corporate representatives rely on for the creation of value. Thereby plagiarism comes down to “deliberately bill[ing] a customer twice for the same item” (Posner 2007: 43). In this sense, plagiarism for the literary industry causes distinct, though practically immeasurable, damage to the creation and further increase of economic capital in that it corrupts that market sphere’s reliance on these exploitable entities and the cultural capital the authorial subject invests. What Theisohn further identifies and what can be aligned with Bourdieu’s claim for “tension” within the field of cultural, i. e. literary, production, is the notion of plagiarism as narrative. This categorization works in understanding the narrative as having a plot that follows a distinct narrative scheme, i. e. a sequential and causal structure. This narrative is inevitably public, since a case of plagiarism that nobody notices does not exist (see Theisohn 2009: 3) – only in uncovering the illegitimate appropriation of intellectual property of others is the ‘story’ of theft set in motion.³⁶ With respect to plagiarism as narrative, we may return to the descriptive imagery attending the initial event of its detection. This metaphoricity follows two major domains, namely the medical/biological and the legal discourse. The medical discourse figures plagiarism as pathogen, as an anomalous indication within the otherwise healthy organism of literary production, an organism that relies on the literary field’s sustainability through authorial attribution and textual integrity. As plagiarism regularly appropriates ‘original’ material by other authorial subjects, blends it with different text fragments, and finally issues that blending as genuine and ‘from the same father,’ critics often diagnose a ‘bastardization’ of previously pure material. Here plagiarism represents an incestuous figment, as the plagiarist breaks up and infects canonical text, contaminating the integrated pre-text in retrospect. As already mentioned in the introduction, Groom identifies the resulting text as “a bastard offspring, an illegitimate child [… that] breed[s] monsters out of its own flesh,” finding it “contagious, sickening, unnatural, and terminal […]” (Groom 2002: 27).³⁷ The medical/biological domains of ‘procrea-

 Randall equally stresses the need for an awareness of the literary theft: “plagiarism depends on the reader’s recognition of repeated discourse” (Randall 2001: 151).  Other pathological metaphors include references to an epidemic – “liable to escalate, or spread like a stain or poison – or a plague” (Groom 2010: 277) – or a psychological abnormality (“an indication of some mental disorder, the sign of something deeper, something sinister, something aberrant,” ibid. 282). The following chapter, assessing the legal discourse on plagiarism, will turn to the figurative speech about literary theft and intellectual property infringement.

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tion’ and ‘illness’ are, in this way, joined, linking literary theft with incest, so as to cast it as society’s ultimate perversion and taboo, a hazardous deviance in need of rigid control. The act of plagiarism seen as a ‘sick’ anomaly interferes with the healthy mode of cultural, here, literary, production, and the exploitation of literature as an “alienable commodity.” ‘Common’ plagiarism thereby misappropriates textual material that is deemed unambiguously ownable by an authorial subject and claims this subjectivity for itself. It radically confuses the uniqueness of the relation ‘authorial subject – textual entity’ and corrupts the latter’s qualities of coherence, soundness, and unified thought. The metaphorical vocabulary describing cases of plagiarism and the plagiarizing authorial subject as pathological and attributing to it notions of sickness, unnaturalness, or bastardization substantiates this claim. On the one hand, plagiarism can be seen as both corresponding to the literary-economic field that depends on originality, individuation, and textual integrity, in that plagiarism imitates these three features without actually embodying them. On the other, it heavily contrasts with these conceptions as it – at the point of the plagiarism’s discovery – fundamentally disappoints the ‘normal,’ healthy, and appropriate mode of creative practice and authorship as ownership. It is the necessity of restriction of plagiarism and the call for authoritative regulations that point towards the closely-knit alliance of the literary-economic and the juridical discourse. The latter, as we will see in the following chapter, mainly provides for two aspects: first, it serves as the second metaphorical domain for describing plagiarism, thereby complementing the register of ‘plagiarism-as-pathogen’; second, it represents the legal means that are enforced to retain and perpetuate literature as a commodity, and the strong link between individual author subject and textual entity, a link that is readily secured with the ever-expanding enforcement of intellectual property laws.

2.1.2 The Extra-Aesthetic Notion of Plagiarism: The Case of Literary Theft Even the good become pirates in a world where the rules seem absurd. (Lessig 2008: 44)

The conception and broader understanding of plagiarism and copyright infringement follow from the establishment of a vocation of authorship in the eighteenth century. This sparked a number of fundamental questions and ambiguities: Who was considered an author? What did it mean to produce creative work? And how was the individual author to sustain him- or herself beyond the dependent con-

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fines of sponsoring patrons of the arts (see e. g. Groom 2010: 273 ff.; Russett 2006: 13 ff.; Woodmansee 1994: 11– 33)? As (legal) allegations of literary theft thrived, re-affirming the individual authorial subject, the distinct conception of the author as an individual agent who brings forth original, unique, and authentic material was shaped by, just as much as itself shaped, these developments. Groom, for example, sees a “growing desire for originality and creativity [… as a] response to a growing obsession with plagiarism” (2010: 293), and vice versa, during this period.³⁸ This entanglement subsequently finds its legal expression in formulating limits for the ‘right to copy,’ thereby facilitating the economic intermediaries’ interest in perpetuating their revenue principles of commodified literature, as well as the functionalization of the individual authorial subject and its assigned textual entity. The founding principles of intellectual property law in the eighteenth century lay in regulating certain rights with respect to the property of texts as well as their exploitation. As a consequence, the authorial subject, ‘released’ from the dependent commissional work for supportive patrons, was provided protection in two major aspects: first, it came to be protected in its authorial right to own the textual entity at hand; second, this protection was meant to work as an incentive for enhancing the author’s productivity. The second, in other words, ensured that a writer obtained a livelihood from his or her creative productivity: “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (US Constitution 1787: Art. I.8 [8]). The intermediaries, on the one hand, were awarded the exclusive ‘right to copy’ and to sell the individual author’s text; on the other hand, these laws further protected and encouraged publishing investments with revenues far more calculable with no rival press beating prices.³⁹ This also offered an incentive for publishing unknown authors, whose prospects of success were uncertain, in fear of publishers who produced cheap, risk-free reprints. Thus Copyright

 Groom decidedly sees plagiarism as both effect of and reason for Romantic notions of the individual genius author by asking: “did a plagiarized text not only function under the same cultural laws of originality and authenticity underwriting Romantic authorship, but actually constitute those very cultural laws? […] [P]lagiarism would not simply be an inversion of the Romantic valorization of origin; it would be precisely because plagiarism presented such a threat to potential authorial earning that theories of originality could gain precedence in order to confirm the economic viability of professional authorship” (2010: 293).  For a helpful overview, as well as particular national circumstances, see e. g. Dowling (2009); West (1990); Woodmansee (1994); Woodmansee and Jaszi (1994).

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has been closely tied to economic interests and the authoritative regulation of free-market competition among publishers. The handling of literary theft within the legal discourse occurs with respect to these original interests of the individual authorial subject and its representative intermediary. This chapter will consequently outline the crucial similarities and differences between plagiarism and copyright infringement. These aspects assist this study’s objective in two ways: the following discussion aims first at continuing and intensifying the preceding claims of the economic discourse with respect to the creation of value that arises with the attribution of individual authorship and its link to textual integrity; this distinction, however, also secures the liability of the term ‘plagiarism’ for the critical analysis of the three specific variants of the postmodern radical appropriation of other authorial subjects’ literary text, although only a minority of the attending primary cases discussed in chapter 3 of this study were eventually threatened with legal prosecution. What Adrian Johns recognizes in the historiography of intellectual property – “its tendency to presume a normative tone, its legal essentialism, and its neglect of the fine grain of cultural history” (2010: 44) – is in large part equally valid for the conception and enforcement of intellectual property itself. The legal discourse ‘naturally’ requires regulations that lead to mandatory practices and it defines these standards as essential at the time of their release. Yet these enactments cover only a part of the broader phenomenon of plagiarism, establishing it not only as a legal, but as an overall socio-cultural issue. So how are intellectual property infringement (here copyright) and plagiarism entangled in the pursuit of sustaining the ‘field of literary production’ outlined in the previous chapter? Of course both copyright infringement and plagiarism are concerned with issues of legitimate authorship, originality, and textual integrity.⁴⁰ Their closeness is once more manifest in the second major discourse serving as a metaphorical source domain, that is the vocabulary employed when speaking about cases of plagiarism. This ‘legal’ conversation involves an assessment and judgment of the ‘deed’ or ‘offense’ that is often defined as ‘theft,’ ‘fraud,’ ‘kidnapping’ (sensu Martial), or even as ‘murder’ and ‘patricide.’⁴¹ It further identifies plaintiffs and victims, culprits and perpetrators, pieces of evidence and their mode of presen-

 It has to be noted that both terms are often and inadequately used as synonyms, especially in everyday discourse where the voiced indignation towards literary theft is one and the same as the juridical verdict in court. See e. g. Alexander (2010a: 5 ff.); J. Anderson (1998: 1– 12); Posner (2007).  On the use of these metaphors see e. g. Goschler (2011: n.pag.); Groom (2002: 27); St. Clair (2010).

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tation – such as the elaborate j’accuse in feuilleton articles, press releases, or extensive online documentation.⁴² Revealed to us in this discourse are (expert) witnesses, accomplices, and advocates. The employment of legal metaphors thus strives for a ‘verdict’ as conclusive as possible, conveys legal-normative principles with respect to intellectual property, and connects them with an ethical offense against the good manners of individual authorship and textual integrity. It is this ethics that brings the discussion of plagiarism to a point beyond the legal discourse of formal jurisdiction: ‘piracy,’ for instance, which still implies the aspect of malicious theft, works as a metaphor for designating an uncivilized act that puts offenders to the ‘right to copy’ in the position of the savage plunderer. The moral implications of literary theft can, furthermore, be associated with the US-American idea of a civilized nation state whose citizens have an obligation to protect the liberty of production for American authors, as designated in the US Constitution, “securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In an influential sermon, “The National Sin of Literary Piracy” (delivered in 1888 in New York City), Presbyterian clergyman Henry van Dyke found the lack of enforcement of international copyright as a “perversion of national taste and manners by the vast circulation of foreign books that are both cheap and bad” (van Dyke 1888: 17), and diagnosed a “partial atrophy of our native literature” (ibid. 18). Van Dyke marries the metaphorical domains of ‘medicine,’ ‘biology,’ and ‘illness’ (“perversion,” “atrophy”; see also the pathological metaphors introduced in the previous chapter) with a deep sense of patriotism (“national taste and manners,” “our native literature”). In this way, he connects these domains to the presumably copyright-infringing “vast circulation of foreign books that are both cheap and bad” to advocate the necessity of more stringent national regulation. The equation of copyright violation with committing an uncivilized act is rendered yet more deleterious when the religious dimension of authorship enters the picture. Here, the historical authorial conception of the poeta vates comes into play. As the ‘seeing author’ receives his or her ideas and their form from a transcendental source, i. e. God, the radical challenge literary theft presents

 With respect to the mode of evidence presentation, several examples support the notion of a collective close reasoning through professional and amateur readers and investigators: see e. g. GuttenPlag Wiki (on former German secretary of defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg) that considers itself a forum for the “collective documentation of plagiarism” (2011: n.pag.); see again also the public declaration of established German authors demanding a condemnation of plagiarism as a reaction to the ‘case’ of debut novelist Helene Hegemann (see introduction to this study).

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not only throws the alter deus or auteur-Dieu into question, but divine origin itself. Thus plagiarism is denounced as inhuman and utterly sinful: “[I]n committing the sin of plagiarism (crime against originality), plagiarists commit an equally egregious sin of ‘original’ betrayal (crime against humanity)” (Marsh 2007: 14).⁴³ Both domains – jurisdiction and religious belief – conceptualize the authorial subject as the manifestation of and authority on principles that ‘believe’ in, as well as build on the necessity of, an individual agency that can be ascribed to certain amounts of text. Uncivilized, lawless, and sinful literary theft constitutes a “cultural transgression” (Groom 2010: 278), yet for a long time no legal liability followed from this breach. The fundamental differences between copyright infringement and plagiarism concern their incongruities in terms of scope, quality, and agency. Plagiarism, on the one hand, is “principally determined by a wide variety of extra-textual criteria that constitute the aesthetic, institutional and cultural contexts of production and reception of the work” (Randall 2001: 4). Plagiarism is a far less rigidly defined phenomenon, since it is debated with respect to a number of “extra-textual criteria” and contexts, of which Copyright, as the legal aspect, is only one. The disparity between Copyright and plagiarism emerges yet more strongly with the consideration of two additional facets. Taken altogether, these facets eventually lead to a working definition of ‘common’ plagiarism that incorporates the spectrum of informing discourses: the first concerns the respective historical evolution of plagiarism and Copyright, respectively; the second involves the quality and consequences of illegitimate appropriation brought forward. With respect to the emergence of the two phenomena, it ought to be stressed that plagiarism by far precedes long-term efforts to declare both the illegal reproduction of individually authored texts (for booksellers and printers) and the appropriation of other author’s expressions and ideas unlawful (for individual authors). Scholars of literature and law have likewise identified the inception of plagiarism as wicked deed with Martial’s scolding epigrams in the first century AD. From the start, this discussion of textual theft in the literary sphere provided the seeds for satirical epigrams ridiculing reckless ‘kidnappers of verses’ (see the introduction to this study). Thus, plagiarism is connected to the public exhibition of experienced injustice – either by the plagiarized author him- or herself, or by

 The notion of plagiarism as sin can also be found in, for example, Clark (2007: 43); Marsh (2007: 14, 18, 75); Orgel (2003: 56 ff.); Place and Fitterman (2009: 20).

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another sanctioning agent – that may evolve into shared indignation and the broad response to the production of literature as scandal.⁴⁴ Copyright, on the other hand, represents a comparatively young phenomenon, with the Statute of Anne in Britain in 1710 serving as the first enforcement of copyright law. In Europe, as well as in the United States, intellectual property rights are considered the collective effort to promote and secure the ‘right to copy,’ as a result of technological as well as social paradigm shifts that occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Due to developments such as increasingly fast rotary presses and outbound logistics (aspect of affordable technology), rising literacy rates and demands for higher education (dissemination of knowledge), and dramatic increases in the countries’ domestic product (provision of economic capital), it was necessary to secure the rights of authors and intermediaries. All these developments resulted in an enormous extension of the respective national book trade and an independent literary marketplace.⁴⁵ In the case of the United States, a federal copyright only became established in 1783, following the Copyright Clause of the United States Constitution in 1787 (“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts …”).⁴⁶ In assessing the nature of illegitimate appropriation under legal scrutiny, the emphasis from the very beginning lay on quantitative and qualitative aspects: the appropriation, to be considered illegitimate, has to be ‘substantial’; the ambiguity surrounding this word already constitutes one of the many battlegrounds involved in examining the scope of seized material and the legitimate ownership of a textual entity. In this line, ‘substantial’ refers to the extent of text appropriated verbatim (quantitative substantiality). Yet the decision of whether substantial infringement has taken place also depends on qualitative parameters, such as the ma-

 See Bösch (2011); Burkhardt (2006); Holzner (2011); Ladenthin (2007); Moritz (2007); Zierold and Altnöder (2009).  On the historical developments of and participating discourses in the emergence of literary markets, see West (1990); Woodmansee (1994).  Congress finally conceded to international regulations, with the international US Copyright Act passing as late as 1891. The reasons for this late ratification can be found, on the one hand, in the fundamental lack of unity among the states during and after the Civil War and, on the other, in the slowly increasing willingness of American publishers and lobbyists to acknowledge European regulations representing substantial limits to the previously boundless publication of British and other European authors. For information on US Copyright’s evolution “for the purpose of securing the rights of authors and publishers among the civilised nations of the earth” (American Copyright Association 1868: n.pag.), especially allowing for the international enforcement of authorial and publishing rights in conflict with already advanced regulations in Britain and France, see esp. Bainbridge (2009 [1992]: 825 – 850); G.S. Brown (2006: esp. 163 – 169); Seville (2006; 2010); Teilmann-Lock (2009).

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terial’s relevance for the pre-text’s content or how congruent the two texts are with respect to use of expressions. The transnational agreement TRIPS (‘Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights’),⁴⁷ largely based on Anglo-American intellectual property laws,⁴⁸ therefore states: “Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such” (1994: Art. 9[2]). As a consequence of this emphasis on the form of appropriated material, an idea/expression divide arises that affects practical jurisdiction. The divide consistently calls for individual case assessments and juridical judgment (ad-hoc jurisdiction), with no possibility of determining stable and long-term parameters. Legislators cannot provide the public with universally valid information on the borders between illegitimate appropriation, tolerated allusion and adaptation, or fair use.⁴⁹ Yet naturally legislators strive for greater clarity with respect to these ambiguities, and they do so by adopting notions of authorship and textual unity that both inform and are informed by ideo-historical, philosophical, and economic discourses. The individuality of the historical author and the materiality of the produced text thus again play a significant role. In analogy to and bolstering the claims made in the preceding chapter on the economic value of individual authorial assignment to a distinct textual entity, the attribution of text and that material’s integrity are considered pivotal. The member states of the transnational institution of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886 – 1979), for example, acknowledge the right of an individual author with respect to his or her respective work,

 Other transnational agreements can be found in connection with the Berne Convention (1886 – 1979), the WIPO Copyright Treaty (World Intellectual Property Organization, 1996), and the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, since 1998). More recent extensions of national and multilateral agreements opposing intellectual property infringement include the propositions of ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act, all since 2011). The latter three examples reveal an expansion of interest in protecting intellectual property in the digital environment, with restrictive policies and the criminalization of formerly untriable violators. See e. g. J. Goldsmith and Lessig (2010); Jolly (2012); Perlroth (2012).  For a similar phrasing see WIPO (1996: Art. 2). On the difficulty of setting the boundaries for substantial appropriation see e. g. Chacksfield (2001).  ‘Fair use’ concerns a doctrine in US Copyright legislation that allows the unauthorized usage of protected material “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” (Copyright Act of 1976: 17 U.S.C. § 107) and that is not subject to allegations of intellectual property infringement.

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[t]o claim authorship; to object to certain modifications and other derogatory actions; (1) Independently of the author’s economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation. (Berne Convention 1979: Article 6bis (1))⁵⁰

Authorship legally qualifies as individual ownership, even if the historical author has ‘transferred the said rights’ to his or her intermediary, the publisher. According to these directives, the attribution of an authorial subject (by its name, e. g. ‘William Faulkner’) to a unified work (the textual mass that makes up, for example, The Sound and the Fury) is never suspended.⁵¹ Authorial personality is subsequently considered a vital element in assessing and maintaining that authorial subject’s right of ownership and for prosecuting the infringement of this right. Beyond the personal claim of a breach of property regulations, the intermediary may, as well, assume the defense of their economic interests as the author’s representing institution. As a far-reaching consequence, the administration of immaterial property rights has become one of the central concerns and sources for rights acquisition and market exploitation. Following Copyright law’s major interest to protect and thereby “promote progress,” i. e. to advance economic growth, the guaranteed ownership of reproductive rights for texts corresponds with the exclusive privilege to turn the literary field’s cultural capital (the authorial subject’s investment) into long-term economic capital (the revenue from exploiting the ‘right to copy’), and to finally increase the intermediaries’  The Urheberrecht in Germany reinforces the notion of individual authorship to an even greater extent by determining four parameters for “personal intellectual creation” (UrhG §2 Abs. 2; my translation). These include “personal creative work” supporting the authorial person’s individuality, the materiality of the work (“wahrnehmbare Formgestaltung”), a “reception-oriented intellectual content,” as well as a “peculiar character” that claims a minimum of originality against other average efforts and writerly achievements (see Lutz 2009: Rn. 37– 86d; my translations).  The purpose of the author name corresponds to Michel Foucault’s remarks on “What is an Author?”, stressing authorship as an epistemological concept. According to Foucault, the author name serves to contain a written work and is therefore always a part of its structure. It “is not simply an element in a discourse […]; it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts. […] [T]he fact that several texts have been placed under the same name indicates that there has been established among them a relationship of homogeneity, filiation, authentication of some text by the use of others, reciprocal explication, or concomitant utilization” (1983 [1969]: 107).

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and authorial subject’s symbolic capital, in the form of prominence, prestige, and recognition.⁵² Now the actual case of a discovered act of plagiarism, or an initial suspicion, does not necessarily end in court and result in legal charges. Though informed by notions (and metaphors) of illegality, plagiarism operates on a much broader level: while a work can only be protected when subject to active copyright law,⁵³ literary theft from texts whose copyright is inactive or has expired can still be considered plagiarism as an ethical transgression, without being legally pursued. The public prosecution punishes the illegitimate appropriator by publicizing all allegations and pieces of evidence, thus forcing the offender to comment on the charges. What ensues from this public narrative and trial are three distinct ways of professional and overall social stigmatization: first, through the literary field’s ‘position-takings’ of the plagiarizing authorial subject’s and the plagiarized authorial subject’s respective intermediary (sensu Bourdieu); second, through the public forum for literary debate, i. e. engaging literary critics or scholars of law and literature as expert witnesses; and, third, through the general reading public that feels deceived by the culprit and his or her supposedly original material. As a consequence, the prosecution of suspected cases of plagiarism accordingly avenges: first, the individual interest of the aggrieved originator and his or her representatives; second, the general public interest in ‘setting the record straight,’ i. e. restoring the valid conceptualization and configuration of what is deemed an authorial subject and the corresponding textual entity.

 It is this emphasis on the intensified and monopolizing exploitation of Copyright that has led to extensive discussions concerning the necessary scope of intellectual property protection. Anna Blume Huttenlauch sums up the central questions: “What level of protection is necessary to simultaneously present authors with incentives for the creation of new works and to stimulate creative production in society as a whole? And when does it turn into a self-defeating paralysis of the creative process?” (2006: n.pag.; my translation).  Copyright law can be considered active and pursuable if the work fulfills one or more of the following requirements: 1, “it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device” (US Copyright Office 2006: n.pag.; my emphasis); 2, the work “is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is ordinarily given a term enduring for the author’s life plus an additional 70 years after the author’s death” (US Copyright Office 2008: n.pag.; on the duration of copyright see also Copyright Act 2011: 17 U.S.C. § 304) with relatives or commissioned representatives at the receiving end; 3, the author or intermediary may “choose to register their works [with the Library of Congress …] and have a certificate of registration [… to] be eligible for statutory damages and attorney’s fees in successful litigation. […] [I]t is considered prima facie evidence in a court of law” (US Copyright Office 2006: n.pag.).

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In sum, this chapter has served to outline the differences between plagiarism, as a broader cultural phenomenon, and intellectual property infringement, as a narrower legal one. Both nevertheless borrow from and influence one another in terms of the vocabulary and concepts involved (‘authorship,’ ‘originality,’ ‘literary theft’), with these entanglements often rendering them interchangeable in everyday use. Therefore ‘ordinary’ plagiarism – as it has been addressed in this study so far – can be defined as follows: it is the malicious and intentional act of reproducing textual material that was previously issued by other authorial subjects; the plagiarist passes off a substantial part of this unedited material as original, and, as a result, illegitimately gains unearned economic (advance of royalties, book sales, merchandise, additional fees) as well as symbolic capital (public recognition, social prestige, awarded honors); and, finally, plagiarism asks for the detection and publication of the preceding characteristics through the participating institution in the literary field such as the book industry, scholarly and feuilleton criticism, the reading public, and the legal framework. The latter either works as a locus of judicial procedures and decisions, or as a set of regulations, the execution of which is constantly looming. The legal discourse, both as a continuation and effect of the economic literary market, perpetuates the reliance of that market on the individual authorial subject accountable for an integrated amount of textual material, the literary work. In order to assess and adjudge infringement, the law has to rely on the notion of ‘work’ as a body of text that follows a sequence, bears a certain structure, and is made up of language that the reader can consume in its fixed form, the commodified book. The theft of literary material (in the US context especially its expressions) fundamentally upsets the economic as well as legal construction of the individual authorial subject and its work. It thereby also violates the basic principles of these discourses, i. e. the increase of free-market economic capital and the sanctioning protection thereof, and is consequently imbued with connotations and metaphors that conceptualize it as an instance of perversion, a cultural malady, and a criminal offense. However, plagiarism as a sinful and despicable offense against these two regulative dominants of literary authorship cannot only be seen as a pathogen. It also serves as an affirming corrective, which time and again re-establishes and reifies the field of cultural production and that field’s reliance on individual authorship, originality, authenticity, and the literary work’s integrity. In this way, plagiarism as a phenomenon that invites the exclusion of the offending thief from cultural production serves to level, or unify, the internal “tensions” between historical ‘original’ authors and their intermediaries, and helps to sustain the joint interests of the various discourses participating in the field. Faced with a commodification of literature that draws economic value from authorial attri-

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bution and a legislative apparatus that secures these demands, plagiarism as the malicious betrayal of these background conditions ultimately reinforces them more powerfully than ever.

2.1.3 Under Siege: Challenging Textual Integrity and Individual Authorship The preceding remarks on the commodification of literature and the essential role of the individual authorial subject and its textual entity, as well as the affirmation of this strong company in and through the legal discourse served to carve out those aspects of the two major discourses that co-define the phenomenon of plagiarism. Against this backdrop, the discussion of decidedly postmodern plagiarism, that is the strategic application of radical appropriation with its own cultural agenda, emerges. The present chapter will prepare the theoretical grounds for the three distinct plagiarist strategies I subsequently identify – grounds that call for uprooting precisely these previously-guaranteed notions of authorship, originality, and creativity. Post-structuralist and deconstructionist proposals for understanding language, literary agency, and the creation of meaning broadly address authorship and originality from the literary-theoretical point of view, and they stand in contrast to the hitherto outlined economic and legal regulations. By the end of this chapter, I will thus propose ‘postmodern plagiarism’ as a decidedly deconstructionist literary practice that does not only draw attention to the household notions of these central issues, but that it also questions them with respect to their claimed universal validity. In doing so, postmodern plagiarism nevertheless continues to operate within the same containing parameters of literary language and metaphysical determinism (sensu Derrida). Authorial subjectivity comes under fire from a number of post-structuralist and deconstructionist vantage points: first, the demystification of authorship as performed by an individual biographical person; second, an ensuing shift from both the authorial instance and the textually unified ‘work’ towards the utmost level of language indeterminacy in a ‘text’ or texture; and third, the situation of interpretive multiplicity, with a strong emphasis on momentary meaningmaking and reader-dependency. Thus the challenge addressed in this chapter’s heading concerns the main elements of the literary communication model and thereby renegotiates the accustomed position and respective functions of the author, the text, and the reader. Postmodern plagiarism likewise reassesses the role of ‘code,’ i. e. language as the illusorily reliable vehicle for conveying meaning; the ‘channel’ in terms of drawing attention to ‘book’ as the medium of physical contact and commodifier of a textual entity; and the ‘context’ (all sensu Jakobson

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1996 [1960]), whether as abstract hypothetical reference framework for the text, the omnipresence and pervasiveness of the literary canon, or as concrete identifiable instances of plagiarism, where the appropriation refers back to the verbatim phrasing of a preceding textual entity. Starting with the demystification of authorial individuality and integrity, the author as writerly and meaningful agent saw an early and paradigmatic ‘death.’ With Roland Barthes, “the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins” (1977 [1967]: 142), since “[t]o give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (ibid. 147). The imposed limit Barthes addresses is twofold: it relates, one the one hand, to a boundary in terms of self-containment, a demarcation that associates a certain amount of (literary) text to be physically integrated (e. g. as a book), which is formally systematized by receiving, for example, an International Standard Book Number, and being literarily classified (e. g. as a bildungsroman, elegy, or melodrama). It is a limit that allows us to functionalize literature, to render literary language manageable and consumable, and to link it to the concepts of authorship and ownership in the legal discourse outlined above.⁵⁴ On the other hand, it is a limit that concerns the ways in which we read, interpret, and attach value to that text, as well as how meaning is conveyed, assumed, and ascribed to make sense of literary language. The author with a capital ‘A’ is the auteur Dieu, a monolithic authority that, in the spheres of the literary market and intellectual property regulation, represents the unattainable vantage point for unification and meaning-making, the “final signified” that closes the text and turns it into a work. The removal, or at least the shift, of attention from the individual authorial source is thinkable and productive for discussing plagiarism with the strong linguistic turn. Deemed a “mega-turn” (Bachmann-Medick 2010 [2006]: 1; my translation; see also Petterson 2012: 407– 420), the linguistic turn represents a shift from the personal agent to ‘writing,’ or to an interest in how language constitutes a meaningful system (structuralism) and/or how it covers up that it is self-sufficient (post-structuralism). Just as the singular authorial source is famously killed and cleared away from the limiting center of individual creativity, originality, and authenticity, the radical appropriation of (canonical) material wrests ideas and expressions from the cold, dead hands of the pre-text’s alleged originator, an au-

 On the generic qualities of functionalization and the reduction of complexities in literature, see e. g. Bawashi (2001); Derrida (1980); LaCapra (1986).

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thority ‘common’ plagiarism wants to usurp and postmodern plagiarism does not acknowledge. What is abandoned as an overarching notion is the understanding and acceptance of teleological intention, the concept of ‘center’ or other metaphysical ideologemes, such as ‘origin’ (arche) or ‘end’ (telos) (see Derrida 1978 [1966]). Used to support the illusory idea that experience and text can be contained – as physical material – and condensed to a unified essence – as fixed meaning or even intention –, this center always represents a reduction. According to Derrida this necessarily deficient reduction corresponds to “a point of presence, a fixed origin […, a desired] basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude […]. [O]n the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered” (ibid. 352). In examining the deconstructive potential of plagiarist practice in literature, we can understand ‘center’ as the authorial subject from which the principal qualities of authenticity, classification, valorization, sustainability, and canonization (see chapter 2.1.1 of this study) emanate.⁵⁵ The “immobility” discussed by Derrida serves to reassure, master, and soothe the fears (‘anxieties’) of disintegration, fragmentation, and the loss of meaning. Yet what is the actual mode that assumes the responsibility of ‘mastering anxieties’? What must this mode pre-suppose to gain authority and reaffirm the center of the authorial subject with “reassuring certitude”? And, ultimately, how do plagiarist strategies induce doubt and distress in the face of these phenomena? The central mode in post-structuralist and deconstructionist thought in which to conceive, conceptualize, and communicate the various centers is language. In language the desire for metaphysical meaning is endowed with its illusory presence: “[A]ll the names related to fundamentals […,] to the center have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) […]” (ibid. 353; original emphases). The “names” given suggest “an invariable presence,” and they convey notions of permanence and immutability. The author, both as historical person and writerly subject, and the attending concepts of ‘authorship,’ ‘authority,’ ‘authenticity,’ etc., are or represent parts of these envisioned metaphysical “fundamentals.” Language constitutes the thing, the signifier engenders the signified, and therefore always already predates both consciousness and the human (or authorial) agency that claims to only ‘make use of’ the innocent tool of language. In this first sense, the illusory stability of fundamental centers – of telos and arche in

 In “Structure, Sign and Play,” Derrida identifies the lack of center with the subject under scrutiny by taking into account Lévi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked (1964): “The absence of a center is […] the absence of a subject and the absence of an author” (ibid. 363).

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general, and of poeta, in particular – has been unmasked as constituted by the all-pervasive mode of fluid language. In overcoming the notion that language is a transparent medium, the strong linguistic turn is what, in hindsight, can be seen as the crucial rupture to which Derrida repeatedly refers (see e. g. 1978 [1966]: 351– 354)⁵⁶: “[I]t was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center […,] that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play” (1978 [1966]: 353 – 354; my emphases). The presence of a ‘center’ is merely an effect of linguistic workings, an effect that must be constantly reconfirmed. Thus the authorial subject as an authoritative center of the textual material contained as a ‘work’ is reformulated as a “function,” and its previously guaranteed presence dramatically negated (“a sort of nonlocus”). The moment language loses its transparency, and the signifiers their disambiguity, the authorial subject is divested of its individuality and claim to original creation. Fixity, with respect to linguistic presence and stable meaning in this argument, is replaced with an “infinite number of sign-substitutions” that deny the eventual existence of a unifying center. These “sign-substitutions” allow for “everything [to become] discourse [… ,] a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely” (ibid. 354). This absence of an outside of structuring language, coupled with the effort to create presence, meaning, and center, is precisely what plagiarism performs – the abduction of formerly present, unified text that constantly actualizes a physically absent authorial subject source. Because ‘everything is discourse’ and “there is nothing outside of the

 For deconstruction, this rupture is heavily informed by three major philosophical instances: with Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics, the notion of a transcendental beginning and end is called into doubt: “everything that has heretofore made metaphysical assumptions valuable, fearful or delightful to men, all that gave rise to them is passion, error and self deception: the worst systems of knowledge, not the best, pin their tenets of belief thereto” (Nietzsche 1908 [1878 – 1880]: aph. 9); the “Freudian critique of self-presence” (Derrida 1978 [1966]: 354) that relates to Freud’s rejection of religion and metaphysics as mere deferrals of the identification with the father and his denial of the psyche’s seclusion; and, finally, it draws on the “Heideggerian destruction of metaphysics, of ontotheology, of the determination of Being as presence” (ibid.), with a clear focus on the methodical revelation of metaphysics’ underlying implications and functional principles.

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text,”⁵⁷ an outside that would serve to structure and level ambiguities and inconsistencies, demands of originality are obsolete: “[R]epetitions, substitutions, transformations, and permutations are always taken from a history of meaning […] whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence” (ibid. 353; original emphasis). Meaning is always deferred, its presence only a simulation, an illusion we hold on to. It is this movement from ‘center’ to “an infinite number of sign-substitutions” that marks a post-structuralist shift from the contained ‘work’ to the notion of text or texture. Barthes, in his eponymous essay from 1971, equally sees this mutation or development as a process that “demands […] the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer” (1977 [1971]: 156). The concept of ‘work’ is understood as a “fragment of substance” (ibid.) that “can be held in the hand” (ibid. 157; i. e. the commodified entity of the book), and that “itself functions as a general sign […,] an institutional category of the civilization of the Sign” (ibid. 158), as well as “the object of a consumption” (ibid. 161). Because all three of these domains are heavily interdependent, they directly refer both to the previously outlined conceptualizations of literature in the economic and legal discourses, and to the multitude of ideo-philosophical concepts of the authorial subject. The work is a functional entity that facilitates production and management, that contains cultural capital of the assigned authorial subject, and that is turned into both economic and symbolic power in the literary marketplace.⁵⁸ The notion of ‘text,’ in contrast, “is held in language, [it] only exists in the movement of a discourse [… , is] experienced only in an activity of production” and thus “cannot be contained in a hierarchy” (ibid. 157; original emphasis). Text is the field in which the impact of language is played out or, even in which “the text itself plays” (ibid. 162) with the relations between signifier and signified, without ever arriving at the work as “the object of a consumption.” As unstable texture it “can be read without the guarantee of its father” (ibid. 161). In this shift, the precious originating and authenticating instance, the authorial subject, has yet again lost its significance as it is released from cen-

 In Of Grammatology, Derrida again stresses this all-embracing quality of language and text that became one of the pivotal points of deconstruction: “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (1976 [1967]: 158).  Barthes even explicitly addresses the socio-legal discourse, stating that “society asserts the legality of the relation of author to work (the ‘droit d’auteur’ or ‘copyright’ in fact of recent date since it was only really legalized at the time of the French Revolution)” (1977 [1971]: 160 – 161; original emphasis).

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tering and forcing the multiplicity of signifiers and its inconsistencies to conform in the work. As plagiarism seizes previously codified textual material that has been unified as a work and joined to the eclectic image of an authorial subject, and as it relocates these fragments alongside equally purloined expressions, it transgresses borders that have been meticulously assembled by the discourses ploughing the literary field. Yet if we look more closely at the various instances in which these transgressions of individual authorship and textual integrity take place and effect, it becomes obvious that plagiarist practice designates not only one side of the binary pairings of, for instance, ‘original’/‘copy,’ ‘creation’/‘destruction,’ or ‘authentic’/‘fake’; the issues addressed in the preceding argument – decentered authority and its substitution by all-pervasive language – inevitably concern the literary production of postmodern plagiarisms as well: There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history […] [and] no single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. (Derrida 1978 [1966]: 354)

This ‘slipping into the form and logic’ of metaphysics “what it seeks to contest” affects plagiarism as well – it is made up of the very same language and involved in the same structures and hierarchies that it prepares to surpass: […] [A]s soon as one seeks to demonstrate in this way that there is no transcendental or privileged signified and that the domain or play of signification henceforth has no limit, one must reject even the concept and word ‘sign’ itself – which is precisely what cannot be done […]; But we cannot do without the concept of the sign, for we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity. (Ibid. 354, 355; my emphases)

Plagiarism leaves behind the metaphysical sign as the representative and main constituent of that ontotheology; yet there will never be total deferred signification which would imply that the ‘nothing-outside-of-the-text’ paradigm surpasses the binary, and thus plagiarism is always doomed to fail as it cannot “reject […] the concept and word ‘sign’ itself.” Still, an investigation and questioning of that system is possible as the metaphysical presence and its determination through the linguistic sign are revealed. In deferring the impossible disambiguity of the sign, that is in breaking up the relation between signifier and signified, a criticism of this system occurs, while simultaneously losing the naivety to overcome it after all: “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” (ibid. 358), as Derrida concedes.

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Although it is commonly perceived as downright antagonistic towards the economic, legal, and Romanticist discourses, respectively, postmodern plagiarism as deconstructionist practice does not lay claim to propose a better “sort of nonlocus” the initial elimination of center brings along. It acknowledges, rather, its inescapable failure, as a text- and language-bound effort, to cut the umbilical cord between authorial subject and textual entity. And it maintains, nevertheless, its marginal position without ever taking interest in substituting the perfunctory center. As a consequence, as it acknowledges this state of being trapped and “systematically pos[es] the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage” (ibid. 356 – 357), the deconstructionist view still allows for applicable “functions” (read: the authorial subject), as they are impossible to imagine without their constituting syntax: “Since these concepts are not elements or atoms, and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing brings along with it the whole of metaphysics” (ibid. 355 – 356). This means that although postmodern plagiarism as a deconstructionist project overall follows the strategy of disowning individual authorship and substituting “language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 143), it relies on the illusory presence of authorship as a function or category to be questioned. Therefore authorship cannot absolutely surpass its own concept, presence, and metaphysical embeddedness in the literary discourse. At the stage at which ‘center’ is cast out by “sign-substitutions,” the previously dim, even nihilistic, prospects acquire a positive charge: “nontotalization can be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of play [… in] a field of infinite substitutions” (ibid. 365; original emphasis). The notion that meaning is infinitely deferred notwithstanding, the “nontotalization” of (literary) language earns the quality of positive play, of being “irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single centre, essence or meaning” (Eagleton 1993 [1983]: 138). Strategies of radical appropriation embrace this jocular quality of play, as play will assume a pivotal role even in a particular brand of one of the plagiarist strategies in this study.⁵⁹ Language per se already juggles possible meanings and signification – the literary writing strategy of postmodern plagiarism renders this circumstance more obvious. It does so by moving formerly contained, interpret-

 See the following section on Critifiction and Playgiarism as textual ideal (in chapter 2.2.1) and the corresponding case study of Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing from 1971 (in chapter 3.1).

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ed, and valorized signs from their previous location, and transplanting them into another literary context – the ‘work’ of, for example, Federman’s Double or Nothing, or Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless. Play thus assumes characteristics such as ‘unpredictability,’ ‘coincidence,’ ‘diversion,’ or scrutinizing an action’s meaningfulness. Postmodern plagiarism connotes a hide-and-seek or tag play that only momentarily allows the reader to hold on to ephemeral meaning in “a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings […] blend and clash,” leaving “[t]he text [… as] a tissue of quotations [… ,] a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 146 – 147). By appropriating a preceding writing as a quotation from literary history’s archive, the plagiarist text becomes this material “tissue of quotations” that is also “a tissue of signs,” “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages […,] antecedent or contemporary […]; the citations which go to make up a text [are] quotations without inverted commas” (Barthes 1977 [1971]: 160; my emphasis).⁶⁰ In this jocular manner, the text ultimately breaks open unified wholes and breaks down the distinction between the original and the ‘lost imitation,’ between authentic writing and the secondary fake. The plagiarist text is a minor or peripheral textual fabric that embodies a constantly moving “multidimensional space,” made up of “quotations without inverted commas.” This text has an endless range of signifiers in general and theoretically identifiable passages of prior textual entities in particular “blend and clash.” Thus plagiarist practice exhibits the deconstructionist conception of playful language as an inherently ambiguous conglomerate of signs, which cannot be aligned with notions of authorship as individual ownership, nor with text as a definite amount of signifiers, conveying neither “filiation” nor stable meaning. As a consequence, this affiliation of play with plagiarism feeds into a tension arising “between play and presence. Play is the disruption of presence” (Derrida 1978 [1966]: 369). This holds especially true because play precedes the general notion of absence and presence: in line with Heidegger’s criticism of ontotheology, “[b]eing must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the pos Barthes, similar to Michel Foucault’s diagnosis “What is an Author?” (1968), sees the concept of ‘work’ as “caught up in a process of filiation. […] [A] determination of the work by the world [… ,] a consecution of works amongst themselves, and a conformity of the work to the author” (Barthes 1977 [1971]: 160; original emphases). ‘Filiation’ thereby emphasizes once again the illusory stability of relationship between a ‘fatherly’ authorial subject and its ‘childlike’ work. In the lines of “The Death of the Author,” Barthes deepens the authorial subject’s service: It “can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. [Its] only power is to mix writings” keeping in mind that “the inner ‘thing’ [it] thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely” (1977 [1967]: 146; my emphasis).

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sibility of play and not the other way around” (ibid.; my emphasis).⁶¹ Play exists as a conjunctive mood, as a “possibility” of meaning-making, yet it is a promise never fulfilled, as it always upholds the idiosyncratic asymmetry of signifier and signified. Yet since being for Derrida fundamentally relies on this sheer “possibility,” play is not the menacing chaos sabotaging the ordering structure (which never existed). It rather suggests Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center. (Ibid. 369; original emphases)

The ‘affirmative’ character of play cultivates a lively interest in traces as the “mark[s] of the absence of a presence” (Spivak 1976 [1967]: xvii), rather than an interest in fixable presence, a mark that both covers up and exhibits this “noncenter.” The deliberate practices of radical appropriation examined in this study are equally based on this affirmative setting that leaves (identifiable) traces of others, fragments of other textual entities, as well as notions of other authorial subjects associated with the fragments.⁶² Looking at plagiarism as literary practice from the vantage point of poststructuralist and deconstructionist thought and language criticism has paved the way for identifying distinct variants, or strategies. As the preceding investigation has shown, the radical appropriation of literary text accomplishes two purposes: on the one hand, it rejects the practice of ‘ordinary’ plagiarism, which is aimed at economic and symbolic capital while obfuscating the original source: Conventional plagiarism assumes authorship at the expense of the pretext’s authorial subject and a deceived public, relying on economic and legal structures and catering to them. The strategies of postmodern plagiarism, however, play with them.

 In placing play as the “basis” of being, Derrida avoids the pitfalls of structuralism he, in the case of Lévi-Strauss, denounces as a nostalgia for fixed provenance: “[O]ne no less perceives in his [Lévi-Strauss’] work a sort of ethic of presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence, of a purity of presence and self-presence in speech – an ethic, nostalgia, and even remorse, which he often presents as the motivation of the ethnological project” (ibid.; my emphasis).  I put ‘identifiable’ in brackets because of the complications arising from singling out these discernable traces – ‘discernable’ in the sense of that they can be aligned with a de facto pretext. I will address this archaeological task by the end of this chapter by referring to the deconstructionist notion of reading as put forth by Paul de Man and others.

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On the other hand, postmodern plagiarism also exceeds the simple, provocative avant-garde performance of seizing mainstream material, thereby transgressing the economically and legally set borders of creative literary production to provoke a deliberate scandal. Corresponding to similarly transgressive acts, such as breaking religious or sexual taboos, this mode of appropriation aims for cheap sensationalism. It shows aspirations for transcending mainstream productivity, an attitude Derrida finds naïve and utterly pointless: “The step ‘outside philosophy’ is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it long ago with cavalier ease, and who in general are swallowed up in metaphysics in the entire body of discourse which they claim to have disengaged from it” (Derrida 1978 [1966]: 359). The strategies identified in this study are cognizant of and exploit the widespread image of plagiarism as one of the few remaining taboos in the universe of literary production; yet they do so whilst acknowledging their own conditionality as text, namely the inescapable entanglement in language that precedes, determines, and occupies consciousness, and thereby literary writing. In sum, postmodern plagiarist practice operates in three ways: first, it performs an abduction – of text from the center of the pre-text’s authorial subject, and that subject’s work; second, it appropriates the pre-text, and countless others, and integrates them in another texture. In this new textual framework, it recodifies the signifiers within these pre-texts as ultimate “sign-substitutions,” always referring back to their previous function as “quotations without inverted commas,” and to the ephemeral presence of signs as such. Third, it repeats the signifiers of the released texts, thereby reiterating, or parroting, idiosyncratic material and mocking the pre-text’s awarded creative originality and uniqueness. Before proceeding to the three distinct plagiarist strategies identified with respect to radical appropriation in postmodern literature, some final methodological questions shall be addressed. Claims put forward by post-structuralist theory and deconstructionist thought, as outlined above, include aspects of all-pervasive language, namely de-centered subjectivity and the necessary plurality of interpretations, and consider them the inescapable conditions of (literary) discourse. Postmodern plagiarist practices acknowledge these conditions and freely appropriate and implement all sorts of different “citations, references, echoes, [and] cultural languages,” without any appreciation of the pre-text’s authorial subject. One of the main aspirations of this study, however, lies in precisely identifying these underlying pre-texts, their investment in literary and cultural history, and the possible implications of why certain authorial subjects are disowned and their textual entities disintegrated.

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So how can this breach between ‘ontological’ différance and the radical appropriation of discrete pre-texts – for example the phrases of the textual entity “Howl,” by the individual authorial subject ‘Allen Ginsberg,’ in Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless – be confronted while neither criticizing the pervasiveness of the former nor losing the literary objective altogether? What notion of readership and “interpretive community” (see Fish 1980: 147– 174) is necessary to belie post-structuralist expectations, and to do justice to the respective ‘primary’ texts at hand?⁶³ And how is it possible to confine the multiplicity of readings, i. e. of meanings of and motivations for postmodern plagiarism, as they are played out with the respective strategies? Thus the deconstructive potential of plagiarist practice additionally arises in regard to the impossible process of reading – impossible in the sense that plagiarist texts are necessarily interminable projects of interpretation, leading only to an inconclusive understanding. The comprehensibility of all text, which Barthes still saw in the transfer of interpretive power from the author to the respective reader,⁶⁴ is lost with the realization of all-pervasive linguistic play and competing meanings that consistently confuse a perception of the written text. Therefore, the reading of plagiarist texts has to rely increasingly on literature’s rhetorical quality to guarantee communication despite that very communicative structure’s interminability. It is inter alia Paul de Man’s reflections on the readability of literary texts (see 1979: 3 – 19) that assist in addressing this methodological challenge. De Man, in building on deconstructionist positions, finds a basic tension in literary texts arising from grammatical structures and their rhetorical realization, from “what is being said” and “the way of saying” it (de Man 1996 [1992]: 89). Grammar and rhetorics necessarily clash, and an ‘allegory of reading’ emerges when literature reveals this tension. This tension, found within the text itself, fundamentally weakens or, as de Man has it, “limit[]s […] textual authority” (1979: 99): “the deconstruction does not occur between statements, as in a logical refutation or a dialectic, but happens instead between, on the one hand,

 Here, ‘primary’ text has to be distinguished from the term ‘pre-text’ as I use it in this study. While the former refers to the case studies in chapters 3.1 through 3.3, the latter determines the underlying textual entities that are plagiarized on various accounts (see esp. chapters 2.2.1 through 2.2.3).  This shift is what Barthes articulates by stating that “there is one place where this multiplicity [of writing] is focused and that place is the reader […] [A] text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. […] [H]e is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 148), finally concluding that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (ibid.).

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metalinguistic statements about the rhetorical nature of language and, on the other hand, a rhetorical praxis that puts these statements into question” (ibid. 98; my emphasis). If the literary text “bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” (Derrida 1978 [1966]: 358), meaning that it always relates back to and reflects on itself, then the constitutive language necessarily, in its inherent vagueness, runs counter to its own principles. With plagiarism, this tension is acted out methodically, since “what is being said” must first be decoded and attributed to another authorial instance to gain momentum and effect. Postmodern plagiarism not only reflects on its own process of coming into being, but it manages to boldly exhibit “the necessity of its own critique,” as it transgresses some of literature’s paradigmatic conditions: authorship, the homogeneity of a contained work, and interpretive consistency. In seizing textual fragments from pre-coded works, both their integrity and that of the plagiarist literary text are corrupted and rendered inconsistent. Second, the quality of radical appropriation itself – “the way of saying it” – must also be identified and acknowledged: what in this study is designated as the ‘pre-text,’ that is the textual entity preceding the plagiarist incorporation of that pre-text’s fragments, is present and absent at the very same time – materially present in the plagiarism, virtually present in the literate reader’s knowledge of the canon. Its simultaneous absence arises with the plagiarism as it suspends the pre-text’s unity and close association with its ‘original’ authorial subject. Plagiarist texts are themselves what de Man’s calls ‘strong’ readings, defying interpretation as they absorb the pre-texts’ phrasing, significance, and sustained valorization.⁶⁵ With appropriation as their crucial tool, they strive to lay bare, first of all, the pre-text’s internal ruptures, often flattened long ago. This applies to, for example, Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable in Federman’s Double or Nothing (see chapter 3.1 of this study), Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (see chapter 3.2), and to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Darkness (chapter 1) by Yedda Morrison (see chapter 3.3.3).  From a psychological perspective, Harold Bloom, in his Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), uses the term “creative misreadings,” in that the poet accomplishes a convincing reading of past authors and texts. This ‘misreading’ is what proves the productivity of an authorial subject and its text and legitimizes both as parts of the literary canon and cultural history. Bloom also identifies this condition as the eventual incentive for the poet him- or herself to work away from the literary predecessors as a defensive gesture to create something ‘new.’ Bloom, of course, fails in his approach when he, in the first edition of Anxiety, nevertheless identifies William Shakespeare as the one all writers defend themselves against, thereby definitively repudiating the deconstructionist quality of the approach. On Bloom see e. g. Allen (1994); Zils (2009: 107– 160).

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These works thus appropriate established contexts and interpretations, which the reader has deemed set, present, and stable for all time. Furthermore, plagiarist texts also point toward the interminability of all texts, insofar as they are permeated with language, a factor writers and readers alike cannot escape. Not only can the interpretive coherence and consistency of the texts not be preserved; plagiarist texts also demonstrate a fundamental volatility of text and language as such. They therefore must be identified as radically critical of the idea of transparent language and reducible meaning. Adopting Ingo Berensmeyer’s diagnosis of deconstructionist methodology, they “demonstrate in argumentative form what the text itself does in the way it works with, or is worked by, language” (2009: 96). The combination of exposing internal ruptures and denying an ‘external’ to these ruptures finds its most pronounced manifestation in the utter unreadability of these texts, which renders them “haywire act[s] without a safety net” (ibid.). Plagiarist texts are hardly readable in three respects: first, they exemplify several characteristics of postmodern literature, such as incoherence, fragmentation, and temporal as well as spatial distortion (see e. g. Hutcheon 2004 [1988]: 3 – 73; McHale 1987; 1992: 8 – 14; Marg. Rose 1991: 3 – 20; Waugh 1992: 49 – 65). As a consequence, the reader must constantly redirect his or her focus, finding a moment of meaning-making that, no sooner than the next sentence, is contradicted or may appear as forever lost before re-emerging seventy pages later. This disorientation and poetic distortion all by themselves already point to deconstructionist hypotheses of disappointed unity and the innate undecidability of the text in a game of linguistic hide-and-seek. Second, the often employed element of metafictional discourse, or the foregrounding of the literary process itself, uses poetic means to refer back to the fictionality of language in general and of fiction in particular – it “self-consciously reflects upon its own structure as language” (Waugh 1984: 14). The metafictional quality of poetic self-consciousness, which all plagiarist examples in this study possess, equally distracts from the linear progression of a meaningful narrative, and, in doing so, accentuates the ‘nature’ of literature itself, of what “the way[s] of saying it” might eventually consist. The postmodern shreds and scraps of text acquire their third and ultimate level of unreadability with the entangled heaps of fragments deriving from earlier textual entities. The appropriations additionally thwart the respective text’s integrity, and thereby further confuse readerly expectations and heighten frustration. The postmodern plagiarist text therefore represents the generic realization of deconstructionist paradigms as it constantly evades its confinement to a fixed textual entity, as well as a virtual, ‘transcending’ meaningfulness.

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Meanwhile, the deconstructionist assumption of unreadability does not lose its impact if we separate and identify two kinds of readership: the ‘naïve,’ inexperienced reader, on the one hand, and the skilled and schooled professional reader (i. e. the scholar), on the other. With respect to this study, which requires an archaeological quest for as many pre-texts as possible and relates the previous context of an individual pre-text to its incorporation in the plagiarist texture, this difference in knowledge is still valid.⁶⁶ Yet the point of all three aspects of this unreadability affects both groups: the scholar likewise can never be sure if he or she has found all plagiarisms, and even if he or she ever managed this almost impossible feat, the interpretation of their incorporation and the available context is equally endless and deferrable. Postmodern plagiarisms are thus themselves ‘allegories of reading’ (sensu de Man). My own rhetorical attempt at interpreting these texts as challenges to the set concepts of ‘individual authorial attribution’ and ‘textual integrity’ necessarily fails as one of these “strong readings.” In addition to previously identified notions of radical appropriation, e. g. as narrative, as pathogen, and as corrective, postmodern plagiarism as aesthetic practice adds that of the litmus test. If we follow this chemical metaphor,⁶⁷ it becomes obvious that a disclosed case of plagiarism additionally works as a probe for prevalent (usually eclectic) conceptualizations of authorship, a culture’s respective handling of textual property infringement, and the ensuing valorization of that cultural sphere’s notion of originality and individual authorization. With the Derridaean ‘traces’ of other textual entities, for example of the novel The Unnamable in Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971/1991; see chapter 3.1) in mind, the practice of postmodern plagiarism appears as the ultimate deconstructionist operation: on the one hand, products of radical appropriation

 In line with Philipp Theisohn’s dictum that a plagiarism that nobody knows about does not exist, Nick Groom asserts that “[i]mitation expects recognition – indeed, imitation is defined by the reader’s recognition and knowledge of the source. Recognition informs the processes of poetic recasting of lines, sources and typologies. Imitation in other words demands a cultural community, a canon: it has textual expectations for readers as well as writers, and, as Johnson noted, the collapse or failure of these relationships causes the imitative model of composition to break down” (2010: 291; original emphasis). In Groom’s text, what he downplays as ‘imitation’ is very much congruent with ‘plagiarism.’  This conceptual metaphor’s source domain has it operating as follows: litmus as a violetblue dye, when dissolved in water, acts as a pH indicator and therein demonstrates the acidity of a substance by altering the color of a soaked filter paper. The process corresponds to plagiarism as such, the filter paper to the respective literary entity that includes the ‘alien’ fragments which, in turn, qualify as the dissolved litmus powder.

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acknowledge the implications of metaphysical logocentrism and of the impossibility of an ‘outside of text’ that refute unity, fixed presence, and exhaustive interpretation; on the other, literary products continue to operate within the literary marketplace, which includes publications as material books (or virtual etexts) that are subject to dominant modes of production, distribution, reception, interpretation, and evaluation. Simultaneously, and precisely because this indissolubility of language and meaning is admitted, the seizure of the language of others points towards the insufficiency and shortsightedness of that metaphysical belief system. In sidestepping the ultimate end to signification and meaning, as well as discarding the unifying center (individual authorship) supposedly policing the former, the pointedly ‘heterogeneous’ text with plagiarist corpora delicti demonstrates both the singularity of the momentary significance of the linguistic sign, and the inevitable recourse to language that remains necessary to convey its non-transparency. This study identifies the language-critical position of postmodern plagiarist texts as rooted in the post-structuralist and deconstructionist approaches. These fuel the three distinct variants of plagiarist practice – designated Critifiction/Playgiarism, ConText, and Neo-Conceptualism in the following sections – with the necessary assumptions of a decentered text, the inevitability of language to constitute discourse and momentary meaning, as well as the affirmative notion of linguistic play.

2.2 Writing Beyond Petty Theft: Critifiction, ConText, and Neo‐Conceptual Writing 2.2.1 “Everything can be said and must be said in any possible way”: Stealing Away With Critifiction and Playgiarism Postmodern fiction has been frequently diagnosed with an infestation of poststructuralist paradigms, pointing towards a general predisposition of the theory inscribed in these narrative texts (see e. g. Anderson 1998; Hutcheon 2002; McHale 1987, 2007; Moraru 2001). All too readily, fragmented plots or a character’s inconsistent identity have been connected to anti-realist implications that have arrived with the criticism of anthropocentric logocentrism and the recognition of the fallacy of stable signification and textual uniformity. Yet as we will see, faithfully relying on a precise translation of post-structuralist theorems in plagiarist practices may prove insufficient for all conceptual strategies in this study: since it is always a thin line separating the adherence to this criticism and the placement of the respective imaginative agendas against this theoretical

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background, each approach offers a different strategy that feeds back into the overarching label of postmodern plagiarist fiction. Critifiction is no exception. Consequently, in order to develop a poetics of postmodern plagiarisms, the following discussion of Critifiction and Playgiarism is allied with poststructuralist and deconstructionist paradigms. It will put emphasis on their distinctive idiosyncrasies as well as their ambition to still create literary form and narrative beyond a literal translation of the theoretical assumptions outlined in chapter 2.1.3. Critifiction can be considered the most programmatic mode of throwing the realist paradigms of literary production into disarray via the radical appropriation of text. It is decidedly so with respect to the blatant self-conception of authors and their manifold critical, or ‘critifictional,’ publications. Since they are invested in this strategy not only as writers or critics, but also as theorists, translators, editors, scholars, recording artists, illustrators, etc., the distinctive practice branded ‘Critifiction’ and its method ‘Playgiarism,’ has gained attention from an early stage and continues to impact the debate on plagiarist practices significantly. And it is Critifiction’s detailed program for literary production that qualifies it for first consideration in the theoretical outline and, later, in the exemplary analysis of Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971/1991). Although Federman coined both terms as a literary strategy himself and outlined them in numerous publications from the late 1960s until his death in 2009, several other writers can be ranked as ‘critifictionists,’ including 1970s contemporaries Ronald Sukenick, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and William H. Gass, as well as Samuel Beckett, as one of the approach’s influential predecessors and driving forces.⁶⁸ Apart from Federman’s notorious conceptual critical work, their equally critifictional enterprise contains programmatic positionings, the elements of which notably found their way into the plagiarist variant at hand. In the following, the elements that eventually constitute Critifiction as a genre or writing practice and Playgiarism as the inherent method and that are most crucial for assessing the interpretive potential of plagiarist literature will be presented. Once the embedding of the critifictional program into the decidedly postmodern practice of dismantling realist literary production has been examined, the comprehensive syncretism and strategical blending of theory, criticism, and fiction will lead the way to understanding this program’s aesthetic agenda. A third major issue arises in the playfulness of re-productive text allocation that

 Beckett, in this respect, is of interest especially for Federman since he already completed his dissertation Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction with the University of California in 1967 and served as the editor of e. g. Samuel Beckett: His Works & His Critics (1970), the collection of manuscripts and essays Samuel Beckett (with Tom Bishop, 1976), and a 1995 homage poetry collection, Sam Changed Tense (with Bill Howe).

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manifests itself in the illegitimate appropriation of other canonized writers’ material into the literary text. Completing the examination is a discussion of the intricate promotion of Playgiarism as the eventual condition of all creative production, spurring Critifiction to abandon its enclosed genre and embrace the supposedly radical challenge of aesthetic, as well as literary-economical, assumptions regarding literature and the literary market. Critifictional texts such as 98.6 (1975) by Ronald Sukenick or, as we will see later in more detail, Double or Nothing by Raymond Federman, incorporate an appropriative playgiarist quality by, first of all, featuring proto-postmodern narrative elements such as fragmentation and formal and thematic incoherence. These elements prevent decidedly literary reading positions and interpretive approaches along the lines of a clear referentiality of signifiers within a coherently narrated storyline. Since Critifiction is often closely associated with neighboring genres and labels such as ‘New Fiction,’ ‘self-reflexive prose,’ or ‘metafiction,’⁶⁹ this variant naturally shares many of these phenomena’s concerns, namely a fundamental distrust in the representation of social reality, historical unity, and unambiguous identity. Critifiction furthermore calls attention to its own fictionality and literary quality by offering an insight into the various fictional devices and their respective effects – an insight Linda Hutcheon classified in metafiction as “narcissistic narrative” (see 1991: 36). As will become obvious with the element of syncretism (theory + criticism + fiction), Critifiction and Playgiarism further involve a decidedly critical positioning of the text with respect to its content, form, and compositional strategy. The post-World War II skepticism towards the official discourse of the USideal of self-modeling, and the attendant emphasis on imaginative individuality and an attainable “pursuit of happiness,” unmasked these desiderata as unfulfilled and unfulfillable goals. This skepticism comprised a distrust or break with the authoritative version of reality acknowledged by critifictionists as “the rupture that occurred during the 1960s between the official discourse and the subject” (Federman 1988: 1147): while “America was asserting its position of strength throughout the world, making its political but also its cultural impact felt [… and bringing about] a period of valorization and symbolization of the American way of life and the American reality” (ibid.; my emphases), they interpreted the quest for homogeneity as feeding into an unwanted essentialist cultural discourse. This fostering of essentialism endangered a complexity of insights, approaches, and resolutions towards life and art and it established a superiority

 On these associations, and their sometimes-interchangeable use, see e. g. Gerdes (2011); Pedersen (2005); Truchlar (1983: 329 – 330).

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of the ideologically uniform over the productively diverse. Doubts of the existence of a consistent reality and fact-based history and historiography gave way to a basic skepticism towards the purported ideal of concrete 1960s metanarratives, such as the American Dream, the Cold War, McCarthyism, or semi-legitimate warfare as in Vietnam or Korea – posing as unified narratives as they were told, re-imagined, and broadcasted, i. e. medially relayed and meaningfully delayed.⁷⁰ These representations (via language and the added medial filter of the television screen, for instance) thus lost their once-active credibility and validity, a result of various traumatic incidents compromising the formerly anticipated unity of experience: John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, for example, fully televised only once and thereby not subjected to public scrutiny,⁷¹ in the critifictionists’ view epitomized the necessary “awaken[ing of] America from its mass-media state of illusion and optimism” (Federman 1988: 1149). Events like these affected a nation that, soon after World War II ending in the US-avoidance of national socialism, designed and practiced a similar rhetoric of distrust and condemnation towards the new ‘Other,’ namely the Soviet Union behind the real and imagined political, economic, and cultural border of the Iron Curtain.⁷² Apart from challenging the reality principle of the American present, the representation, interpretation, and evaluation of past events within historiography were equally scrutinized. Manifest in the Holocaust and certain individual events such as Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Vietnam, as well as the ubiquitous yet virtual Cold War, was an impossibility of speaking and writing

 The usage of ‘meta-narrative’ follows Jean-Francois Lyotard’s established notion of the phenomenon in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), i. e. the condition that the grand “narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements – narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on […]” (1997 [1979]: xxiv).  The precise medial phenomenon arriving with the film footage of JFK’s assassination, for example, is known as ‘the Zapruder film’ and was considered a crucial piece of evidence in the Warren Commission’s investigation (1963 – 1964). Until the 1975 broadcast of the full material recorded by onlooker Abraham Zapruder, the American public had only seen individual frames in LIFE magazine. The broadcast of the full movie on ABC’s Good Night, America, again sparked rumors and doubts about the eventual progression of events and the ‘lone gunman theory.’ See e. g. Chambers (2010: 179 – 194) and Wrone (2003: 51– 75, 255 – 277). The term ‘Zapruder’ has since entered the American collective memory as a way to suggest and convey an alternative truth that is concealed by ‘the authorities.’ For popular usage see e. g. William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2003: 24).  On the rhetoric and historical presentation of Cold War politics, see e. g. Medhurst and Brand (2000) or Parry-Giles (2002). On the pervasive role of US media in perpetuating Cold War conflict, see e. g. Bernhard (2003 [1999]) and Krugler (2000).

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about them. These place-events very much emphasized the ‘unsayable,’ the ‘crisis of history’ or, rather, of historiography. In Adorno’s words, “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and […] corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today” (1983 [1951]: 34).⁷³ The insight that historiography cannot confine phenomena to the unifiable products we relate to as facts, events, and stable relations furthered the notion that the faithful representation of the ‘world’ as such is not only not possible; the perpetuation of the claim that a graspable reality does exist as well as the existing paradigms that constitute society in terms of values, cause and effects, and most of all meaning, were denounced as void and utterly misleading (see Hay. White 1973: ix, 2). And it was the distinct national peculiarities of this history- and reality-making in the United States that also gave rise to a basic distrust in the naturalized social formations of the 1960s and 70s which became manifest, for example, in the ideological warfare along the virtual border of the Iron Curtain. The accompanying investigations against all ‘Unamerican’ activities consequently enforced the political, economic, and social, i. e. cultural dichotomies of ‘American’/Democracy/Capitalism and ‘Un-American’/Constitutional Socialism/Planned Economy on a domestic level with tactics known as McCarthyism. The randomness of these relentless inquiries, which dramatically affected the liberality of the arts, only contributed to critifictionist writers’ lack of confidence in a unified national ideology and a shared cultural narrative – a mistrust that also involved the principal forms and modes of representation, i. e. communication and language. Therefore, in transition from the everyday experience of dubious representation and unity to their eventual accomplishment in Critifiction, the ‘neutral’ character of language and communication itself necessarily came under attack. Words, not only in their coercive role enforcing the established meta-narratives of the American Dream and the global cultural hegemonic power of the United States, but also as linguistic signifiers as such, would never be able to convey the literal meaning of a pre-existing referent. Yet the sign itself, with the strong ‘linguistic turn’ setting the stage for criticism in the 1960s and 70s radicalizing de Saussure’s structuralist insight with respect to the arbitrariness of the linguistic signifier,⁷⁴ was now openly contested and identified as an ideologically in-

 On the inadequacy of historiography with respect to postmodern paradigms, see e. g. the contributions to the comprehensive Postmodern History Reader edited by Keith Jenkins (1997); Hay. White (1973).  For overviews of the linguistic turn see Bachmann-Medick (2010 [2006]); Rorty (1992 [1967]); on the separation between weak and strong linguistic turn see Petterson (2012).

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formed, or rather corrupted, entity and relieved of its ‘truly’ referential and representative role. Linguistic expressions – and this well-known language-critical preamble serves to prepare the playgiarist take on these paradigms – in this way never capture the precise meaning of both ‘thing’ and ‘sign,’ and may only approximate a sign’s implications, while at the same time acknowledging its ultimate elusiveness. Words, text, and ultimately literature are thereby suggested to be only make-believe reference systems, including their confinement to the agreedupon yet polyvalent rosters of meaning. The self-reflexive, playful postmodern text, especially in its variety as Critifiction, from the beginning of the 1970s with Federman, Gass, Barthelme, or Barth, explicates this instability and considers the depiction of reality, history, and ontological truth in literature itself makebelieve, an attempt to order a society that is always already ‘out of order.’⁷⁵ Since the process of language-in-process, écriture, has taken up the reins of polyvalent meaning production, a shift occurs that necessarily disowns the allegedly individual authority of authorial text production and intention, as well as a still author-centered interpretation, and evaluation within the literary industry.⁷⁶ This polyvalent meaning production strives to eradicate the author in that it leads him or her, the text, i. e. language, and the reader out of this vicious circle, the linguistic maelstrom wherein a sign refers to ‘thing’, which refers back to the sign, although it does not. In the best of all possible post-structuralist worlds, it is the process of unfolding language itself, this “multidimensional space in which a variety of writings […] blend and clash” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 146) that corresponds best to the indeterminateness of language, its polyvalent quality, and the naturalized inscription of each and every sign in the history of its usage – “a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred” (ibid. 147). For the domain of art and, more precisely, of literature, critifictionists consequently call for the necessity of finding a different writerly mode to renegotiate the discursive rupture within the grand narrative and developing a more authentic mode of expression. Federman claims that “[i]t will most certainly not be in the mode of an easy, facile, positive literature written in an industrial high-tech prose, it will not be a literature which has sold out to the Spectacle whose rich

 McHale also adds Steve Katz, George Chambers, Clarence Major, and Ursule Molinaro (see McHale 2011: 94). In a transnational perspective we can also include Italo Calvino’s metafictions as well as the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. The critifictionists discussed in this study are limited to the national and cultural territory of the United States.  In this vein, Critifiction again shares this interest with more established metafiction that also seeks to shatter the illusion of the sovereignty of writer over work and the well-set borders between the intra- and the extra-textual world.

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territory it wants to enter by any means, by compromise or by prostitution” (1996: n.pag.), in contrast to realist, linear (“easy, facile”) and affirmative (“positive”) narrative.⁷⁷ In claiming this, Critifiction takes up the postmodern denouncing of the alleged clarity and matter-of-factness that contents itself with “compromise,” and relegates desire and potential to “prostitution.” The inevitable mode of telling that may accomplish this problematizing of meaning therefore lies in language experiment, in pointing back to the constructedness of language’s own tool, the linguistic sign. The postmodern critifictionist text unsettles, disintegrates, and fragments the foundational pieces of the system of language, ultimately rendering the text ‘unreadable’ and radically open to meaning-making and interpretation. Since the mode of telling in Critifiction resorts, like any other text, to language as a communicative means, the demand for renegotiating the discursive rupture requires engaging in the expository potential of language and its simultaneous quality of deception: The kind of literature we need now is the kind that will systematically erode and dissipate the setting of the Spectacle, frustrate the expectation of its positive beginning, middle, and end, and cheap resolution. This kind of writing will be at the same time frugal and denuded, but rhetorically complex, so that it can seize the world in a new way. (Federman 1996: n. pag.; my emphases)

If the demand for precision, factuality, and equivalence, all teleologically pointing towards a “cheap resolution,” serves as a veneer that hides the unnaturalness of the linguistic sign, then Critifiction attempts to disrupt this facade. Individual critifictional texts such as Federman’s Take It or Leave It or Barthelme’s The Dead Father (1975), in their unreadability and lack of guiding referential pieces of information, not only refuse to rely on an unambiguous relation between signifier and signified; they also deny a full and final understanding of the text (“frustrate the expectation”), and thereby deceive the a priori deceitful tool that is said to constitute ontological reality. Hence, this kind of proto-postmodern experimentation in prose encompasses multiple points of critique: as a conceptual comment on the unrepresentability of reality and history via language; as a reaction to the insufficient literary

 Sellling out to the ‘spectacle’ refers to the again unified and unifiable cultural organism Guy Debord elaborates in his Society of the Spectacle (1967). Debord identifies social life as being coated or even replaced by mere representations and this numb social environment consequently as colonized by commodity principles (see 1967: thesis 42). Much as in postmodern Critifiction, what is under scrutiny in Debord is the “passive identification with the spectacle [that] supplants genuine activity” (thesis 4), an identification that corresponds to Federman’s “rich territory.”

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modes of realism; as an invitation for the reader to reconsider his or her own position within the model of literary communication; and, finally, as a challenge to the socio-aesthetic framework that holds pre-coded expectations of authors, books, and creative production. Regarding the latter, Federman, for example, addresses this existential issue via the following questions: Is it possible for these writers to escape the generalized recuperation that is taking place in the marketplace of books? […] Is it possible for fiction to escape the way publicity and advertising ingest and digest culture? Is it possible for fiction to survive the hypnosis of marketing, the sweet boredom of consensus, the cellophane wrapping of thinking, the commercialization of desire? (Federman 1996: n.pag.; my emphases)

The literary industry, as it seemingly ‘commercializes desire,’ i. e. unifies the unruly potential of literary language, commodifies the aesthetic quality of literary production. Moreover, the industry “ingest[s] and digest[s] culture,” is enslaved by and further sustains a conservative understanding of the linguistic sign. Thus it assigns meaning-making, and valorizes art and literature ‘wrapped in cellophane,’ with a retail ‘Buy one, get one free’ sticker. In sum, the quality of unreadability within experimental literature aims at the accomplishment of three goals: first, Critifiction seeks to make the reader aware of the notion that reality is perpetually naturalized; second, it strives to unmask the mode that engenders this experience and thereby suspends the unanimity principle of language; and third, it consequently aims to divest representational art of its claim to convey consistent and expressible language and meaning. The critifictional text is ultimately conceptualized as a postmodernist stronghold of imagination, set against the oppositional absorption of language by dominating discourses of politics, ideologies, or science, as described above. The characteristics of ‘unreadable experimentality’ – the awareness of naturalized reality, a suspension of language’s unanimity principle, and the disavowal of representational art – therefore run counter to the integrative agenda of these discourses, playing up the disintegration and disruption this critical fiction finds at fault. The already numerous associations with language-critical paradigms result in the deliberate syncretism of theory, criticism, and fiction. Critifiction blends characteristics of the abstracted, the dialectic, and the imaginary, forming the conceptual basis for the genre to employ Playgiarism as a method that foregrounds the distrust outlined here in conventional modes of discourse, as well as in its production, distribution, and reception. The postmodernist challenge of the various metanarratives of unified history, reality, law (as supposedly apolitical but normative), truth, and authority, as Lyotard outlines in his Postmodern Condition (see 1997 [1979]: 34– 37), involves

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more than simply a discontent with their unified, constructed, and ideologized content; it also refers to the demarcation of these separate grand narratives through institutions and operations. This once-again deceitful demarcation “can no longer structure or even enslave the individual into a sociohistorical scenario prepared in advance” (Federman 1993a: 33), but must eventually be refigured as “a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics” (Lyotard 1997 [1979]: 8).⁷⁸ In Critifiction this refiguration occurs by overexciting this postulated “interlinkage” in the reciprocal fertilization – or blending – of theoretical assumptions, literary criticism, and self-reflexive fiction. In contrast to Brian McHale’s assertion that there are “few traces of high theory” (2011: 94) in early critifictionist works, I want to emphasize the genre’s claims to blend literary practice, literary theory, and literary criticism as three distinct and historically grown professional domains of experience. These domains are equipped with different points of entry, methodological approaches, and authorial roles with respect to aesthetic design, mode of emplotment, and interpretive/judgmental investigation. Literary theory is conceptualized here as the philosophical setting for the constitution of what is deemed ‘literary’ and how it can be assessed and interpreted. The literary, i. e. ‘primary,’ source in accordance offers itself as the artistic object carrying notions of the ‘imaginative’ and ‘invented,’ and a structural complexity with respect to conveyed fictional content and its accompanying form. Literary criticism, as a third component, addresses multiple issues such as the study, interpretation, and evaluation of fictional material ranging from scholarly concerns to journalist reviews.⁷⁹ With Critifiction, the reader witnesses a collapsing of genres – autobiography, theoretical essay, absurdist prose, Dadaist language manifesto, commercial copywriting, Surrealist concrete poetry, and many more – that overcomes mere fictionality and, along the lines of a critifictionist agenda, illusionary representational effects created by literature. In the middle of Sukenick’s novel Out (1973), for example, in one of numerous narrative instances, an ever-hiding ‘I’ begins musing about the conditionality and prospect of the text of which it is a part:

 Lyotard identifies the “interlinkage” in terms of the legitimation of science and, on the other hand, of narrative within postmodern societies of “the choice called the Occident” (1997 [1979]: 8), i.e. the crucial Western question of “who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?” (ibid.).  On the emergence and historicity of literature, literary criticism, and literary theory with respect to their implications, promoting qualities, and classificatory functions, see Eagleton (2001 [1983]: 1– 46); Gumbrecht (2007: 212– 214); Williams (1977: 145 – 212).

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Hi. Everything up to here has been a novel. My feeling about it so far is it’s serious. But it’s going to get even more serious that’s also my feeling about myself. What a coincidence. Anyway that’s my feeling about it on this page in any / case it’s my attempt to sort out my feelings about certain things that have been happening to me lately like Pixie for example I can’t get her off my mind. Is she really in a soft cell with Empty Fox I should have asked him. Also what’s the meaning of the 7– 3 – 10 numerological scheme that runs through the book […]. If I knew that I’d probably know what’s going to happen next which I don’t either in my novel or in my life. […] All I know is I’m getting messages I don’t know where they come from or who else gets them it’s a mystery to me I just pass it on and hope it comes together this is a message […]. Meaning disintegrates connection proliferates what does that mean. (Sukenick 1973: 162– 164)

The not otherwise specified ‘I’ contemplates certain details of the erratic storyline thus far and thereby imitates the distinct register of the cliffhanger – “Is she really in a soft cell …” Yet it immediately disappoints the readerly anticipation of solution and closure as the ‘I’ considers it impossible to account for “what’s going to happen next.” This fictionalized authorial ‘I’ seems to receive text and ideas from sources it cannot recall – “it’s a mystery to me I just pass it on and hope it comes together.” This act of passing on (and hoping) may not be confused with the historic authorial configuration of the mediating writer who circulates and advances text from an either transcendental source (as a poeta vates) or following an authoritative tradition (mediaeval imitatio veteris); it refers, rather, to the pervasiveness of language and the ‘proliferation of connection’ that supersedes meaning-making. This ‘I’ in Out directs our attention to theoretical and language-critical implications, and it does so in text categorized as fiction. This synchronizing eradicates the notion of literariness and fictionality as containable and ascribable textual qualities, and, in its effective form of Critifiction, establishes “a kind of narrative that contains its own theory and invents its own criticism [… and that] breaks down the distinction between fact and fiction, between fiction and criticism, between imagination and reflection [… to] merge into a new type of discourse – a critifictional discourse” (Federman 1993a: 31). It is this ‘merging’ or blending of codified text types and respective competencies for a text that eventually prepares the ground for appropriative practice. The blending of genres or text types necessitates the radical dissolution of borders between self-enclosed textual entities, i. e. two or more distinct literary works. The leveling of genres and text types calls forth the dehierarchizing potential of Critifiction by disregarding the functional differences, assigning each domain its respective categorical content, form, and relevance. This leveling consequently has three effects: first, the communication of a profound disinterest in clearcut genre and text borders complicit in perpetuating the realist paradigm; sec-

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ond, the revelation of the literary text’s potential to engage in the abstract and the concrete applicability of theory and criticism; third, the overt exhibition of the impact of literary-imaginative writing in terms of cultural relevance and subversive intent. The deliberate mash-up, or bastardization – to recall the imagery aligned with plagiarist practices as outlined in the introduction and chapters 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 – of functional divisions within the literary system positively points towards the role of the real author (historical) and the authorial subject (functional). Along the lines of the critifictionist paradigms of blending, confusion, and doubling, this ultimate expansion of the notion of text simultaneously reduces and enlarges the authorial subject’s competencies over the textual material freed of the confining bonds of the self-contained ‘work’ (see Barthes 1977 [1967]). Agency, as might be expected, lies in the “kind of narrative” itself that “invents its own criticism,” that will “break[] down” and “merge” the division of authority presiding over theory, criticism, and fiction only emerging in the nineteenth century (see e. g. Lyotard 1997 [1979]: xxiii). Thus individual authorship only validates the decidedly historical, constructed argument of metanarratives claiming ubiquity and sole entitlement to originality. The authorial engagement I identify with Critifiction is consequently twofold: on the one hand, in the tradition of an existentialist littérature engagée,⁸⁰ the conscious commitment of the writer, whose texts bear social responsibility and who makes artistic decisions from which the wider community might benefit, is frequently realized by him or her self-reflexively partaking in the fictional process, a process which profits immensely from the transgressed boundaries of literary expression. Yet on the other hand, the author as primary productive force and generator of meaning and value is also degraded to the function of an associative assembler, or, alternatively, only the authorial function Michel Foucault assigned to the writer in his response to Roland Barthes’ radical ‘death of the author’: “[The author function] does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects – positions that can be occupied by different classes of individual” (Foucault 1983 [1969]: 113). One key aspect of Critifiction, and, as we will eventually see, of the playgiarist practice in Federman’s Double or Nothing, lies in facilitating this negotiation of “different classes of individual,” that is between a downright denial of individual authorial voice (de-authorization) and writerly engagement.  The term littérature engagée refers to the existentialist tradition, with Jean Paul Sartre demanding a positively charged position to defend a committed stance from the writer, in contrast to both tendentious literature and aesthetically hermetic variants such as art for art’s sake and bourgeois self-sufficiency. See e. g. Sartre (1947).

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The strategy of de-authorization, of course, involves the appropriation and realization of post-structuralist aspects of language criticism, notably in denouncing origin, authorial originality of that “real individual,” and stable interpretation. Accordingly, the monopolization of meaning associated with the interpretive sovereignty of the authorial subject is what critifictionists see reinforced and socio-economically exploited for the sake of commodifying that meaning. The incentive ‘If you like Richard Ford, you may also buy The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner’ thereby corresponds to the “generalized recuperation that is taking place in the marketplace of books” that Federman mentions above. These literary-economic strategies of genre or author alignment, and of cultural capital readily translated into purchase decisions and fixed exchange value as economic capital, are consequently subverted by the critifictionist stratagems of ‘doubling’ and repetition. Both challenge the qualities of ‘primary,’ ‘original,’ and ‘individual’ for the sake of deferring the signification representational language per se is accused of incorporating. Before delineating the significant role of repetition in the critifictionist practice of Playgiarism and embedded play as a predominant figure of thought, the committed engagement of the author offered by this approach needs to be taken into account, an involvement that contrasts to the subject-less free-floating of signifiers informed by post-structuralist paradigms. Concerning the elemental responsibility of littérature engagée, Critifiction also sees “authors […] intent on revising their position and their views in relation to the events that they themselves helped shape, and they do so self-reflexively in the dual role of narrator and protagonist of their own fiction” (Federman 1993a: 27; original emphasis). The authorial subject, ironically yet only seemingly in line now with the representational quest by the general readership and literary marketing that try to find, for instance, (auto‐)biographical references within a text, considers itself a part of its fiction: “as a fictional/mythical figure: an author-narrator-critic-theoretician-protagonist” (ibid. 31).⁸¹ The syncretism of text types and genres therefore also exhibits the confusion and corruption of writerly roles, of Foucault’s “different [functional] classes of individual.” Blending theses “classes” brings forth agents who concurrently assemble, compose, edit, contextualize, evaluate, analyze, and experience, within and without the textual world of the open narrative. From the perspective of a committed author who writes to support and even promote the libertarian agenda of dissolving borders and releasing text from its  Federman, in the same text, later lists additionally “the typist, the editor, the typesetter, the printer, the proofreader, and of course the reader […]” (1993a: 42). Here, the functionality identified with the figures of ‘typesetter’ and ‘printer’ further points towards the all-encompassing notion constitutive of Critifiction.

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strict confines of authenticated unity, Critifiction does more than follow the existentialist dictum to consciously engage in deliberate action; it exaggerates and even misuses that commitment by referring the various intra- and extratextual roles and instances – e. g. narrator, critic, or protagonist – back to the eventual biographical agency Deconstruction seeks to do away with. The critifictionist re‐enacts a biographist stance, yet this is done by masking this quasi-real subjectivity with endless metafictional layers that never keep the promise of disclosing ‘the (wo)man behind’ the story, be that an autobiographical narrator, implied author, or historical person. The programmatic layout of the critifictionist’s numerous roles draws on the extremes of the author spectrum – imaginative involvement and depersonalized detachment – to render authorial borders in the service of this “new type of discourse – a critifictional discourse” more flexible. What finally qualifies Critifiction as having a conceptual agenda that both denounces the authorial agent and simultaneously lionizes it is the writer’s task to transform experience – also his or her own – into words without limits: “Everything can be said and must be said in any possible way” (Federman 1993a: 44; my emphasis). The potential and obligation of the writer, to be able (“can”) and be required (“must”), to express “in any possible way” is thus of course also applicable to the appropriation of materials by others, “totally unrelated to the story he is in the process of inventing” (ibid.; my emphasis). Because the critifictionists focus on the “process of inventing” – an element that again recalls metafictional paradigms, in this case Hutcheon’s ‘mimesis of process’⁸² – they consciously draw attention to this radical dissolution of borders. This includes the appropriation of textual entities and therefore the infringement of intellectual property conventions. Plagiarist practice is a strategy that is overly conscious of the various historical authorial concepts – mainly poeta vates (imaginative-ingenious), poeta faber/doctus (axiomatic-methodical), imitatio veteris, and canones auctores (imitative-venerating). It anarchically blends, both to evade easy categorization and to reconceptualize levels of genre distinction, authorial competency, and textual identity. Taken together, these traits demonstrate the fragility of these categories, while still suggesting an imaginative position opposite the ‘compromising’ representational “spectacle” of literary production.

 ‘Mimesis of process’ is understood in contrast to ‘mimesis of product,’ which is used to identify the realist belief in communicating a uniform real world entity in the representative textual world of the narrative; see Hutcheon (1991: 36 – 47).

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A synopsis of Critifiction as an initial model for suggesting a poetics of plagiarist practices so far includes three major elements: first, as a proto-postmodern practice starting in the late 1960s, it draws from the distrust in political discursive practices associated with unreliably mediated events and developments such as actual or proxy warfare (in Vietnam, Korea, Cold War), traumatic occurrences on American territory (McCarthyism, JFK/RFK/MLK assassination, violation of Civil Rights), and boosted consumerism, as well as doubts in the ability of language to represent facts, events, and truth per se. Second, it fuses the predominantly discrete discursive realms of theory, criticism, and narrative and rebrands this transgression as an innovative genre. Third, it involves modifications on the level of genre, authorship, and text that feed back into the critifictionist agenda. This agenda entails a plurality of compositional modes and classifiable styles, multiple authorial roles and textual responsibilities and, as the strategy becomes intensified with the notion of ‘doubling,’ ‘repetition,’ and ‘play,’ corrupted identities of previously self-contained texts, i. e. literary works plagiarized and reinvested in critifictionist prose. Critifiction’s syncretism is undeniably connected to the predominance of playfulness and self-reflexivity in the combinations and permutations of texts involved in plagiarist practice. Play as a mode of confusion and corruption, in its seemingly undirected movement, serves to constitute Playgiarism as Critifiction’s method. For this appropriative strategy, the playgiaristic mode represents the crucial operation that supports a suspicion entertained towards unified (meta‐)narratives. This suspicion translates into a promotion of the senseless, of non-sense that is built on the post-structuralist claim to free play, jocular repetition, and that embraces appropriation as the eventual condition of all writing – three elements that will, by the end of this chapter, become indispensable notions in the conceptualization of Critifiction as a plagiarist practice. Because experimental writers initially deepen the criticized rupture representational discourse promotes by necessarily employing the same language system that serves realist demands in literary production, they are automatically “involved in an act of disruptive complicity”; yet in self-reflexively taking this complicity into account, they “have chosen the play of irrationality, the free play of language over discursive coherence and formalistic unity” (Federman 1988: 1156; my emphases). The expressions used here – especially “irrationality” and “free” – suggest a distinct counter-position to the framework Critifiction establishes as the deceitful cultural paradigms of order, reasoning, and meaningful stability. It seeks to cultivate a writerly attitude that “reaches beyond the rational, where the real and the imaginary […] are no longer dichotomous. […] [F]or

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there is as much value in making non-sense as there is in making sense” (Federman 1993a: 11).⁸³ Despite rejecting a dichotomous relation – that between “the real and the imaginary” – Critifiction itself attends to a polarity evident from this quote, namely sense vs. non-sense. In this constellation, it points towards the inversive potential of play, of momentarily swapping the order of signs for the sake of displacement. What is striking when we work from the notion of play towards its embedding in the appropriative strategy at hand is the basic difference between game and play. Federman emphasizes ‘free’ play as subject only to coincidence and “irrationality.” This playful anarchism exceeds both the ontological belief in set signifier-signified relationships and also Wittgenstein’s concession to systeminherent language games assuming “various categories of utterance [that] can be defined in terms of rules determining the properties of each of the pieces, in other words, the proper way to move them” (Wittgenstein 1953: sec. 23). This kind of language game does not strive to uproot or annul the systemic character of language; it rather consolidates the acknowledged structural patterns already at work in conveying meaning through language, i. e. determining of what is possible in synchronic langue. Genuine unhampered play, on the other hand, undermines these “properties,”⁸⁴ corrupts the accepted rules of the game, and thereby subverts the sort of logically ‘ideal language’ analytical philosophers Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell imagined.⁸⁵ The quality of play Critifiction regards as indispensable to realize this strategy of corrupting and de-ideologizing necessarily deconstructs the forms and content of the literary text. Play furthermore preemptively denies the text the ultimate meaning of its seemingly coherent graphemes, lexemes, semes, etc., since the dynamics of unstable meaning-making prohibit this. Consequently, Federman, for instance, “want[s] to write a novel that cancels itself as it goes along” (1993a: 10) just as Sukenick’s protagonist in OUT “want[s] to write a novel that changes like a cloud as it goes along” (1973: 136). The effect is a play Please note that the terms ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ do not refer to Jacques Lacan’s classification of the human psyche in psychoanalysis. They rather denote the contrast between literary language and a seemingly real outside world  Here, ‘properties’ can be understood in its triple sense of ‘characteristic attribute,’ ‘self-enclosed building,’ and ‘ownable asset.’  McHale, in this respect, shows playgiarist work as correlating with language games, in the sense of “a set of rules, an ‘algorithm,’ that processes input ‘automatically’” and therein creates “a literary ‘machine’” (2011: 102). Yet this clearly refers to understanding repetition in the sense of eroding the established discourse on the basis of following cohesive rules. Understanding Playgiarism as a game therefore divests it of the self-generative impact the notion of écriture suggests. On Frege’s ‘concept-script,’ see Beaney (1997: 47– 77, 362– 367).

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fully created texture, the ordering rules of which may only correspond to opposing sense after all, exposing its processuality, and thereby breaking the rules of the agreed-upon game. The disruption of syntax, i. e. of the intricate quality of language which “reduces [words’] multiplicity [… and] controls their violence” (Federman 1977: 109), and the consequent juggling with even the smallest meaningful components in language, comprise the crucial tools aimed at fostering this disorienting oppositional non-sense. On the structural level, Sukenick’s OUT, for example, realizes this non-sense by disenfranchising the reader with abruptly changing names and identities every couple of pages and writing in detours. OUT thus plays hide-and-seek between the pages of a superficially self-contained novel with title, authenticating author name, chapters, and a left-to-right and top-to-bottom typeface. With these experimental enigmas planted in the novel, play, in line with Federman’s demand, reinstates the violence of language itself, or rather of the process of bringing this language into being: it shifts from structuralist paradigms of the syntactic and syntagmatic to the processual post-structuralist piercing of the textual surface. As a consequence, the double entendre ‘playgiarism’ invokes the resemblance of anarchic play and the textual taboo of plagiarism, that is, it suggests a blending of the effect of desired non-sense of play and the practice of radical appropriation of literary text: If postmodern fiction embraces a post-structuralist conception of text and authorship, this embrace necessarily involves a dissolving of the economical and legal boundaries that define a pre-coded textual entity, the work. The ‘critifictionist’ needs to reopen the “multiplicity” of words and to unleash the “violence” of language while the notion of play refers to the innocent appropriation of material that has lost the significance of an identifiable origin and agency. This occurs both within the textual world, where narrators and characters lose their referential meaning, and in the extra-textual world, where the pre-texts’ authors are literally divested of their legitimizing and authenticating competencies. The appropriation, say, of parts of Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable (1953) in Federman’s Double or Nothing may therefore be considered the ‘natural’ consequence of the language-critical attitudes of Critifiction. With respect to the effects of jocular repetition, Critifiction holds the potential for creating an imitative echo that self-reflexively multiplies authorial subjects, language, text, and meaning. Language and thereby also literary aspects of text, such as a protagonist or plot, a short story, poem, or user manual, a catchphrase or cliché, a narrator, or author open into a “montage/collage of thoughts, reflections, meditations, quotations, pieces of my own […] discourses […] as well as pieces of discourses by others (spoken or written – published

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and unpublished, authorized and non-authorized)” (Federman 1993a: 51; original emphasis). As Playgiarism’s central figure of thought, repetition is conceptualized as the re-calling of textual parts, the re-assemblage of formerly indexed and classified material, and the pervasive break with diachronically unified signs. Furthermore, fostering the consequences of this eradication of borders, especially between “published and unpublished, authorized and non-authorized,” a core idea of jocular repetition as a textual operation, namely ‘doubling,’ should be taken into account. ‘Doubling’ is excessively present in the critifictionists’ œuvre; this can already be deduced from the titles of many works – Double or Nothing, The Twofold Vibration (Federman), Further Fridays, The Tidewater Tales (Barth), or In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, The World Within the Word (Gass). Doubling proves particularly successful in pinning down the concerns of both the genre and its method, and it does so in three ways: first, in following the quality of blending, it obliterates the consented boundaries of text units (cancellation); second, on the micro level, it equates two identical entities to render them indistinct, literally two of a kind, i. e. of language in process (identification); and third, on the macro level, it succeeds in retroactively modifying the pre-text’s meaning as it is charged with the ‘secondary’ text’s implications (affirmation). Doubling therefore renders void the notion of a singular creative work, and therefore textual exceptionalism, and it proves authorial inimitability impossible, since the practice of multiplying text momentarily annuls the rules for traditional literary production by leaving them to non-sense. Repeating and doubling extend Critifiction’s refusal to distinguish between genres, text types, writing registers, and modes of emplotment. But this step of radicalized play also does not discriminate between “published and unpublished” and, even less so, between “authorized and non-authorized” material that broadly asks for an abolition of the individual alignment of work and author: text “merely imitates, copies, repeats, echoes, proliferates – plagiarizes in other words – what has always been there” (Federman 1993a: 52). With this emphasis on the ‘always already there,’ the strategy of Playgiarism doubles, “echoes,” and “proliferates” form and content of the previously unified, canonized work. As outlined in the previous chapters on the complex metaphoricity of textual misappropriation, the verb ‘to plagiarize’ is already burdened with a long and far-reaching history of meaning that tends to evoke notions of kidnapping (with Martial’s use), jurisdiction (‘theft,’ ‘culprit,’ ‘evidence,’ etc.), pathological disease and abnormality (‘incest,’ ‘bastardization,’ ‘sickness’), and scandalous muckraking. Within the plagiarist narrative these are all connotations that discipline and punish the unauthorized appropriator of another’s material. Yet with

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the rededication, or even rebranding as ‘Playgiarism,’ the deceiving practice is de-vilified and thereby relativized, to the extent that the degraded authorial subject is now conceptualized as actually never having exercised any control over the language grounding its material. With Playgiarism, it is always discourses communicating, not ‘real individuals’: “The writer […] will only be the point of junction […] of all the elements of fiction” (Federman 1993a: 45; my emphasis). Roland Barthes, however, saw another “place where this multiplicity [of writing] is focused and that place is the reader […]. [H]e is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (1977 [1968]: 148). By these disparate modes of conceiving of who or what becomes the point of ‘constituting’ the multiplicity, which écriture brings about in its heterogeneous and unfathomable unfolding, we arrive at another deviation of Critifiction from ‘pure’ post-structuralist theorems: Federman sees the writer as the junction of all possible meaning. Yet although this utterly different emphasis may suggest a major fallout with post-structuralism, Critifiction’s conception of the author corresponds from the very start to the Barthesian scripteur who is written by language and in this manner has him- or herself become text. In downsizing authorial responsibility to “only” a de-individualized obligation within the critifictionist system of communication, the writer, following Foucault’s author function, is split into “several selves” that “can be occupied by different classes of individual.” Playgiarism again calls attention to and mobilizes the potential of writing within the paradox of the split personality of the critifictionist author and the écriture-oriented post-structuralist ‘death of the subject.’ The authorial subject’s schizophrenia is not pathologized, but – in recurring to the ‘always already there’-historicity of language – valorized as ‘imaginative’ within the context of playful appropriation. So far I have diagnosed the playgiarist view of text as essentially impure, continuously interspersed with free-floating meaning and interpretive dynamisms. The critifictionist therefore neither only wants to adorn him- or herself with borrowed plumes for reasons of reputation and financial reward nor does the jocular handling of text represent a cheap provocation directed at the rigorous rules of intellectual property. In reversing the semantization of the word and the condition, Playgiarism may beat language at its own game of representationality and meaning-making. Plagiarism as Playgiarism is de-vilified as an optimistic embrace of all language, present or absent, “since nothing is said, since nothing can be said, or since it can always be said differently, writers are now freed from what was denying them, what was negating them, and what was determining how they should write” (Federman 1993a: 14). This freedom for encoded linguistic signs and authors forced into individualism, and a freedom from de-

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mands for originality and impossible exceptionalism can only be achieved within language itself and the self-reflexive process this implies. Continuing the discussion of the subversive potential of play with respect to delineating Critifiction’s contribution to a poetics of postmodern plagiarism, one needs to account for Playgiarism’s connotations of intellectual theft concerning its pathological assessment, in this case amnesia: “For I do not know […] where my own language began and where it converged with that of others within the dialogue all of us entertain within ourselves, and with others. […] [T]here are no sacred sources for thinking and writing” (Federman 1993a: 52; my emphasis).⁸⁶ This amnesia, i. e. forgetting where the roots and definitional borders for material may lie and what individual agency is linked to an arbitrary amount of text, ironically echoes convicted culprits’ weak defense strategies and the psychological condition of cryptomnesia often called upon to justify ‘commonplace’ plagiarism (see also the introduction to this study). In sum, the playgiarist authorial subject indulges in a lively schizophrenic existence: it forgets the source of its writings; compiles text matter from the linguistic pool that knows no individuality and that sheds a convincing equivalence of authorial subject with textual entity; and, ultimately, it addresses this existence in self-reflexive metafiction. This subject oscillates between the necessity to decry creative ingenuity, the demise of the integrated subject, and a committed and thereby subjectified positioning which seeks to point the way to go, i. e. towards non-sense and counter-realism. The promotion of Critifiction and Playgiarism as the ‘natural’ condition of all creative production builds on two assumptions: on the one hand, fiction infused by all texts past (including theoretical and philosophical ones) implies a quality virtually all texts share, yet would not put on view: it is a “fundamental truth of all fiction: it is always implicitly reflexive” (Federman 1988: 1143). In Critifiction’s conceptual outline, all writing (re‐)instates simultaneous texts that have a past, and a commodity career by positioning all pre-texts on the same plane of the material book page of, for example, Federman’s The Twofold Vibration. If we cannot rely on a unified metanarrative of reality or the truthful representation of facts and events, then the pre-texts have to be repeatedly wrested from their respective places of significance for the sake of momentary de-historization: text now is “a kind of non-sense delirium that […] reflects the nonsense of historical events and the delirium of the language recounting these events” (Federman 1993a: 27).  I chose ‘amnesia’ over ‘ignorance’ since the phrase “For I do not know…” is more aligned with forgetting text, events, etc. this contested ‘I’ once received. ‘Ignorance’ implies the ontological difference of either a conscious lack of knowledge or the willful disregard of a text’s origin, as encountered earlier with the self-enriching conventional variation of plagiarism.

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With respect to the proposed poetics of postmodern plagiarist practices, Critifiction as self-reflexive genre and Playgiarism as according method contribute the initial translation of post-structuralist and deconstructionist paradigms into the fictional text. These paradigms include the ‘death of the (imaginative) subject’; the transition from language as mechanical system to processual activity (écriture); the constant deferral of stable signifiers and sustainable meaning (practiced différance); the only momentary invoking of signification that is otherwise only traceable, “dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements” (Lyotard 1997 [1979]: xxiv) that “change[] like cloud[s] as [they] go along” (Sukenick 1973: 136) leaving them superfluous “once [the word] is spoken” (Sukenick in a letter in Federman 1975: 5); and the dissolution of distinct genres. Both Critifiction and Playgiarism recur to the notions of play in order to irritate a narrative style already categorized as experimental, unreadable, fundamentally self-reflexive metafiction. While play confounds the linear reception of a coherent narrative, modes of repetition and especially doubling, which divest pre-textual entities of their individual uniqueness, over-identify with the pre-texts by appropriating them, and refer back to their sustainability and literary value. Therefore Playgiarism epitomizes the least radical variant of plagiarist strategies in this study, in that its revisionist potential runs the danger of being lost in play, in ‘playing down’ the promise of a political edge and damning itself to the self-perpetuating vicious cycle of bold metafiction. While Critifiction acknowledges Jameson’s critique of postmodernism’s “[u]topian ambitions [that] were unrealizable and its formal innovations exhausted” (Jameson 1984 [1979]: xvii), it can be seen as stuck in a paradox of fighting fire with fire, i. e. of writing narrative by means of non-narrative. Critifiction with Playgiarism produces non-sense that both negates realist paradigms and re-affirms them ex negativo. The quest for non-sense, that deliberately “has no value (commercial that is) for the common reader” (Federman 1993a: 36), shares not only the constitutive elements of postmodern writing – skepticism, fragmentation, experimentation – but it also runs the risk of being accused of unreadability. This accusation includes charges of elitism, of interpretive exclusiveness opposite that “common reader” who, with his or her reading experiences following canonized forms of literary consumption, is by default and by Federman’s definition above a second-class recipient. The claim to “use experimental forms to disarticulate language from the inside” (Federman 1988: 1154) runs the risk of becoming stuck within the popularized “world within the word” (Gass 1971), an intentional pigeonholing of experimental fiction as a “safe and useless place” (Federman 1993a: 37).

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The author role resulting from these programmatic conceptions is thus outlined as constituting itself at the interface of an engagement with language reframed in the plagiarist text and a subordination to the language texture itself at work in the respective novels. The critifictionist, with Playgiarism as tool, negotiates not only the borders drawn between genres and the grey areas of legitimacy in appropriating text entities aligned with other authorial subjects; in the best tradition of self-conscious and self-reflexive metafictional writing which strives to overcome these borders, the playgiarist authorial subject also renegotiates itself as equally textual and thus as flexible as the unified novel and the eventual recipient, the reader. The critifictionist is dedicated to the playgiarist project of unmasking and abolishing simulated boundaries, forsaking the labels of imaginative inventiveness and/or innovative ingenuity, and yet, precisely in these endeavors, ventures to paint this unoriginal practice as a quasi-natural condition of language and literature: “it is the function of creative language to be left behind, in just that way. The word is unnecessary once it is spoken, but it has to be spoken, and afterwards it may be superfluous” (Sukenick qtd. in Federman 1975: 5).

2.2.2 Disowning Meaning and Male Authority: Feminist Plagiarist ConText The following chapter will shift to a second prominent strategy of plagiarist appropriation in postmodern literature, namely feminist ConText. While other literary phenomena such as female postcolonial rewritings since the 1960s⁸⁷ or visual artworks – including Hannah Höch’s Dadaist collages or the photographs of Appropriation Artist Sherrie Levine and the self-fashioning work of Cindy Sherman⁸⁸ – have enjoyed scholarly attention for some time now, radical feminist plagiarists have not won comparable recognition. In this section, I aim to redress the balance and in doing so I shall refer to this particular strategy as ‘ConText.’ This playful label captures several properties: first of all it echoes the deceitful quality and illegal implications of misap-

 For a broad discussion of the historical background, socio-political implications, and aesthetic strategies of postcolonial literature, theory and the discrete literary practice of rewriting, i.e. the observable negotiation of the (post‐)colonial experience through abrogation and appropriation, see e. g. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s survey The Empire Writes Back (2004 [1990]), Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Spivak (1988), and Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture (1994).  For a respective outline of postmodern Appropriation Art, see e. g. Buchloh (1982), Cameron (1990 [1986]), Evans (2009), Krauss (1984: 27 ff.), Römer (1997, 2001), and Wallis (1984).

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propriating literary text by others without supplying sufficient markers; second, ‘ConText’ is reminiscent of con artists who trick their audience by exploiting established assumptions about human nature;⁸⁹ third, in its homophony to ‘context,’ it demonstrates the close integration of and interaction with texts spatially and temporally separate from the present text unit and, for the reader/scholar, a necessity to accept the ultimate ‘contextuality’ of the material at hand. Finally, ‘ConText’ hints at the feminist communal interest in representation, voice, and subjectivity, and the imperative ‘with text’ suggests a political program that is put into practice in post-structuralist writing. The central concern of ConText comes with the recognition and achievement of deconstructionist and/but feminist language criticism as the quest for female empowerment and subjectivity.⁹⁰ This brings together rather ambiguously a position of constant meaning deferral (and a rejection of an ultimate signifier as outlined in chapter 2.1.3) with an interest in actually signifying subjectivity within a distinct field of experience. Concerning this paradox, language as the allpervasive communicative means can be identified as both the problem and the solution for the unrepresentability of female subjectivity, desire, and, ultimately, textual meaning-making: Language […] deeply is discourse: when I use language, I am given meaning and I give meaning back to the community […]. [W]hen I use words, any words, I am always taking part in the constructing of the political, economic, and moral community in which my discourse is taking place. All aspects of language […] are politically, economically and morally coded. (Acker 1997: 4; my emphases)

In her short essay on “Postmodernism” (ibid. 4– 5), Kathy Acker, whose Empire of the Senseless will be examined in chapter 3.2, explicitly recognizes language as the central means of politically, economically and morally, i. e. ideologically, coding society and culture. In doing so, the feminist mode of literary writing takes into account the immersion of a literary voice in and its constructedness through discourse – “I am given meaning and I give meaning.” Especially the insight of being shaped by language clearly shows an orientation towards, if not absorption of, post-structuralist and deconstructionist theorems that see language as formative for the restrictive metaphysical framework in which the writer is trapped. The crucial issues that this approach takes into account are the concept of transcendental signification, derived from theological  For further reading on con artistry and psychological manipulation see e. g. Conwell (1937); Ford (1996: 147– 172); Maurer (1999 [1940]).  For the similarities, differences, and contradictions of deconstructionist and feminist theory see e. g. Benhabib et al. (1994); Brodzki and Schenck (1989); Elam (1994).

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as well as secular enlightened premises that support a teleological argument, the distinctiveness of a signifier within the linguistic system, and that signifier’s relation to a referenced object, a supposed ‘reality.’ What is obscured by the notion of an immediate relation between ‘what the world is,’ ‘what of this world we perceive,’ and ‘what of this world can be expressed in words’ are the ambivalences already within, but also between the three instances, the ubiquitous ambiguity of text which Roland Barthes described as that “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings […] blend and clash” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 146). Language and ‘text as work’ are consequently dissociated from the restrictive equation of ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ and dissolve into écriture that no longer bears the responsibility of representation. There is thus a shift of agency, from subject to text, and the name for this shift, which must be seen as the decisive deconstructionist development of the differential structuralist paradigm of language and meaning-making, is différance. Jacques Derrida, in his essay on the concept⁹¹, admits to the confinement of writing within this metaphysical constitution of meaning since metaphysics is not a form of knowledge that allows for an alternative, but is a way of thinking already inherent in language itself that determines the way we imagine knowledge to be. As a consequence, “there is nothing outside of the text” (Derrida 1976 [1967]: 158), a claim that will become important for plagiarist language politics beyond intertextuality. Différance emphasizes flexibility as the immanent characteristic of the linguistic sign by including two qualities: first, one sign necessarily differs (différer) from another (hereby following Saussure’s model of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations); second, a sign also constantly defers (again différer) meaning and therein acts as re-(peating) presentation, i. e. a deferred presence for whose re-appropriation we persistently strive (see again Derrida 1978 [1966]; 1982 [1972]: 7– 12). ‘Meaning’ consequently always exists in the deferred and secondary quality of the sign, never in the place of a signified reality. As the nature of language may never fully expose the potentially signified, the significance of post-structuralist and deconstructionist premises for ConText is clear: postponing ultimate sense-making ad infinitum. The dissolution of an illusory alliance between language and reality is ultimately realized in the plagiarist stance since not only do linguistic signifiers never suffice to describe, map and represent an understandable reality; this unfinished quality also applies to the agent supposedly in charge of that alliance –  For want of a consensual term to define différance as method, approach, practice, and/or theory, the term ‘concept’ will suffice to designate this deconstructionist phenomenon. See Brogan (1988 [1985]: 32– 38) or Derrida (1982 [1972]: 5 – 6) for a discussion of différance’s ambivalence and multiple applicability.

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the ideal of the self-complete authorial subject. If a text is “a field without origin […] at least [with] no other origin than language itself” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 146), then écriture is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. […] [T]he voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 142)

As the possibility of a transcendental signifier is foreclosed in this second step of denying an ‘auteur-dieu,’ an author-God, there is no subject who is the master of différance, the sign system and therefore of a text. Rather, this subjectivity is itself an effect of difference and deferral, an effect that results in the permanent revision of the instance that assigns meaning, a process most visible in the competing authorial subject positions of a plagiarist text. The textual surface, as it is presented to the reader, i. e. without indicating the border between authorial subjects or narrative voices, takes no interest in assigning rights and duties to the multiple subject positions behind it; it replaces the ambition for representation with script and writing that work as indicators of potential meanings and ‘traces’ (see e. g. Derrida 1978 [1966]; 1982 [1972]: 24– 25) of simultaneous influences within the text. The inherent quality of language as continuously prolonging the quest for meaning and identity prevents the text from becoming bound by structural(ist) determinism. ConText reveals this quality of language and authorship by explicitly interfering with the eclectic notions of what both concepts are taken to be (see chapters 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 of this study). A ConText, e. g. Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1979), remains a material textual entity – with the according paratextual clues of author name, title, year of publication, etc. –, yet it contains numerous plagiarized identities, unmarked passages that on the textual surface are disguised as a single whole. The reader witnesses the concourse of many subject positions on the same material layer, multiple texts and voices that may not be subjected to individual authority and authorship. The only determinant for and limitation to this texture of ‘différantial’ meaning is the commodified book, a Pandora’s box sold on the literary market. Transferring these assumptions to a literary marketplace that decisively shapes the restrictive attitude towards plagiarist practice, ConText is not conceptualized as the product of individual ingenuity (as in the argument for autonomous imagination) or as an effect of skilled craftsmanship and virtuosity (heteronomous innovation); rather, it designates a merely hypothetical presence of meanings that remains ambiguous because of ‘difference’ and ‘deferral.’ Kathy

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Acker as a writer of ConText clearly expressed this position against the economic and legal exploitation of authorship in her prognostic essay “Writing, Identity, and Copyright in the Net Age” from 1995: As it now stands, the literary industry depends upon copyright. But not literature. My worries concern the increasing marginalization of writers and of their writings in this society. For to write should be to write the world and, simultaneously, to engage in the world. But the literary industry as it now exists seems to be obfuscating relations between this society’s writers and this society. […] I suspect that copyright as we now define it will become a thing of the past. (Acker 1997 [1995]: 103, 101; original emphases)

The literary industry not only prevents (‘obfuscates’) writers of ConText from publication and official recognition, but also from the confrontation (‘engagement’) with traditional modes of creative production and the notion of ‘reality’ discredited in postmodernism. In addition to rejecting the existential necessity that emerges with authorship as ownership, ConText has the potential to invalidate inherited historical concepts of the authorial subject and to lay bare the commodity-like quality of its heterogeneous elements.⁹² In addition to the ongoing significance of deconstructionist theorems for ConText and their implications for the literary sphere, the distinctively feminist quality of that strategy has to be taken into account. Similarly to Critifiction and Playgiarism, literature and its production are permeated with the imperatives of an all-pervasive metaphysics. Against the background of this metaphysical determination, the female writer still has to resort to the medium that governs her consciousness. Thus language becomes both the problem and the solution to the conundrum of unrepresentability. Acker, for example, emphasizes that despite her subjection as a female writer to the symbolic order of language (“I am given meaning”), she also takes the opportunity to articulate concerns (“I give meaning”) and to contribute to a communal sphere, “constructing […] the political, economic, and moral community” (Acker 1997: 4). The postmodern female authorial subject assumes a paradoxical authorial position that is conscious of its confinement to the ‘différantial’ quality of language and of the consequences of a cultivation of the author in literary-economic and legal struc-

 This challenge to the commodified text in practice within the literary industry is further highlighted in Acker’s essay from 1995 since she identifies the oncoming advent of the digital with its fundamental changes to production, distribution, and reception of text as a crucial historical moment that “many, many of the people in this (coming) society are preferring to engage in writing and in writerly activities outside the realm of books […], outside the realm of copyright, as copyright now exists” (Acker 1997: 102; original emphasis).

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tures; yet it simultaneously persists in expressing that inferiority from within that rigid system and thereby seeks to dismantle it. Besides the language-critical infusion of conceptual plagiarist agendas that is common to all three plagiarist strategies, ConText as a feminist mode of writing is additionally charged with a critique of phallogocentrism.⁹³ Rosi Braidotti calls this “the activity aimed at articulating the questions of individual, embodied, gendered identity with issues related to political subjectivity, connecting them both with the problem of knowledge and epistemological legitimation” (2011: 30; my emphasis). The crucial issue voiced by Braidotti, who adopts the post-structuralist concern with the “problem of knowledge” and emphasizes the need for embodied subjectivity, evolves as the promotion of a deconstruction of authoritarianism and the possibility of female agency. Concerning the first part of this endeavor, the politics of a text unit’s being endowed with an authoritative subject that is individually identifiable is linked to a fundamental male hegemony with respect to ideas (creativity), writing processes (productivity), social embedding (institutionalization), interpretive sovereignty (intention), and modes of evaluation (value, canon, and sustainability). Phallogocentrism necessarily involves the coextension of language with this hegemony, which Hélène Cixous has termed “self-admiring, self-stimulating, selfcongratulatory” (1991 [1975]: 337). The overall critique ConText offers is thus directed at the privilege of male authorial identity. It is a critique that involves the practice of appropriating material that epitomizes these principles: the secular canonized text affiliated with ‘dwems,’ the ‘dead white European males’ of Western thought – of literature and also of continental philosophy. In both ‘being given meaning’ by and ‘giving meaning’ to the communal textual archive of Western literature, ConText echoes another critical tradition, namely French Feminist écriture féminine that Cixous has sketched out most famously in “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975).⁹⁴ Her positions are equally modeled⁹⁵ according to the conflict of the female writer trapped within phallogocen The first use of the term ‘logocentrism’ as a critique of the absolute validity of the (transcendental) signifier (logos as ‘word’ and ‘act of speech’) can be found with German philosopher Ludwig Klages. Derrida in chapter two (“Linguistics and Grammatology”) of Of Grammatology (1976 [1967]: 27– 73) adopted ‘logocentrism’ as a way of fundamentally criticizing the metaphysical orientation of language towards a transcendental meaning.  Although Acker, for example, distanced herself from Cixous’ exclusionary feminism which is based on genital difference – “[s]he’s a separatist” (qtd. in McCaffery 1992: 96) –, the repercussions of écriture féminine as outlined in this chapter cannot be denied.  The participle ‘modeled’ is actually misleading since the feminine writing practice promoted in écriture féminine actually aims at undoing the structural consistencies and causal interrelations all rigid systems and models represent and cultivate.

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tric society and the necessity to express both an individual as well as communal emancipatory interest. One of the central metaphors emerging from Cixous’ text via the French verb voler, suggests a strategy that can be connected to plagiarist ConText. The French signifier voler already refers to two different conventionalized meanings, namely ‘to fly’ and ‘to steal’:⁹⁶ Flying is woman’s gesture – flying in language and making it fly. […] [W]e’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers. It’s no accident that voler has a double meaning, that it plays on each of them and thus throws off the agents of sense. (Cixous 1991 [1975]: 343 – 344; original emphasis)

This double imagery of flying as a detached and liberating activity and stealing as a devious and utterly dependent one fuses previously separated semantic fields⁹⁷ that are now both projected onto a common agent: the female writer who “throws off the agents of sense” and “take(s) pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down” (ibid. 344). The plagiarist strategy of ConText does exactly that: it disarranges the area (“space”) in which text is supposed to take place and it mirrors the confusion of both the structured textual entities of sentence, paragraph, chapter, and book as it toys with their hierarchical order of designating original and quoted material with punctuation (inverted commas, paragraphing) and paratextual devices (e. g. parenthetical referencing, foot-/endnotes, etc.). Through this act of disordering, the female authorial subject first changes the interior decoration (“furniture”) and functionality of language and the literary system. Second, she thereby reveals the senselessness and artificiality of this system’s protocol (“emptying structures”); and third, she disqualifies the supposedly ‘natural’ infrastructure of literary production and authorial creativity. By “turning propriety upside down” she ultimately voids literature’s good manners and – through the resemblance of ‘propriety’ and ‘property’ – the guaranteed commitment of authorship as ownership in the literary and legal sphere. This double-imagery of ‘flying’ and ‘stealing’ also echoes an observation Acker borrows from Hannah Arendt in the aforementioned essay, “Writing, Iden-

 Cixous’ original version, of course, includes only the French signifier. Its double meaning is consequently explained in the following passage (see Cixous 1991 [1975]: 343 – 344, 349 FN 7).  Looking at the grammatical characteristics of both meanings, it is interesting to note that ‘to steal’ is a transitive verb necessarily demanding an object; this is unnecessary with the intransitive verb ‘to fly’ that only denotes the movement of the material subject position and which thereby also signifies (partial) independence and detachment.

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tity, and Copyright”: “‘Flight from the world in dark times of impotence can always be justified as long as reality is not ignored.’ Flight does not mean abandonment” (Acker 1997: 103; original emphasis; cf. Arendt 1968 [1959]: n.pag.).⁹⁸ In this disclaimer that ‘flying is not fleeing,’ the strong metaphoricity inverts the usual association of flying as ‘outside,’ as detached from reality in “dark times of impotence,” and also as the marginal and insignificant position of female authorship in this phallogocentric society in general and literary production in particular.⁹⁹ Instead, this way of flying rather resembles orbiting – a movement that echoes both necessary dependence (gravitational attraction) and detachment (temporal and spatial distance) from an agreed-upon center. This understanding offers a broader perspective on literary topographies and engenders an aerial view that puts the aviator in disguise and temporary control inviting the only momentary “enunciation” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 145; 1977 [1971]: 164) of sense. Following the homonymous quality of voler, a redefinition of ordinary ‘stealing’ for literary plunder emerges: if ‘flying is not fleeing,’ but rather designates the desirable action of orbiting in-between, then ‘plagiarism is not stealing.’ Rather, the multivocality deriving from the appropriation of male texts and authorial subjects designates an ironic twist. This irony emerges as ConText, on the one hand, repeats canonized patterns that have passed the acid test and thereby demonstrate a quality of uniform compliancy;¹⁰⁰ on the other, the texture’s multivocality points towards the text’s perpetual differing, confusion, and breach of the plagiarist taboo.¹⁰¹ That way, the in-between position of the postmodern text and of the deconstructionist writing process reconfigures the pathological dimension of plagiarism and its incrimination towards the demands of female plagiarist writers: to suggest a radical difference from, yet

 I deliberately used the verb ‘to borrow’ since the quoted passage marks a rare instance of direct referencing in Acker’s writing.  It is this flight and isolation of non-traditional writers that only receives acknowledgment by being labeled as ‘avant-garde,’ ‘experimental,’ or ‘alternative,’ trademarks that are denounced as feeding in to the stigmatizing machinery of literary production: “what they’re doing is marginalizing the experimental and that’s why I hate the word ‘experimental’” (Acker in Friedman 1989a: 10).  This conformity and dependence echoes John Barth’s critique of the “used-upness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities” (Barth 1984 [1967]: 64) that he saw in realist and modernist modes of writing.  This second aspect also epitomizes Barth’s 1979 follow-up demand for the “ideal Postmodernist author (who) neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century Modernist parents or his nineteenth-century pre-modernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back” (Barth 1984 [1979]: 213).

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also from within the inescapable centers of language, text, and authorship by repeating already acknowledged expressions that represent the authoritarianism of these centers.¹⁰² The equation of flying and stealing consequently emphasizes the impact ConText has with respect to its theoretical backup by écriture féminine and the double binding of phallogocentric entrapment and female subjectivity. Beyond this notion of speaking ‘with yet from within,’ ConText proposes another, equally significant metaphor taken from the theoretical school of French Feminism: that of plagiarism as sexualized text. Text is now to be understood and conceptualized in two ways: as an analogy to the female body that engages in the promiscuous engendering of meaning, and the consequential understanding of plagiarism as a forceful penetration of that body, as a violent sexual act. The correspondence between plagiarist text and the female body in the sense of écriture féminine first takes place on the structural level. ConText disregards the established borders of genres, forms, and citational conventions and thus turns against the ordering principles of authorial individuality and textual integrity innate to phallogocentric society. Cixous, in line with Derrida’s acknowledgment of the metaphysical nature of the linguistic system (nothing ‘outside’) consequently states that “the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis” (Cixous 1991 [1975]: 337). These dominant concepts of reason and, accordingly, causality and linear thought are based on Dualist notions of dichotomies and hierarchies of immaterial/material, intellect/body, or mind/ matter. Thus “that sexual opposition, which has always worked for man’s profit to the point of reducing writing […] to his laws” (ibid. 340) marginalizes both text as écriture and the expressive quality of the female physique. The potentially liberating means of a distinctly female writing mode that follows the double-strategy of voler and of the female body as repressed by the definitive power of the phallus may always remain within the limits to which deconstruction concedes; yet it still entails the potential for practicing an alternative way of writing from the margins of that framework: “[W]riting from the body provide[s] the best hope for working beyond the impasse of language” (Engebretsen 2004: 70). This activity of “writing from the body” connects the notion that language cannot be escaped with “the political will to assert the specificity of the lived, female bodily experience” (Braidotti 2011: 124), an experience that has been con This combination of difference and repetition as tactic is likewise discussed in gender-theoretical accounts such as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) with her ideal of variation in reiteration or Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1994 [1968]) which promotes the mutual embeddedness of both concepts as a critique of representation.

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tinuously posited as the negligible, negative side of the phallogocentric binary system. The body promises to engender agency and significance, “bursting open the bubble of ontological security that comes from familiarity with one linguistic site” (ibid. 43). In doing so, female as feminist writing can leave behind, or orbit, the illusory logos-based centers of authorship and creativity as well as assume an alternative “site” from which this fragmented, even nomadic existence can be communicated.¹⁰³ With the analogy of text/writing and the female body and its potential for writing from within the logocentric system thus established, the promise of revolt and transgression becomes effective. In ConText, the reader witnesses this revolt in the stories’ emphasis on the sexual and the erotic: by breaking away from restrictive practices and institutions – e. g. the home as a contaminated symbol for the nuclear family or the school as the disciplinary epitome of arbitrariness and autocracy –, the denial and repression of female existence, woman’s desire, sexual and textual excess, and of the body as its prominent means are temporarily suspended. This movement of breaking away from, yet also staying within the same limiting patterns, finds expression in repeated instances and imagery of incest (as the characters’ first sexual experience) and rape (as a legitimate way of exercising masculine hegemony over the female body): “‘Abhor,’” as the abusive father of the female protagonist of Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988) insists, “‘I’m the only man who’ll ever take care of you properly’” (Empire 11– 12). The strategy that counters these physical subjections involves an inversion of their manipulative qualities. This comes about by the profession of pleasure and satisfaction gained from violent sexual intercourse – a tactic of emancipatory masochism that not only counters the patriarchal implications of the same act, but also provocatively empties protective structures that promote women’s physical integrity against sexual assault.¹⁰⁴ It is this inbreed, or ‘bastard’, quality of ConText’s feminine strategy of writing (with) the body that avoids the trap of

 I borrow the term ‘nomadic’ from Braidotti (see 1994; 2011). It articulates very well the importance of (an at least temporary) frame, or body, facilitating a certain degree of subjectivity and agency without losing the dynamics of location and signification.  For other literary examples of emancipatory masochism that involves the appropriation of pre-texts, see the short stories (e. g. The Bloody Chamber, 1979) and the essay “The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography” (1979) by Angela Carter, the Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by Anne Rice/A.N. Roquelaure (1983 – 1985), and Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1984 [1978]).

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employing yet another totem for a female alternative to the phallus that would only confirm the latter ex negativo. ¹⁰⁵ In line with the embracing of violent behavior characteristic of ConText, the final argument for a comprehensive analogy of text/writing and the body lies in the frequent metaphor of a penetration of the (female) textual body from the outside. As the material surface of the seemingly integral text is pierced, the borders of this surface are not merely blurred as with Critifiction, but become forced open and enduringly wounded. The integrity the reader expects from the textual body in his or her hands is just as violated in terms of one or more corrupted authorial subjects and their literary-economic intermediaries as the feminine body is subject to phallic domination and violence. This literal ‘writing (of) the body’ is equivalent to the plagiarist strategy of extracting crucial (male) portions of material from another source and puncturing another textual entity with it. It is this notion of illegitimate penetration that may evoke a language beyond rationalist conventions and, as the multiple substances merge into one textual bastard, bring the constructedness of literary text to the fore. The image of penetration brings us back to forms of violent sexuality, i. e. incest, rape, and masochism. The connotation of pain involved in this physical écriture refers to various instances of the complex relation of text and body / text as body, an experience again reminiscent of French Feminist hypotheses: first, the process of écriture féminine is comparable to a painful effort against man – the institutionalized “imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us” (Cixous 1991 [1975]: 335) – and the female writer who would not deem herself worthy of writing without succumbing to the phallogocentric rules of rationalist thought (see ibid. 335 – 336). Second, pain is not suffered, but is welcomed by the female writer as the necessary means to permeate the static framework of literary production, its intrinsic rules and writerly etiquette, all of which ‘work against us.’ Finally, pain for the female writer of ConText is pleasure: her misappropriations constitute a cunning subversion of established rules that compares the seizure of pre-texts to a violent sexual act. The oscillation between repetition and difference, plagiarist parroting and locking horns, re-presentation and female imagination, in its stigmatized textual abuse and bending of systemic statutes, i. e. phallocentric totems, represents a

 This quest for a self-sufficient alternative that is prominent in essentialist sex difference approaches is often held to deepen the gender gap by maintaining distinct respective qualities and thereby facilitating the phallocentric policy of a repressive binary system. For the ‘misappropriation’ and absorption of emancipatory strategies by sex-difference feminism see e. g. Butler (1990: ch. 1); A. Henry (2004); Walker (1992, 1995).

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painful struggle and necessitates the imagery of pain and violence in female écriture. This pain ultimately reveals the potential openness of the produced text, its dynamism and instability: in disintegrating the physical as well as the textual body, the female authorial subject of ConText renders both supposed entities open to dynamic play and endlessly deferred variations; yet this subject is always conscious of the limitations set by the phallogocentric framework in terms of female empowerment and voicing, textual experimentation, and authorial control – limitations that include legally enforced ownership and the perpetuation of individual authorship in the literary marketplace. This outline of female plagiarist strategy in postmodern fiction closes with three additional features that play a significant role for the diagnosis of literary ConText. In line with multiplying canonical male authorial voices by misappropriating ideas, plot lines, and verbatim passages, and with the particular feminist deconstructionist mode of plagiarist text composition that is continued in the usage of phallogocentric language, this ambivalent practice of ‘writing in-between’ is also visible in the penetration of that language’s genre conventions. In this case, the predominance of autobiographical references echoes the clash of authorial subjects in one text as well as the disappointment of genre expectations. By initially referring to the difficulty of expressing an integrated self, Acker, for instance, identifies the writing of an autobiography as a schizophrenic practice: “I wanted to explore the use of the word ‘I’ […]. So I placed very direct autobiography, just diary material, right next to fake diary material” (Acker 1991: 7). This public avowal of her production techniques messes with conventionalized generic assumptions about autobiography: The established genre of ‘self-lifewriting’ is dependent on, if not the ‘truth’ about a historical person’s life, then at least the convincing recreation of that life’s authenticity and credibility. In the process of reception, it establishes the autobiographical contract between the authorial subject, which vouches for the non-fictional status of the material with its paratextual signature, and the reader who accepts and verifies the material according to intra- (e. g. pronouns, addressed audience) and extratextual markers (title, back cover, and the trinity of historical author, narrative instance, and protagonist).¹⁰⁶ By admitting to planting “very direct autobiography right next to fake material,” the genre’s intricate qualities are openly ironized and plagiarized in order to support the text’s conceptual strategy of confusion: “I set up guidelines for each piece, such as you’ll use autobiographical and fake autobio-

 For further details on the autobiographical contract see Barros (1998); Lejeune (1989 [1975]); Marcus (1994).

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graphical material, or you’re not allowed to re-write” (Acker qtd. in Wollen 1998: n.pag.). With such “guidelines” to accomplish a type of autobiographical text in plagiarist fiction the reader encounters yet another dimension of the programmatic appropriation of ‘alien’ material in ConText. The ‘self’ of the authorial subject which is normally responsible not only for the production of literary quality, but also for the authenticity of the configured ‘facts’ and their probable correspondence to events from ‘reality,’ is frankly exposed as just another text: as with other appropriatable elements – text, ideas, authorial role, etc. – the ‘self’ is a textual composite that can only be described and thus exist in writing. Écriture consequently not only defers the meaning of language; it also continuously suspends the autobiographical self that is made up of that language. The readerly expectation of the origin of an autobiography, anchored in the historical author producing the text, gets confused and frustrated since the supposedly discovered entity is yet another “multidimensional space” subjected to a deferral of meaning. This deconstructive assault on the genre of autobiography ties in with ConText’s intra-textual concept of mixing. As in Acker’s phrase ‘placing right next to’ mentioned above, the work’s integrated whole, full of plagiarized, i. e. ‘différantially’ repeated, passages from other text units, is further corrupted by freely blending supposedly high-culture elements with popular emblems, discourses, and art forms. This corruption of text shows ConText’s profound intergeneric (and multimodal) writing practice: literature is often combined with other modes of representation such as naïve visual art, dream maps, figures, tables, symbols, foreign script, or seemingly incidental drawings. Concerning not only the disruption taking place on the novel’s content level, but also its penetration with non-narrative elements, this mixed mode points to a carnivalesque role-play with respect to themes addressed as well as literary styles and representational forms applied. It is this carnivalesque quality that Mikhail Bakhtin, a precursor of poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories of intertextuality and différance, denotes in Rabelais and His World (1984 [1941]: 7– 17) as a balancing of social differences. In his well-known Dialogic Imagination (1975 [c. 1930]: esp. 259 – 422), he relates this phenomenon to the mutual interdependence of the social and the literary and an egalitarian multivocality (“polyglossia,” 1984 [1941]: 12) that is intrinsic to the hybrid nature of language and is primarily played out in the novel genre. The heteroglossia (‘different-speech-ness’; see ibid. e. g. 263 ff., 272 ff., 399 ff.) implicit in the novel suggests an inclusion of extra-linguistic elements, a ‘contextuality’ that feeds into the production, reception, and critical interpretation of the texture at hand. As a theoretical translation of mixing,

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carnivalesque instances and heteroglossia can be added to the post-structuralist denial of an author-God, deconstructionist meaning-deferral, the French feminist double-image of flying/stealing and body writing, and the bastardization of genre conventions in autobiography – all central theoretical presuppositions of ConText. In sum, ConText both disowns language and redefines it as a powerful tool for expressing the role of text in a commodified culture, as part of “this imbecilic capitalist machinery,” the conventionalized necessity of referring to an individual biographical author, and of female writers as neglected participants in this discourse. As will be further exemplified in the analysis of the ConText Empire of the Senseless (1988) in chapter 3.2, this plagiarist practice, similarly to Critifiction/Playgiarism, embraces critical theory in the form of post-structuralist and deconstructionist arguments. This involves the dissolution of authorial agency, the open dynamics of textual space, as well as the deferral of instances of signification and the attribution of meaning. In doing so, ConText facilitates a criticism of the artificial quality of unified text as it disperses and freely incorporates material beyond the conventions of genre – autobiography as a texualizing diversification of the ‘self’ – and of literary styles. It gives rise to an alienation, defamiliarization, and différance of the signifier towards its supposed signified: presuming that the lines “April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land” were taken out of their original context, the passage would become decontextualized from its original source,¹⁰⁷ T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem “The Waste Land,” recognized as different from the surrounding material, and any possible meaning would be constantly deferred (following deconstructionist assumptions). Now if Eliot’s lines were additionally incorporated into prose with a feminist and radically critical content, i. e. ConText, the reader may further conclude that the illegitimate and unmarked borrowing of this well-known passage constitutes an expropriation of the canon by a neglected female authorial subject rebelling against the mechanisms of the literary industry. Looking now at the differences between ConText and the preceding strategy of Critifiction/Playgiarism, ConText’s radical misappropriation immediately comes into focus. With Playgiarism constantly running the risk of ‘playing down’ the illegitimate inclusion of pre-canonized text and thereby cutting into former material

 I decided on “The Waste Land” for its canonical exemplarity. Simultaneously, the poem represents an ironic example since Eliot’s poem itself, on the one hand, was subject to significant cuts and further editing by his friend and colleague Ezra Pound; on the other, it equally appropriates various intertexts from recognized literary predecessors such as Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, etc.; see e. g. Eliot (1971).

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with a blunted blade, writers of ConText such as Angela Carter and Kathy Acker appropriate extensively in a way that confuses literary material and authorial subjects that have hitherto enjoyed canonical recognition. As a consequence, ConText’s agenda epitomizes a plagiarist program that involves a female-as-feminist literary production within the rigid system of phallogocentric meaning-making and the limiting idiosyncrasies of language. The practice scrutinizes that system’s ideological underpinnings and its consequences for the female authorial subject. This is vitally different from Federman’s playful blending of pre-texts. Critifiction does not look for a mode of representation beyond a repressive phallogocentric society; it aims rather at a proto-postmodernist unmasking of realist notions of writerly imagination, expression, and historicity that, by ultimately erring on the side of non-sense, serve only to reaffirm these conditions. ConText contrasts sharply with playgiarist acts of playful affirmation. The production of feminist plagiarist literature emerges as much more extensive in its scope of theft and the pervasiveness of its plagiarist poetics than Critifiction: in breaking up the sealed agreement between a text’s integrity and the attending individual authorial subject without pretending to have overcome both it and the necessity of the literary industry in its stigmatizing deviant modes of production, ConText embodies a more complex and conceptual criticism of language and the commodification of literature. The writers’ “methods are designed to force a confrontation between readers and all conventions” (1989: 218; original emphasis), as critic Larry McCaffery has it. This confrontation engenders the insight that “women need to become literary ‘criminals’ […] because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives” (ibid.). The radicality of ConText as a variant of plagiarist practice lies finally in its visceral tactics of body-writing, i. e. the thematic (incest, rape, pornography, and masochism) and structural (penetration of the textual entity’s surface) negotiation of what we may call écriture féminine illégale. Playgiarism pursues the approach of positive, affirmative play, and can be balanced by a focus on the erotic that is resolvable and that guarantees “contentment” (Barthes 1980 [1975]: 19). In contrast, ConText aligns itself with sado-masochistic and violent jouissance (‘orgasmic bliss’¹⁰⁸ or “rapture,” see ibid.) that is neither fully satisfying nor bearable. Jouissance derives from a transgression of the limits of enjoyment (‘beyond that which is allowed’), and in this transgression ConText addresses the physical

 On the difficulty of translating jouissance (as ‘bliss,’ ‘pleasure,’ ‘coming,’ etc.), see Ri. Howard, “A Note on the Text” in Barthes (1980 [1975]: v–vi).

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as well as the sexual and textual.¹⁰⁹ The multiplied authorial subjects in feminist plagiarisms exceed the tolerable amount and density of playfully appropriative textures, and they refuse to be seen as reverent tributes. ConText includes the contradictions and the pain of textual production and sexual/textual violence by means of literary plagiarism. The authorial subject emerging with ConText simultaneously refuses a clearcut authorial attribution in that it emphasizes plagiarism as an unoriginal practice and keeps in mind the legal notions of literary theft – “women need to become literary ‘criminals’” – in its particular mode of creativity. This contradictory in-betweenness recalls the orbiting quality of the marginalized female authorial subject mentioned above as well as that subject’s continuing unresolvable suffering. It, to conclude with Barthes, becomes “this [historical] subject [that] is never anything but a ‘living contradiction’: a split subject, who simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the consistency of his selfhood and its collapse, its fall” (1980 [1975]: 20 – 21).

2.2.3 Neo-Conceptual Uncreative Writing of the Twenty-First Century Music is all around us if only we had ears to hear it. John Cage (in Goldsmith 2011: 53) Poetry is all around us, if only we had the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it. Kenneth Goldsmith (ibid.)

The two previous varieties of postmodern plagiarist practices, Critifiction/Playgiarism and ConText, shared a general distrust of metanarratives, a profound disbelief in self-contained text, and an interest in a widely dispersed narrative that – following the paradigms of post-structuralist and deconstructionist criticism – somehow necessarily has to make use of extraneous material. Critifiction and Playgiarism have been identified as playfully transgressing both generic and stylistic borders of text production to convey a profound dehierarchization of all text and to celebrate this infringement as a collapse of synchronic as well as diachronic textual borders. ConText is also charged with violent implications, its objective being to radically break up such restrictive institutions of literary writing as canon formation. It negotiates the limits of female authorial empowerment as well as of the ethics and aesthetics of paradigms of originality and au-

 On the qualities of jouissance in psychoanalysis, see esp. Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis, On Feminine Sexuality (1992 [1986]).

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thentic voice that legitimize novelistic writing in the first place, and which require a representative subjectivity that produces pertinent signifiers. The third and final variant of aesthetic appropriation is also the latest in the diachronic spectrum of this study. Neo-Conceptual writing represents an incisive version of self-proclaimed appropriative practices from the (very) late twentieth century to the present. This practice is carried out in a writerly and readerly environment in which the constitutive parameters for (literary) text production have considerably changed. The shift from analog to digital and the attending consequences for textual composition in general and literary texts in particular has also affected so-called uncreative practices of textual appropriation. The following outline must thus be seen as set against this background of a technological paradigm shift. It is the aim of this chapter to delineate this recent practice and, for the future, to suggest aesthetic ways of coming to terms with pressing issues such as collaborative authorship, source- and language-management the potential of art to (re‐)negotiate and relate these developments within the literary field. Neo-Conceptualism qualifies as plagiarist practice in its promotion of uncreative writing as a creative mode of production. It is classified and coded as literature and thereby subject to the same historical, epistemological, and social developments and frameworks that have defined authorship, text as entity, plagiarism as pathogen of the literary industry, and the underlying implications for originality and authentic voice. Yet the advent of digital technology has introduced crucial consequences for the ways in which we produce, perceive and process language and text: we can easily and quickly generate, erase, assemble, cut, copy, paste, search, mark, animate, convert, compress, unpack, manage, store, distribute – in short: seamlessly manipulate language on a large, more or less global, high-quality scale without leaving traces of these modifications on the virtual surface of the respective device.¹¹⁰ This profound change in the ways we handle text and language also affects daily routines and our attitudes towards literary material since we can purchase and operate numerous hardware and terminal devices (e. g. laptops, Amazon Kindle, iPad, smartphones) as well as system software, formats, and languages (e. g. MS Word, Kindle’s electronic paper, PDF, XML, etc.) that reshape old and create new environments. In these altered settings, we confront literary material on screen instead of on material paper that we can physically mark and anno-

 On the changes for content management and language processing from a Humanities perspective see e. g. Bolter (1991: esp. 27– 46); Landow (1992: 41– 49, 2006: 69 – 124, 144– 197); Moulthrop (1994: 299 – 310).

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tate. And as various authors of hypertext fiction as well as literary and media scholars have shown, the consequences of digital text management also affect the materially productive side of the literary communication process – the author, the novelist, the poet who can make use of these flexible environments.¹¹¹ Since the late 1990s, including representatives such as Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Yedda Morrison, Robert Fitterman, Ara Shirinyan, Caroline Bergvall, Craig Dworkin, or Alexandra Nemerov, Neo-Conceptual writing has been concerned with the course taken by the materiality and malleability of language in this changed setting. The notion of the infinite mass of language that is locally produced and globally distributed, disseminated, and shared – the sense of being constantly surrounded by code – has led these tech-savvy writers to discover the poetic qualities of language virtually everywhere: Goldsmith, for example, appropriates a random issue of The New York Times and reframes this appropriated material as conceptual poetry (Day, 2003; for a detailed analysis see chapter 3.3.1). Ara Shirinyan with Your Country is Great: Afghanistan – Guyana (2008) practices so-called Flarf poetry by mining the Internet for the search item “[country name] is great” on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or bing, organizing the results from predominantly user-fed tourist web portals, and coming up with a poeticized alphabetical list (in this edition from ‘A’ to ‘G’) of tourist destinations around the world.¹¹² Finally, Yedda Morrison in Darkness (chapter 1) appropriates the first formal entity, i. e. a paperback edition, of Joseph Conrad’s canonized novel (1899/1900) on the unfathomable depths of human nature by creating a digital facsimile on which all references that denote culture and human interference have been erased from the manuscript (2009; see chapter 3.3.3).

 With respect to writers of hyperfiction, see especially Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story from 1987 as well as Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1992) that are considered forerunners of self-contained digital offline narratives. For scholarly discussions of these two and other hypertext fictions as well as the consequences of language management and processing for narrative see e. g. Landow (2006: 215 – 270). The first online projects that featured literary or, more precisely, narrative and poetry were multilinear web fictions or interactive fictions (IF) such as Douglas Cooper’s Delirium (1994), Bobby Rabyd’s Sunshine 69 (1996), or GRAMMATRON (1997) by Mark Amerika. For a comprehensive survey of electronic literature see Hayles (2008) and Tabbi (2009).  Shirinyan’s Flarf writing appears as free verse of 2– 10 lines each stanza with erratically imitating the paratactical idiom of online forums, chat rooms, and message boards, and aligning it in poetic form: “armenia is great country / famous for its christianity // Armenia is great, and Yerevan is a city / where people live their lifes [sic!] to the maximum / I love you Yerevan, I love your streets your sidewalks / […]” (Shirinyan 2008: 13). For a more detailed analysis of Your Country is Great see Goldsmith (2011: 86 – 90).

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The point to start from in order to grasp the plurality of individual Neo-Conceptualist plagiarist practices is the shared notion that in the information age new writing is neither effectively possible nor desirable. Kenneth Goldsmith, one of the major spokespersons of this writerly generation, diagnoses these language masses as the result of “a huge increase in text-based forms, from typing e-mails to writing blog posts, text messaging, social networking status updates, and Twitter blasts: we’re deeper in words than we’ve ever been” (Goldsmith 2011: 26). It is this ubiquity of signs that these writers consider the differentiation between informative text and literary fictions, between news prose and ‘creative’ poetry, between stock exchange bulletins and haikus entirely obsolete. The consciousness of being bombarded with and drowning “deeper in words than we’ve ever been,” the dissolution of textual borders by means of technological evolution, plus the paradigm shift from analog to digital: all of these are major factors in conceptual practices of appropriation. Just as Critifiction was concerned with the revision and reassignment of authorial roles in the postmodern prose of the late 1960s and 70s, so Neo-Conceptual writers are also interested in the attendant developments of authorship within the context of digital language and literature production. Interestingly, they too do so in accordance with critical language premises: “What happens to notions of authorship? How are careers and canons established, and subsequently, how are they to be evaluated? Are we simply reenacting the death of the author, a figure such theories failed to kill the first time around? […] Is the future of literature reducible to mere code?” (ibid. 10). These pressing questions not only validate the persistent controversies surrounding authorship, canonicity, authorial self-expression and -fulfillment, and the rhetorical investigation of “reenacting the death of the author”; they also answer them in reference to a change in the perception of language – namely, as code. The ubiquity of language already blurred the boundaries of text types and genre differences. This factor serves as a crucial prerequisite not only to losing or at least leveling down generic distinction as such, but also to seeing authority and authorial ownership over classified entities as passé. With respect to the perception of the digital linguistic sign, it is the combination of quantitative virtual omnipresence and qualitative standardization as digital code that establishes the material, or rather immaterial, basis for literary plagiarism to thrive. To establish this factor as decisive for a Neo-Conceptual poetics of appropriation, we have to return to the increased accessibility, malleability, and general management of linguistic signs in the digital sphere. Computing is generally based on a source code that informs the processing unit of what and how information is meant to be displayed, be it a written text – here e. g. black signs against a white background, DG Meta Serif Science, 9,5pt (in desktop publish-

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ing), line spacing 13pt, justified format, character spacing 100 %, superscript for footnote characters, etc. – or an image, an animated movie clip, and so on. Notwithstanding the types of data and the actions to be performed, and regardless of content and text type – whether stock exchange details or a sonnet –, the programming patterns at a file’s basis remain subject to linguistic signs or graphical representations – commands issued from a text file on a server, hard disk, or database. The basic-level operation of signs then serves as input to the process that produces either a storable file or a program to be executed. With Neo-Conceptual writers as well as hyperfictionists displaying a decided interest in the analog implications of digital language production as well as an advanced proficiency in media literacy, the notions of ubiquitous language management may therefore be identified as the decisive step in dehierarchizing the functional and classificatory levels of textual products. Besides these preconditions for plagiarist poetry in the twenty-first century, another socio-technological factor has to be taken into account. This is the idea of digital network neutrality. An increasingly contested policy brought forth by concerned Internet users, it strives to provide value-neutral data transfer online so as to guarantee an unaltered and free communication of code regardless of the data’s origin, quality, content, or addressee. It thereby enforces ubiquitous code in its direct dependence on hardware and software and on the necessary and scrupulous handling of devices and behavior. With net neutrality, the ideal of a ‘free’ polylog that allows for autonomy from governmental censorship (via surveillance) and economic restrictions concerning access and sufficient bandwidth is meant to be realized – a polylog that promotes the decentralized, dehierarchized and, consequently, unauthorized reproduction and limitless dissemination of data.¹¹³ Net neutrality, a policy many contemporary artists have called on (see e. g. Future of Music Coalition 2012; Goldsmith 2011: 34), has become a crucial part of movements and interdisciplinary developments (from the perspectives of law, information technology, or art) that pursue an interest in ‘free culture.’ Proponents of free culture view digital space as a “read/write environment” (Lessig 2008: 23 ff.) and consider themselves agents of an ‘open source culture’ that emphasizes collaboration and sharing as well as unhindered accessibility and storage.¹¹⁴ Thus the effects of generating, managing, and disseminating code in a

 For a discussion of digital access and distribution rights and management see e. g. BernersLee (2006); Wu (2003); on the heated debate on net neutrality as a policy principle see e. g. Marsden (2010); Nuechterlein and Weiser (2005: 168 – 181).  These implications highlight the most important elements of open source practices. Others concern issues of marginal costs, open auditing, non-commercialization – and therein non-pat-

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manner that provides for net-neutral access and egalitarian availability enforce anti-discrimination policies that are asked to constitute an entire environment (‘culture’) that in turn legitimizes the former aspects. It is this environment that emphasizes the constructive effects of (artistic) practices such as remix, “patchwriting” (Goldsmith 2011: 3, 8, 28), sharing, and peer-to-peer networking while disregarding governmental or economic institutions’ limitations on a project its practitioners want to see achieve its optimum self-governing potential. Understanding literature as code is crucial for determining the shift in appropriative practices that corresponds to a similar shift in technological standards. The consequence of naturalizing flexible and accessible code effects changes in the collective and individual mindset that free culture demands – ‘if this software allows me to cut, copy, and paste all kinds of data, I do it’ – as well as expectations from the technology that presents these options to us – ‘if this procedure used to be free, why would I want to go back to restricted and costly access?’.¹¹⁵ Assumptions about the different qualities of language as code that law scholars, information scientists, and art theorists have engaged in – increased speed, flexibility, availability, and accessibility of data – are also addressed by artists who make use of or, again, abuse the possibility of appropriating and re-framing material that was formerly authorized and issued: “When cutting and pasting are integral to the writing process, it would be mad to imagine that writers wouldn’t exploit these functions in extreme ways that weren’t intended by their creators” (Goldsmith 2011: 5). This, again, reflects the alliance of technology and artistic practices within free culture against being seized by corporate interests and commodified language. Yet the notion that “cutting and pasting are integral to the writing process” and that literary practices are therefore actively asked to “exploit these functions in extreme ways” for the programmatic strategy of Neo-Conceptual writing is much more complex than the simple analogy Goldsmith suggests. That writers

entability –, or eternal public domain. On the history of open source paradigms see e. g. Berry and Moss (2008); O’Reilly (2005: 461– 475); Schiff (2002).  It is Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig who co-created the discourse surrounding the quality of digital technology for the management of content and data files and their effects on the human psyche, social structures, and the desires unhampered access and open source paradigms bear – he explicitly does so for cases of data pirating, copyright infringement, and peer-to-peer sharing networks. He famously stated that once the accessibility and management of code is unleashed by means of technological hardware and software as well as by the necessary infrastructure, there is no way of turning back to the restrictive modes valid for the analog setting. On these changes see his Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), Free Culture (2004: 17– 79) and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008: esp. 43 – 50).

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have to “use this proliferation in unexpected ways to create works that are as expressive and meaningful as works constructed in more traditional ways” (ibid. 15), is a demand that is, of course, one effect of “the sheer penetration and saturation of broadband that makes the harvesting of masses of language easy and tempting” (ibid. 5); the appropriative strategy nevertheless exceeds the all-too-simplistic assumption that a shift in technology alone is responsible for fast and easy poaching. This complex negotiation in Neo-Conceptualism, one which ultimately contributes to a poetics of postmodern plagiarism, consists of five elements: first, the valorization of form over content; this aspect relates to and determines both Neo-Conceptual practices’ affinity to preceding conceptual practices of the twentieth century – Dadaism, Concrete Poetry, Oulipo, Situationism after Guy Debord, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry – as well as its disregard for textual borders (in the form of diachronic transgressive strategies reminiscent of Critifiction’s syncretism of theory, criticism, and fiction, and the demand for code neutrality and free access that has arisen with the technological paradigm shift). Second, Neo-Conceptualism displays a conviction for the elemental opacity of the sign, or rather the signifier as such. It thereby again shares certain poststructuralist tenets especially with respect to the plurality of meanings and the de-essentializing potential of language. A third element relates to a hierarchy within the artistic objective, i. e. that the idea or the concept presides over the eventual product, and – here differing decisively from the meta-fictional interests of Critifiction and Playgiarism – over the processual execution leading to the observable result. Fourth, by paying most attention to the initial impulse, the obedience to this conceptual rule that brings about the result breaks with an authorial ideal of inspiration, Critifiction’s free playful re-affirmation of authorial individuality as well as ConText’s violently charged occupation of the male-dominated canon. What I repudiated for the plagiarist program prevalent in the 1970s – an intended determination of the properties of each of a game’s pieces, “in other words, [to determine] the proper way to move them” (Wittgenstein 1953: sec. 23) – regains prevalence with Neo-Conceptual practices. Play gives way to a controllable game and follows a rigid regularity in the intentionally uncreative production of literature. Finally, with form eclipsing content, opacity being favored over linguistic accountability, conceptual idea exceeding process and product, and regulated game surpassing free play and spontaneous ingenuity, creativity as an concept and the author as originator, owner, playful bricoleur (Critifiction), or fierce advocate for female subjectivity (ConText) have become inverted. The Neo-Conceptual authorial subject endorses past, present and future text as eternally obtainable and subject to (Situationist) reframing because it is not the content of a

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work of art that speaks and conveys meaning, nor the authority that comes with awarded reputation. To establish un-creative writing, for example in declaring journalist articles and ordinary ads to be literature (Goldsmith), reframing rape trial testimonies as poetry (Place), or erasing all evidence of the pre-text’s author’s creativity from the manuscript (Morrison), Neo-Conceptual poetics rebrand plagiarism as a conceptual practice that plays out language experiment of the twentieth century against the backdrop of the twenty-first-century techno-cultural dispositif. The five elements of Neo-Conceptualism’s distinct appropriative strategies can be approached via four major areas of interest: namely, the poetic qualities of digital code that become visible in the context of conceptual predecessors in the twentieth century; here, the transit and translation of the predecessors’ strategies into the self-governing environment through which virtual language drifts is most prominent. Next, two central preliminaries – those of denouncing textual entity as well as false creative interest – are discussed in relation to the aesthetic practice of outspoken uncreativity, a practice that not only illustrates the appropriation of other authorial subjects’ language material, but also the methodological consequence of continuously oscillating between the displacement and reframing of text through mechanical text management, i. e. the rules of the game. Finally, before concluding with a discussion of the cultural agenda of Neo-Conceptualist poetics, I shall profile the repercussions for the authorial subject in accordance with and in contrast to the eclectic authorial conceptualizations of mainstream literary production as well as Critifiction and ConText. The poetic qualities of digital code are necessarily tied to the effects of virtual language production noted above. The means of quickly gaining access to, appropriating and modifying text brings about a corresponding mode of text management that uncovers the instability and fragmentation of code. Goldsmith, in a clear appropriation of Roland Barthes’ passage on the superiority of the text itself, or écriture, taken from “The Death of the Author,” claims that with “the resultant text [… as] a tissue of quotations drawn from a series of ghost writings” (2011: 18)¹¹⁶ the virtual amalgamation of any part of code is necessarily authorless.

 In the most canonized translation of Barthes’ essay within the US in Image, Music, Text (1977 [1967]) edited and translated by Stephen Heath, the passage describes text as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings […] blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations” (ibid. 146), “a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred” (147). The edition by Richard Howard (1986 [1967]: 49 – 55) reads the original tissu (see Barthes 1984 [1967]: 66) at least in its first mentioning as “a fabric of quotations” (1986 [1967]: 53).

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The tissue or fabric Barthes and Goldsmith refer to is built from the multitudes of synchronic and diachronic linguistic forms and potential meanings of text. In Neo-Conceptualism these forms and meanings feed on the totality of discourses that constitute appropriatable culture. It sets out from the premise that we are constantly enmeshed in a “pragmatic discourse that appropriates and renews what is given in the discourse that constitutes a social and cultural world” (Bruns 2006: 207). In doing so, the idiosyncrasies of language that arise with the advent of digital technology attempt to realize the demands and assumptions of post-structuralism – the multiplicity of meanings, the de-authorizing of the individual composer with an entitlement to language and writing, as well as the dehistoricization of language with respect to the paradigm of the ‘always already there.’¹¹⁷ Language’s malleability and its constant preliminarity on the screen evade the modes of analog text dissemination and the notion of fixity of the linguistic form per se. As a major consequence for general text production and hence also for literary composition language as code conflictingly brings forth both the materiality and immateriality of the signifier. The focus on the matter of language in a physical as well as a theoretical sense is produced ex negativo by calling attention to the quick and easy mutability of the linguistic sign. Language therefore obviously becomes “subjected to chance, scattering stability, controlled authorship, and prescribed ways of reading to the winds” (Goldsmith 2011: 18). This account and diagnosis of signs as basically arbitrary and as coincidental and unpredictable volatiles ‘scattered to the winds’ that only momentarily gain significance in their spontaneous “enunciation” (sensu Barthes) feed in to the notion of code as being practically free-floating in this elevated immateriality. The imprisonment of code on the material book page, a condition both Critifiction and ConText could only suggest, is now overt. The possibilities of digitalized language lie in the profound challenge of accustomed analog modes of writing, language management, authorial role assignment, and commodity standardization, all points at issue for programmatic literary plagiarism. The gap that has been opened up by free access and facilitated remixing antagonizes the interest of the legal-economic sphere in standardizing text that is understood to have been assembled by an individual source. Appropriative writing of the twenty-first century works as a mode of textual composition that challenges analog expectations of text – syntactical integrity, indi-

 Similar suggestions for the accomplishment and reification of post-structuralist theorems in the virtual environment have also been made in Landow (see 2006: 1– 2; 53 – 68; 345 – 358). In addition, see e. g. Edwards (1994); Poster (1990: 99 – 128); Ulmer (2004 [1989]).

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vidualized sense-making, and corresponding reimbursement. It operates by disrupting “normative flows of communication” (Goldsmith 2011: 35), a mode that suggests the break-up and renegotiation of the assumed stable quality of language and its idealized permanence, immutability, and immortality since “flux is inherent to the digital” (ibid. 32). Yet, as suggested above, the Neo-Conceptualist practice of appropriating all kinds of material in its own right is more complex than simply imagining it as the plain translation of language-critical positions since the late 1960s. In following the protocol of net neutrality and by treating all text types, contents, or file qualities as equal, the practice disposes of constructed hurdles that see some kinds of text as more valuable than others. Similar in strategy to Critifiction’s blending of theory, criticism, and fiction, and to mixing with ConText, the textual transgression flattens the hitherto existing hierarchy of text types and therefore lays bare these hurdles’ artificial ways of containing writing.¹¹⁸ However, despite the move towards clarifying these former systemic obscurities, Neo-Conceptualism simultaneously emphasizes the inherent thickness and opacity of a code’s unit, i. e. of the linguistic sign. Analog signals display a high density and arbitrary variation in assigning meaning within and beyond acknowledged grammatical structures; yet at the same time they pretend to denote a distinct shape and meaning; likewise, the leveled down literary signifier upholds its own non-transparency that structuralist systematization has been striving to overcome in theory. Thus, the linguistic signifier against the backdrop of virtually informed text management continues as well as discontinues heritages of functional/structuralist and self-sufficient/post-structuralist language, respectively. The interest in clearing up the deceitful quality of systemic formalism therefore not only breaks down any kind of code to the binary signals of 1/ ‘yes’ or 0/‘no,’ but in its still prevalent immateriality also realizes Barthes’ “variety of writings [… that] blend and clash” as well as the movement of deferring significance. Language both exposes and transcends its mere functional quality to convey content by at the same time opening up the canon towards the multiplicity of linguistic expression and signification. Not only is everything text, but text is also always ambiguous, literary. Judging from the numerous varieties of Neo-Conceptual writing, the diagnosed in-between state of language transparency and opacity is in continuity

 This hierarchy is informed by systemic policies including national legal intellectual property – copyrighted literary text is higher-rated than transmitted stock exchange bulletins or general news releases, the latter being oftentimes subject to fair use –, according esteem in the public conception of text, or, on a global scale, the discriminative conduct of material in cultures that know of and practice property policies after all.

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with the strategies of historic predecessors, and it is especially the focus on materiality/immateriality that is embedded in a longer tradition of conceptual practices emerging in both the literary movements and visual arts around the midtwentieth century, namely Dadaism, Concrete Poetry, Oulipo, and Situationism. European Dadaism of the 1910s and 20s with Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, and Hannah Höch (Switzerland/Berlin) or Guillaume Apollinaire and André Breton (Paris) is considered an early conceptual approach that informs twenty-firstcentury plagiarist poetics. In stressing form over content, let alone stable meaning, the linguistic signifier on the paper surface for Dada becomes the signified itself. In composing ostensibly mindless sound poems – Schwitters’ “Ursonate” (1923 – 1934) or Hugo Ball’s “KARAWANE” (1917), for example –, Dada stresses the materiality and potential significance of the signifier in its own right and therefore pushes the self-sufficiency of language to the fore.¹¹⁹ Neo-Conceptualist Robert Fitterman, in his poem “Directory” (published 2009 in Poetry magazine), appropriates and recites the inventory of a proto-American shopping plaza. Considering the first stanza: Macy’s Circuit City Payless Shoes Sears Kay Jewelers GNC LensCrafters Coach H&M RadioShack Gymboree […] (Fitterman 2009b: 335)

The vertical alignment of shop names first of all reads like the randomly interchangeable and banal list of a global consumerist topography, floor by floor with a frequent recurrence of the bigger brands or emporia that reside on two or more levels. Yet just as in Hugo Ball’s “KARAWANE,” which assembles 17 lines of onomatopoetic phrases of an elephant train, signification in “Directory” is mainly accomplished precisely through this repetition of identical (Fitterman) or similar (Ball) vocabulary:¹²⁰ “Directory” in appropriating ordinary text mate-

 Concerning Dadaist sound poems, this self-sufficiency lies mainly in the rhythmicality of language as performed on and from the material book page. On Dadaist conceptuality and interest in empty content see e. g. Schaffner (2006).  Ball’s poem: “jolifanto bambla ô falli bàmbla / grossiga m’pfa habla horem / égiga goramen / […] / blago bung / blago bung / bosso fataka /ü üü ü / scahmpa wulla wussa ólobo

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rial – and without adding substantial context – rebuilds the omnipresent and uniform shopping mall in the anesthetizing layout of the hyperreal bazaar from a bird’s-eye view of the index; the independently meaningless sounds of each line in “KARAWANE” accordingly have an elephant herd appear in the reader’s imagination.¹²¹ Hence Neo-Conceptualist variants inherit, or appropriate, the Dadaist use of the form-over-content pattern to create, in Fitterman’s case, ‘uncreative’ references to the arbitrariness and hyperrealist quality of loca amoena in popular culture. 1950s Concrete Poetry (and visual poetry) as a second major influence adds to Neo-Conceptualism the concern with reduction, clarity, and brevity of pronouncement, and allies it with the communication of intent through the form and structure of language. The way in which signifiers are aligned typographically surpasses their merely transparent function as “indifferent vehicles, […] tabootombs in which convention insists on burying the idea” (2007 [1956]: 213), as Augusto de Campo of the Brazilian poetry group Noigandres insists. The ‘concreteness’ of the sign and its placement on the page without any superfluous decorum to support a coherent syntax is what Flarf poet Ara Shirinyan (see above) reframes by transposing the random findings from search engines in Your Country is Great. And it is this adopted reduction that Vanessa Place also adapts in Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts (2010): in appropriating witness reports by victims of sexual assault from her day job as a public defender in court and by transforming them into the ethically inculpable medium of literature, she purposely fails to provide the reader with intratextual framing or de-escalating additional information and leaves him or her with the barely edited legal pre-text, the ‘statements of facts.’ Another influence on twenty-first-century appropriation derives yet again from a European context. Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle: ‘workshop of potential literature’), associated since the 1960s most notably with Raymond Queneau, George Perec, Italo Calvino, and Oskar Pastior, saw its task as finding new ways of writing in the wake of literary modernism. It also focused on the alternative treatment of paradigms such as reality, history, and truth and did so by channeling this interest into a profound exploration of constraining techniques. Utmost fidelity to a restraining dictate of, for instance, a palindrome or downright mathematical lines of thought for Oulipo promised a mechanical and

[…]” (Ball 1917 in Huelsenbeck 1987 [1920]: 53). In the original printing, the layout assigns each line a different font, font size and alignment to designate each individual animal its distinct walking style.  Obviously, both poems are additionally guided by the paratextual cue of their respective title therein delineating the text type (‘directory’) or organization form (‘herd,’ ‘trail,’ ‘convoy’).

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utterly focused approach that was to be expressed in literary experiment.¹²² By dismissing the usage of the letter ‘e,’ in Perec’s novel A Void (La disparition, 1969), for example, the so-called lipogram limits the representable signifiers in such a way that not only does the potential of language become conspicuous by its absence, but it also fundamentally restricts the imaginative properties of the human authorial source through mechanical, or even arithmetical structures. Kenneth Goldsmith is the Neo-Conceptual figure who has most consistently appropriated this idea of unresolved constraint. In Soliloquy (2001), he explicitly logs what he had said for a whole week without inviting the reader to learn of his interlocutors’ responses or even about the external stimuli (events, media, dialog partners) that prompt his verbal statements. The idea of restraint in his Trilogy (2005 – 2008) forces him to transcribe in detail radio weather reports (Weather, 2005), traffic news on a New York holiday weekend (Traffic, 2007), and sports news (Sports, 2008) without allegedly adding to this ‘found’ material from commonplace channels of communication. In adapting this mode of rigid limitation, Neo-Conceptualism thereby translates “[t]he potential of constraints [that] is more important than their actual execution” (Perloff 2010: 14) for the purpose of surpassing out-of-date interests in the eventual textual product as well as in the product coming into being that was still pertinent for Critifiction’s self-reflective meta-perspective. From 1950s Situationism the concepts of dérive (‘drift’) and détournement (‘redirection,’ ‘misappropriation’) are derived. Both modes target a profound alteration of daily routines such as finding one’s way around with a city map, yet using it in entirely different surroundings – on a mountain hike, for example. Situationist programs realize the displacement and translocation of content, form, and assimilated practices into environments for which they were not designed. Guy Debord, one of Situationism’s major proponents, identified the movement as a social utopia in which “everyone will be free to détourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them” (Debord and Wolman 1956: n.pag). This ‘change of conditions’ accomplishes the transgression of genres in the widest sense since the demand for replacing and translocating all sorts of determinants is supposed to affect culture as a whole. For Neo-Conceptualism, Situationism offers different approaches and innovative strategies for coping with quotidian phenomena and for transgressing the border between life and art. It suggests a manipulation of code that is all the

 For Oulipo’s use of palindromes see Boehncke and Kuhne (1993: 100 ff.); for the discussion of mathematical rules see Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi (Life a User’s Manual, 1978) in which the story is modeled after the Knight’s Tour, a mathematical chess problem.

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more possible in the digital sphere as it guarantees a seamless surface that coats the fractions and infringements of the underlying heterogeneity. These are aspects I found in Place’s Tragodía project – relocating purloined witness reports into prose poetry enframed within the classic Greek dramatic form, thereby fusing tragedy with factual legal documentation. Or, again, think of Fitterman’s reproduction of the appropriated mall topography in “Directory.” In summary, Neo-Conceptual writing not only accomplishes post-structuralist goals of free(d) text, de-authorization, and meaning deferral, but also captures central features of earlier avant-garde experiments: an interest in form over content and in the concreteness of the word from Dadaism and Concrete Poetry; the focus on constraint and a preference for the initial idea over the process and final product, as in Oulipo; and the methodical attention to replacing text within new genre environments and to injecting the supposedly quotidian into the sphere of literary imagination, as inspired by Situationism. In contrast to these avant-garde movements, the relation of language poetry since the late 1960s to twenty-first-century practices is more complex.¹²³ To perceive an influence here is especially tempting since its representatives are located in the United States, their practices challenge the conjunctive and transparent function of the linguistic sign, and they transgress the conventional boundaries between poetry and prose. Of course, both factions share a tendency to include found material, an interest in paratactical poem formation, as well as an underlying suspicion of the referentiality of language (see e. g. Silliman 1986: xvi, xviii – xix), not to mention certain previous institutionalizations.¹²⁴ Marjorie Perloff, influential chronicler of avant-garde poetry, also affirms this alignment when she identifies both kinds as “poetr[ies] of programmatic nonreferentiality [… and] syntactic distortion” (2010: 8). Yet skepticism towards linguistic transparency and a penchant for disrupting grammar and meaning still belie differing attitudes towards the initial im-

 For reasons of consistency I will continue to refer to the mid-twentieth-century version as ‘language poetry’ although I am acutely aware of the nuanced usage of ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry’ (after the eponymous magazine established by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews in 1978) and ‘language-centered writing.’ On the movement see e. g. Greer (1989), Hejinian (2000), or Silliman (1987).  Examples of this still close alignment of language poetry and Neo-Conceptualism on an organizational basis are Robert Fitterman’s involvement as curator in the Ear Inn reading series in New York City (founded by Ted Greenwald and Charles Bernstein in 1978), the broad publicity language poetry receives on UbuWeb, an extensive non-commercial online resource for literary, music and film material founded by Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996, and the favorable treatment of language poetry to discuss theoretical implications of text in the digital sphere (see e. g. Morris 2006: 24; Watten 2006: 335 – 336, 341– 343).

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pulse that produces the poetic text. Language poetry cleaves to the intentional invention of language for the purpose of revealing this system’s idiosyncrasies: original invention and language reflexivity remain central creative principles that direct power and responsibility to the formative agent, the author. Language poets still “accept their predeccessors’ trust in invention, in the poet’s power to create a unique parole from the language pool of the culture” (Perloff 2010: 11; original emphasis). Originality, creativity, and a belief in the ontological a priori of individual inventive agency are not shunned as misleading cultural illusions, but are accepted and geared towards additional possibilities. Neo-Conceptualism, on the other hand, does not care where the resources for its individual projects come from. It thereby wrests the formerly codified texts from their embedding in (literary) history, synchronic uniformity, and originator-related authorization. Spurred on by the consequences of digital text production and code leveling, Neo-Conceptualism enables the plagiarized material to generate and represent itself as alienated from its previous surroundings; the author function lies merely in ‘programming’ the constraint and in assembling the found components. In sum, this plagiarist practice can be explicitly aligned with perceptions and poetic qualities of code processed by twentieth-century predecessors. Seen in this light, Neo-Conceptualism has its own place within literary history, yet it equally advances its predecessors’ concerns with form, conceptual restraint, and concreteness by exaggerating them within the parameters of ‘uncreative writing.’ What I consider to be the major investment of Neo-Conceptualism is the branding of uncreativity, and it is this branding’s distinctive features that will constitute the most important inferences for recent plagiarist strategies: first of all, uncreativity triggers basic preconceptions concerning the composition and quality of textual material. If a work of art such as Place’s Tragodía project is labeled ‘uncreative’ from the outset, then all ostensible assumptions and categorical evaluation of the work’s content, style, morale, or canonical sustainability prove entirely void. Readers are conditioned to expect certain standards of originality, individuality, authenticity, and creative singularity, all factors upon which the literary industry is grounded. Yet affirmed uncreativity from the very start evades the aesthetic normative categories of reading, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation, and the literary-economical normative categories of the creation of value, brand development, and capitalization. The maxim of uncreative text production entails two consequences: the first concerns the well-known incrimination of the ownership ideal and original quality assignment with respect to a textual product, an attitude shared with the other two modes of postmodern plagiarism; the second reflects a profound dis-

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crediting of the possibility of such dethroned authorial agents to produce creative form and content. This discrediting suggests an inversion of artistic quality and creative potential that has to be taken for granted to confirm and fulfill the perpetuated ideal of authorship as ownership. Establishing uncreativity as a maxim and method requires a cogent metaphor and analogy: the literary machine as productive agent, as well as the Situationist displacement and translocation as analogous to the appropriation of text. It is the combination of a mechanized approach that seeks to realize uncreative imitativeness with the campaign for translocating writing routines that enables literary plagiarism to continue its methodical and programmatic path beyond the ‘classical’ postmodern strategies of Critifiction and ConText. Turning to the first consequence of Neo-Conceptualist uncreativity, a certain proximity to Critifiction as well as to ConText’s denial of the correlation of originality, expressiveness, and ownership can be espied. Again, originality is not linked to the expressiveness of an individual, personalized source and this pertains also to the basic equation of originality and property. Goldsmith declares that “to think that what I consider to be ‘mine’ was ‘original’ would be blindingly egotistical […] because, in the end, I don’t think that I can possibly define what’s mine and what isn’t” (2011: 83, 84).¹²⁵ As this conception of the individual and of the authorial self shows, the clear demarcation necessary for assessing individualizable quality and, as a consequence, the right to own this quality, is not only blurred, but also a priori only imagined. Goldsmith highlights the impossibility of ontologically discerning between one’s own and another’s and, from another angle, the pointless narcissist pursuit of colonizing this indiscernible texture. In the environment in which Neo-Conceptualism is embedded, this idle authorial narcissism is becoming ever more accentuated. Within the globalized technosphere in which the participating agents in general, and these appropriating writers in particular, are already eminently aware of the plurality and malleability of (textual) identities, the abundance of possible roles and innumerable appropriatable characteristics are reflected in their modes of writing and in their attitudes towards it: “For writers coming of age in the 70s and 80s, the notion of multiple identities and appropriated identities is a sort of native language” (Fitterman 2009a: 12), one which equally infuses conceptual writing practices. Hence, the interest in producing programmatically uncreative material has its cause in the postmodern flexibilization of enclosed selfhood and personal

 Goldsmith’s quote echoes Raymond Federman’s amnesic line – “For I do not know […] where my own language began and where it converged with that of others within the dialogue all of us entertain within ourselves, and with others” (1993a: 52).

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distinctiveness that has become immensely formative for, or even ‘native’ and ‘natural’ to, these conceptual writers. With the prerequisite of versatile identity formation in mind, I want to argue that for Neo-Conceptualist appropriation originality is not linked to containable individual subjectivity or to this subject’s disposition towards his or her virtually disseminated creativity. As a consequence, unoriginality is set in clear opposition both to the institutionalized understanding of what a text and relatable author is asked to convey and to conventional legal, economic and aesthetic standards. In provocatively proclaiming literary sterility (in contrast to the imagery evoked by poetic fertility and authorial procreation) and anti-imaginative inventiveness, the conception of individual ingenuity is both updated and challenged. Also of note in this context are the descriptive labels that arise through both a self- and scholarly conception. In the author Goldsmith’s as well as in the literary critic Perloff’s writings, for instance, the term ‘unoriginal genius’ frequently occurs and serves to encompass the plurality of diverse Neo-Conceptualist practices.¹²⁶ It entails three aspects: first, ‘unoriginal genius’ denotes a term that decries originality as a means of assessing the value of a piece of writing and of an artist’s prowess; second, it obviously frames and affirms ‘unoriginality’ as an artistic quality in itself, a quality that contains the paradoxical promise of innovation and ingenuity in the artistic product; and third, in the combination of ‘unoriginal’ with the equally historically burdened designation ‘genius,’ the latter is transformed since writerly brilliance and literary artistry are no longer subject to inimitability. Beyond the first consequence, the second involves the rejection, or the radical redefinition, of creative productivity: [Creativity] is the thing to flee from, not only as a member of the ‘creative class’ but also as a member of the ‘artistic class.’ Living when technology is changing the rules of the game in every aspect of our lives, it’s time to question and tear down such clichés and lay them out on the floor in front of us, then reconstruct these smoldering embers into something new, something contemporary, something – finally relevant. (Goldsmith 2011: 9; my emphases)

 Despite its title, Perloff, in her 2010 collection of essays Unoriginal Genius: Poetry By Other Means in the New Century, mainly sketches the heritage of twenty-first-century poetry from Benjamin’s Arcades Project to Brazilian Concrete Poetry to documentary poetry closing with a discussion of Goldsmith’s Traffic. Goldsmith himself picks up the term from Perloff in his monograph Uncreative Writing (2011). Nick Groom in 2010 published the article “Unoriginal Genius: Plagiarism and the Construction of ‘Romantic’ Authorship” in Bently, Davis, and Ginsburg (see 2010: 271– 299). With Groom, the term relates to Romantic originality and the sanctioning of derivatives in the eighteenth century that also included allegations against now-canonized authors such as Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth.

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This quote suggests the complexity of Neo-Conceptualist poetics. Both the term and the practice of ‘uncreativity’ become revalorized: although uncreativity for these writers means that the material they bring forth does not originate in their individually exceptional imagination, but rather in the totality of linguistic code at work in culture, it does not simply refer to banal reproduction and imitation via illegitimate appropriation. Yet although the result in sight – “something new, something contemporary, something – finally relevant” – echoes the artistic quest for innovation, representability, and significance, this strategy does not fall back into traditional and legally acceptable ideals of authorial individualism and textual chastity. Rather, as in Situationist détournement – the displacement and translocation of ideas or text to charge the everyday with poetic quality – the “critique is in the reframing” (Place and Fitterman 2009: 20) of appropriated material as well as in the inversion of conventional expectations – ‘original,’ ‘genius,’ ‘inspiration,’ etc. – that describe authorial potential and textual value. The writer’s accomplishment no longer lies in generating supposedly unique form or content; we rather find it in the reversal of literary orthodoxies, i. e. of what is deemed good or bad, or what is considered literature and art after all. In the outspoken detachment from ever-present yet no longer ‘new,’ ‘contemporary,’ or ‘relevant’ creation, once more “[i]nventio is giving way to appropriation” (Perloff 2010: 11; original emphasis).¹²⁷ Situationist paradigms in which misappropriation is effected and systemic conventions transgressed by means of “deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them,” as Debord declared, prevail in terms of the distinct terminology that is applied with ‘unoriginal genius,’ ‘uncreativity,’ and ‘newness.’ In transgressing systemic conventions, détourned text – for example Shirinyan’s Google search-gone-poetry or Place’s issuing of legal code as writings that exceed the non-fictional text to become literature¹²⁸ – transposes not only the level of unified text and ordered text types and genres; it also detours the ways in which plagiarism is perceived (as pathological condition, crime, and lit-

 Despite Perloff’s use of italics that indicate the borrowed Latin term inventio, she does not refer to the first of five particular canons of the rhetoric art that serves to discover the necessary arguments for the art of discourse. In applying the Latin expression, she is rather stressing the anachronism of inventive writing towards the contemporary eligibility of appropriative conceptualism.  The verb form ‘exceed’ in this phrase does not aim at re-hierarchizing the make-believe system of literature over everyday language. It rather sets the route of all text towards its poetic exploitation, i. e. that all text is decidedly literary with the code’s double bind of transparency (no generic borders) and opacity (the polyvalence of the linguistic sign).

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erary denigration) with respect to literary commodification and the conventional plagiarist narrative. First, Neo-Conceptual exercises of détournement transgress the traditional commodification of literature with its self-contained book as the pre-conditioned market good that serves to authenticate literary, and thus authorial, productivity. The leveled-down code of radio weather reports (see Goldsmith’s Weather) or a shopping mall register of department stores (Fitterman’s “Directory”) by displacement and translocation challenges this good’s presumed characteristics to contain purely literary material; as invention gives way to appropriation on both the intratextual as well as the strategic level, sellable innovation has to give up its self-sufficient regularities – such as retail price maintenance, added value services (merchandise, readings, adaptations) and, of course, rigid copyright directives –, and give in to the technological and material consequences for the literary market that have occurred with the advent of digital language processing and the corresponding substantiation of all language as code.¹²⁹ Second, misappropriation traces the responses to the plagiarist narrative with its protocol of initial suspicion, full exposure, close reasoning, concluding conviction, and sustainable stigmatization after a deception of the pre-text’s authorial subject, its economic representatives, one’s own readership and the general public. Having emptied the commodity, i. e. exchange value of the material book, and its assignment to provide a readership with original material, NeoConceptualism anticipates the stigma attached to plagiarism and incorporates it by embracing unoriginality and uncreative writing. Neo-Conceptualism has to distance itself from previous, similar poetics, in this case language poetry, in order to communicate the contemporariness of its plagiarist stance: “[T]he New Sentence has been in its turn replaced by citational or documentary prose, drawn from a variety of source texts, high and low, as well as by the use of visual layout on page or screen, used to defamiliarize poetic material” (Perloff 2010a: 21; my emphasis). Neo-Conceptualism succeeds in translating appropriative patterns into a contemporary cultural setting in two

 Such developments include modes of literary production: collective authorship, online novels, and ebook reader hardware (Kindle, Nook, Papyrus, iPad); modes of sales: books-on-demand policies, institutionalized secondary markets (e. g. Amazon marketplace); modes of merchandise: viral marketing and intermedial incentives (blogs, podcasts, videocast, microblogging, live readings); and modes of accessibility and legal flexibilization: open source (Google books, Script, etc.) and alternative ownership licensing agreements (Creative Commons, Copyleft, General Public License, etc.). For a comprehensive overview of the changing parameters of the literary industry in the twenty-first century see e. g. Cope and Phillips (2006: 47– 68), Gomez (2008: 67– 133), and Thompson (2005: esp. 309 – 329).

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ways: on the one hand, it advances the cause, structure, and methods of language poetry, adopting its thematization of the signifier, and acknowledging the poetic quality of the everyday; on the other, it discards such features as the orthodox adherence to authorial creativity. This plagiarist strategy thereby relies on an increasingly virtual setting that has brought forth profoundly shifting notions of textual homogeneity, unity, accessibility, alimentation, and proprietary rights. We now turn to the practical consequences that arise with the promotion of unoriginality and uncreativity. As suggested above, the most consistent design derives from the ideas of constraint and concreteness as well as from an interest in programmed impulse, all of which are epitomized in the metaphor of the machine. The image of the literary apparatus that is set in motion to exercise certain patterns, perform specific tasks, and provide reliable results can be linked to the appliance that symbolizes text production in the twenty-first century, the computer. It is this device that has profoundly altered conceptions of how text can be depicted, processed, or disseminated, and, as we have seen above, it is the device that has reduced all kinds of writable utterance – numbers, news, literature, or shopping lists – to the status of code. The computer operates according to commands and algorithms and follows an initial impulse with a pre-programmed course of action. Reminiscent of Dada and Oulipo implications, the emphasis of this analogy rests on the idea or concept rather than the ensuing process or the resultant product itself. It is the initial idea that sets the quality and pace of the work that comes into being: “By constructing the perfect machine and setting it in motion, the works [sic!] creates itself” (Goldsmith 2011: 139). The idealized “perfect machine” disregards the content of a file, its aesthetic, poetic and ethical impact and merely has the code’s function follow the conceptualized form. Deleuze, focusing on the authorial determination of Marcel Proust in his essay “The Literary Machine” (1970), accordingly identifies “the highest power of language [to be] discovered only when the work was viewed as a machine, producing certain effects, amenable to a certain use” (2000 [1970]: 146). In order to maintain this ‘useful’ machine, what becomes the most important thing is its ability to perform concrete constraints such as the transcription of weather reports over 365 days or deriving a poem’s elements from web search engine queries. This applies ever more so since once the process is set into motion, ‘the work creates itself’ in the jumble of the leveled code and along the lines of the ever-present constraint. Yet, simultaneously, these operations still occur within the post-structuralist belief in the opaque fabric of the ambiguous linguistic sign. Code and écriture are hereby married through the

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complex capacities of ubiquitous hardware and the attendant shift in authorial and readerly practices.¹³⁰ For Neo-Conceptualism the author is a mechanical instigator: “In order to proceed, I have to build a machine. I have to answer each question and set up a number of rules that I must then strictly follow” (2011: 119), Goldsmith asserts with respect to his conception of the authorial subject. The ‘I’ in his assertion is the cause which “build[s]” this apparatus “[i]n order to proceed.” But the conception of writing as mechanical activity significantly alters this authorial ‘I’ according to the particularities of the writing system: he or she can be identified rather as “a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine” (ibid. 1– 2). The metaphor of the writing machine demands a maintainer, a craftsman who manufactures the poetic appliance and maintains it in working order. Apart from the initial ‘construction’ and ensuing ‘maintenance’ of the literary machine, the notion of the ‘author as programmer’ detaches the writing agent from his or her material not only in terms of rejecting the interdependence of individual source and genuine wholesome expressiveness; it also subscribes to a revised assessment of authorial quality: “[P]erhaps the best authors of the future will be ones who can write the best programs with which to manipulate, parse and distribute language-based practices” (ibid. 11; my emphases). “[T]he best authors” have become both maintainers and content managers of ever-present, never creative language that they exclusively “manipulate,” grammatically dissect, and communicate. These maintaining programmers and manipulating managers simultaneously sequestrate material beyond the limiting borders of poetic or fictional text and are – in the sense of a poeta faber digitalis – proficient in technical and systemic knowledge: word processing, database applications, and facile copy-and-paste appropriation – all elements that suggest themselves to the current intentional plagiarist writing practice. Vice versa, the programming plagiarist as the legitimizing agent of uncreative writing as “something new, something contemporary,  The notion of automatic writing is again not entirely new to poetic avant-garde practices. Consider, for instance Surrealist écriture automatique or Jack Kerouac’s ‘spontaneous prose.’ On spontaneous prose of the Beat Generation see e. g. Kerouac (in Charters 1995: 481– 490) and Weinreich (1987); for Surrealist automatic writing see Breton (2007 [1933]: 33 – 55), Breton and Éluard (1976 [1929]), Mundel (1997), and Tzara (1931). With respect to blending the literary and the mechanical on the part of technology, Ted Nelson’s approach with his ‘literary machine’ in 1980 already gave a comprehensive idea of the overwhelming consequences of the information age. A techno-optimist, he saw the computer create a “docuverse” (1992 [1980]: 4/15) of cultural memory and “a new libertarian literature” (ibid. 1/4) promoting an ideal participatory and fully democratic system.

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something finally relevant” is promoted to the level of a skilled poet in its own right. Hence, the Neo-Conceptual plagiarist is upgraded to an authorial subject proper while the latter’s qualities of originality and creativity are concurrently overturned. Thus, even now, the post-structuralist dissolution of the author is not fully achieved: “Mimesis and replication doesn’t eradicate authorship, rather they simply place new demands on authors who must take these new conditions into account” (ibid. 10). From the depths of appropriated code the notion of authorship has inevitably returned to propose itself as part of that literature’s formation. Although Neo-Conceptualism attends to an expropriation of the imaginative author through strategic appropriation – inter alia by inverting the qualitative assessments of unoriginality –, the constraint of uncreativity again points towards a trigger in charge. Neo-Conceptualism is thus an appropriative strategy that explicitly and continuously refers to the already changed and relentlessly changing environment it is a part of. While this technological, medial, and communicational digital ecosphere with its net neutrality and malleable code allows for free text in terms of access and proprietorship, this ecosphere still valorizes the decisions of an authorial subject that hoards, selects, abandons and combines code to feed the restraining operations of the literary machine. And despite the acknowledged authority of the digital, Neo-Conceptualist products still depend primarily on analog domains of publication, i. e. a work of literature in printed, bookbound form multiplied and distributed by a representative, though considerably small, intermediary.¹³¹ Neo-Conceptualism’s cultural agenda of appropriation, with its conceptual program of ‘uncreative writing’ and its promotion of unoriginality, highlights language as code with respect to authorship as ownership, the self-containment of the literary work, and allegedly ontological barriers between text types and writing environments. Yet in its transgression of borders towards the material

 Looking at the publication organs of Neo-Conceptual writers, a strong tendency towards independent, non-profit presses and initiatives is obvious. While Goldsmith published his trilogy Traffic, The Weather, and Sports with Ara Shirinyan’s Make Now and his other conceptual works with equally independent presses such as The Figures (No. 111.2.7.93 – 10.20.96 [1997], Head Citations [2002], Day) and Granary Books (Soliloquy), Vanessa Place’s books are distributed via her own press Les Figues (Dies: A Sentence [2005]), Fiction Collective 2 (La Medusa [2008]), Other Press (The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality [2010a]), and Blanc Press (Tragodía [2009 – 2011]). The texts by Yedda Morrison are fully accessible online with or alternatively available on demand by Little Red Leaves (Darkness [chapter 1]), Kelsey Street (Crop [2003]), and displaced press (girl scout nation [2008]).

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of the everyday – the news report, the rape trial appellate brief, or a mall directory –, it also attends to what can be considered ‘literary.’ In order to encourage the “method or machine that makes the poem [to] set[] the political agenda in motion or bring[] issues of morality or politics into question” (Goldsmith 2011: 101), the plagiarist practice at hand suggests three programmatic stages: first, the irreversibility of technological progress and its attendant medial developments, an expansion of digital rights and access that open-source activist and law professor Lawrence Lessig calls “obvious. And when it seems obvious, anything that resists that expectation will seem ridiculous” (2008: 44);¹³² second, the upward revaluation of the everyday and a move towards rendering all text poetic – quotidian utility text or functional literature and highly valued imaginative belles lettres converge in a leveled code which suggests the poetic potential of all text; and third, the naturalization of appropriative maneuvers: plagiarized material such as Place’s statements of facts enjoys the détournement of the legal to the literary, a rejection of readerly expectations, genre conventions, and righteous professional conduct; yet it is the appropriative measure that suggests the poetic potential of these briefs, that helps turn them into Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts, and that indicates a consolidation of the former distinctions by means of textual infringement. Against the backdrop of the advent of the digital and the changes in modes of writerly production, distribution, and reading, Neo-Conceptualism concludes the examination of postmodern literary strategies that employ plagiarism. While Critifiction and Playgiarism demonstrated the intersection of theory, criticism, and fiction in accordance with early postmodern treatments of playful meta-fictionality, ConText in its careful selection of canonical texts from the male Western canon pronounced the fundamental negotiation of the textual entity as feminist body writing. Neo-Conceptual plagiarism, finally, has proven instrumental

 Lessig in Remix differentiates between read-only (RO) and read-write (RW) cultures with the former merely seeing text and media as forms of consumption that hold a monopoly of production of commodities with the content industry. This culture and corresponding business model derives from modes of production and consumption that operate with “analog tokens” (2008: 38). The latter, on the other hand, takes into account the “importance of ‘amateur’ creativity” (ibid. 33), and the right to reproduce and change all kinds of cultural tokens to creatively build upon it. He continues the above quote: “Ridiculous, in turn, makes many of us willing to break the rules that restrict access. Even the good become pirates in a world where the rules seem absurd” (ibid. 44). RW-culture, according to Lessig, was revived with the advent of the digital that suggested quick and easy access, net neutrality, and a maximum potential of sharing. It is Lessig’s argument that open source paradigms should accommodate a legal environment that is still in service for RO-culture to the proprietary questions that digital technology and remix culture pose. On this accommodation process see also the conclusion to this study.

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in underlining the prospective for contemporary radical referencing and its cultural symptoms: a litmus test for conceptions of literary authorship in the twenty-first century.

3 Plagiarism as Writing Practice in US Postmodern Literature The previous chapters have served to frame plagiarism as a complex phenomenon that touches upon economic, legal and aesthetic dimensions. These dimensions, of course, pertain to the common practice of ‘stealing text’ as a way of gaining credit and recognition as well as to the distinctly postmodern negotiations of authorship I have identified and explicated as Critifiction, ConText, and Neo-Conceptual writing. This being the case, the programmatic agendas of all three variants clearly draw on the (non‐)value and stigma attached to the petty-theft kind, and they assist in unmasking the mechanics of the literary market and its fixation on originality, individualism, and creative output. The following five case studies will put some flesh on the bones of what I envisioned as postmodern plagiarism in terms of elucidating the claims made for the respective variants: How is the blending of theory, criticism, and fiction actually realized in Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing? In what way may feminist ConText renegotiate canonized material from male authors, and how does the analogy of physical body and literary text come forth? And finally, can the reckless appropriations of entire text units by the Neo-Conceptualists Goldsmith, Place, and Morrison really make a point in promoting uncreativity as a mode of production for the twenty-first century? But these case studies also serve another purpose beyond the illustration of strategic appropriative practices. They simultaneously call for the reader to critically engage in the complex modes of operation these literary products are caught up in: If these books claim to shake up or even abolish the customary order of the literary marketplace, then why do they still make use of writing as a cultural technique and relie on a comparatively elitist infrastructure for publication? Is the sort of writerly agent that emerges with each of these texts rather oriented towards a cheap mixing of all authorial concepts we have encountered in the history of authorship or is this subject an authorial neophyte, a result that would certainly contradict postmodern plagiarism’s renunciation of any innovation whatsoever? The five case studies all address these pertinent questions and bear up against the inevitable paradoxes that arise with many experimental forms of writing.

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3.1 Practicing Theory With Critifiction: Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1971/1991) The case studies substantiating the claims made for plagiarist practices in postmodern US literature from the 1970s to 2010 commence with both the earliest and also most well-known and ‘established’ plagiarist writer among those discussed. Raymond Federman (1928 – 2009) brings with him an extensive œuvre and considerable authorial ‘symbolic capital,’ including the Guggenheim Fellowship as early as 1966, the Fulbright Fellowship (1982/83), and the American Book Award (1986) for Smiles on Washington Square. His writings have received abundant recognition, with translations in over 15 languages, a critical anthology (see Di Leo 2011), and a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Fiction (see Gerdes 2002) dedicated to him. Due to his familiarity with post-structuralist literary theory and criticism, scholars repeatedly see Federman’s critifictional practice as exhibiting an exceptional competency for explicating the discussion of linguistic difference and the ambiguities of (literary) language in and for postmodern texts (see e. g. Rasmussen 2011; Truchlar 1983: 330; Wielgosz 1995: 100 – 101). With this in mind, the following analysis aims to take these readings into account while simultaneously investigating the implications of Critifiction and Playgiarism for a plagiarist poetics, as derived from Federman’s novel Double or Nothing (1971/1991; DoN). After a concise survey of Federman’s works, considering both the broadness and intensity of his writerly activities, Double or Nothing will serve to illustrate the claims made for Critifiction and Playgiarism in chapter 2.2.1. This encompasses, first of all, a look at the paradigmatic title of the text, as well as an attempt to outline the novel’s postmodern content and fragmented storyline. Subsequently, I will identify the text as embodying the proto-postmodern practice of Critifiction that aims at exposing and subsequently dismantling the constructedness of reality, history, and subjectivity via language. The second major feature of the analysis will consider the transgression of the individual text’s integrity, ‘work-ness,’ and authorial subjectivity; with Double or Nothing, we see the blending of theory, criticism, and fiction that, as the first example, realizes Derrida’s assertion that text always “bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” (1978 [1966]: 358). This blending is not least accomplished in the appropriation of fragments from literary and philosophical pre-texts. I will suggest that these plagiarisms constitute an affirmation of the text’s proto-postmodern status and thereby serve as ‘stooges’ for the critifictionist agenda. Following this discussion of affirmative transgression is an investigation of the role of play and self-reflexivity within plagiarist practice. This investigation

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will show how these two elements rely on, on the one hand, post-structuralist and deconstructionist theorems and, on the other, intratextual evidence supporting their significance when it comes to the eternal deferral of meaning. With respect to this deferral, I will draw a connection to Critifiction and Playgiarism’s agenda, namely to escape the stable presence of meaning in order to assume a position decidedly against realist paradigms of literary writing, i. e. nonsense, and to catalyze the breaking down of categorical borders. In taking into account deconstructionist criticism that acknowledges the metaphysical determinacy arising with the all-pervasiveness of language, Crifiction’s promotion of Playgiarism as the eventual ‘natural’ condition of creative production will finally be explained, as well as challenged. The case study closes with an assessment of the role of the authorial subject as can be inferred from the textual entity Double or Nothing. The critifictionist writerly subject is ultimately proposed as a blender of generic and textual borders with the ultimate goal of creating non-sense and non-sensical confusion – a goal that, unfortunately, also exhausts the full critical potential of radical appropriation. As with several writers featured as case studies in this project, Raymond Federman had a scholarly background as a professor of literature (e. g. at UC Santa Barbara and SUNY Buffalo), writing his doctoral dissertation in comparative literature on Samuel Beckett’s fiction and the deceit of language as a communicative means. The work of the authorial subject ‘Federman,’ to whom some scholars also meta-reflexively refer as ‘the Penman’ or ‘the Featherman’ (see e. g. Di Leo 2011: 8; Gerdes 2002: 188 – 195), is thus already infused with post-structuralist paradigms and displays a very high degree of self-referentiality at the interface of academic and literary writing. Federman furthermore acted as the co-director of the long-time independent press Fiction Collective and served on the board of directors of its successor, Fiction Collective Two. This press, also the preferred means of publication for the majority of writers covered in this study, was the first US non-profit publishing collective. The structure of the organization did and does not rely on strictly administrative employees, but was and is run exclusively by writers themselves: it was and is devoted to publishing fiction considered by America’s largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu […]. FC2’s mission has been and remains to publish books of high quality and exceptional ambition whose styles, subject matter, or forms push the limits of American publishing and reshape our literary culture. (Fiction Collective Two 2007: n.pag.)

Considering these high aspirations, the interest in both creating and publishing experimental, “heterodox” fiction “whose styles, subject matter, or forms push

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the limits of American publishing” becomes apparent, and serves as a trademark for the press’s stock.¹³³ This dedication to alternative ways not only of writing, but also of publication already shows the critifictionist’s commitment to counter-positions, whether against the paradigms of literary realism or the heirloom business practices of commodified literature. Concerning the textual entities assigned to Federman, the interested reader may choose from about 19 novels, ten volumes of poetry, as well as critical work – mainly on Samuel Beckett –, two memoirs (the precipice and other catastrophes / der abgrund und andere katastrophen, 1999 and The Sam Book, 2008), and an autobiography published in German (Eine Version meines Lebens, 1993). In Take It Or Leave It, the 1976 novel following Double or Nothing, the reader encounters a “theoretical prologue” which reads: “Leaning against the winds over a precipice syntax integrates itself to the constraints of the paper / its format / its dimensions / its margins / its edges / its consistency / its whiteness” (Federman 1976: n.pag.).¹³⁴ These lines already indicate the experimental quality of the textures that constantly sound out (‘lean against’) the “precipice” of literature and language. They also refer to the “constraints” of a text’s materiality, which inhibit authorial subject and targeted reader alike from imagining anew. The materiality of language and the commodity of the published book designate both the challenge as well as the point of departure for the critifictionist specimen. The inclusion of lines like these from Take It Or Leave It, and the deliberate captioning of the excerpt as “theoretical prologue” in a text labeled as ‘a novel,’ all the more exhibit a devotion to transgressions of textual and authorial borders. Often identified by literary scholars as prominent in Federman’s fiction are negotiations of the Holocaust and the historical author’s bilingualism (English and French). Regarding the former, several publications revolve around the lifelong themes of guilt, shame, and abandonment as a Holocaust survivor;¹³⁵ the

 The press covers notable critifictionist, as well as scholarly work, by, for instance, Karen Brennan, Michael Joyce, Steve Katz, Mark Leyner, Larry McCaffery, Lance Olsen, Ronald Sukenick, Gerald Vizenor, Diane Williams, and Federman (see Fiction Collective 2012: n.pag.). After allegations of the Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, which deemed some material of the press offensive, it reorganized as FC2, which currently acts as an imprint of the University of Alabama Press with several editorial offices at universities across the United States.  Take It Or Leave It has no pagination.  In a 1942 raid of Parisian houses conducted by French collaborators looking for Jewish citizens, the historical person Federman, as a child, was hidden and thereby saved in a closet by his mother. The raid became known as “Le Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver” and Federman lost all of his immediate family. Publications associated with this episode especially include the novels The

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role of language in this respect may relate to notions of the ‘unsayable,’ and of what are deemed viable outlets for expression, experience, and memory: here, words can neither hope to convey meaning in general nor the specific personal episodes, too horrendous to tell. Federman’s bilingualism also keeps with this notion of the ‘unsayable,’ in that he rendered the works attributed to him in different language systems, sometimes by himself, sometimes in collaboration with other translators. Again, stable meaning – or the French equivalent to an English signifier – is doomed to elude the expectations of literary language, namely to tell an identical story in all language versions. The frequent revisions and/or expansions of both the English or French ‘original’ manuscripts of, for example, Amer Eldorado (1974/2001), Take It Or Leave It (1976/1997), The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras (1979/1985/2001), and also the specimen at hand, Double or Nothing (1971/1991), practically – or, for the interested scholarly, impractically – undermine the quest for meaning-making and interpretation: not only can the language of the fiction itself fail to communicate consciousness of a postmodern condition and the unspeakable aftermath of genocide atrocity, but the repeatedly changing versions that also concern the materiality of the commodity ‘book’ and the tangible letters on that object’s page also escape physical fixation and refuse to form a coherent whole.¹³⁶ The numerous adaptations of Federman’s texts to the stage stress the performative quality and value of the material and also the keenness of a European (curiously, especially a German-speaking) audience. All the novels were transformed into radio plays in Germany,¹³⁷ and adapted to the stage, film, or into music.¹³⁸ This is to say that the post-structuralist implications for the openness

Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras (1979), La Fourrure de ma Tante Rachel/ Aunt Rachel’s Fur (1997/2001), and Mon corps en neuf parties/My Body in Nine Parts (2003/2005). On the significance of this incident for Federman with respect to life writing see e. g. Suleiman (2011) and Wutz (2011).  The analysis of Double or Nothing at hand relies on the novel’s third edition (1998) of the second version (1991). All available editions of the text (with FC2, Northwestern UP, and Two Ravens Press) rely on this revised version. The first version, published by Swallow Press in 1971, is currently out of print.  The Twofold Vibration (BR Munich, 1990), The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras (BR Munich, 1991), Double or Nothing (BR Munich, 1992); Smiles on Washington Square (BR Munich, 1992), Playtexts/Spieltexte (BR Munich 1992), To Whom It May Concern (BR Munich 1992), Take It Or Leave It (BR Munich, 1999).  The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras as a ballet (Tanz-Fabrik Berlin, 1992) and as a theater play (Heidelberg, 1996); Playtexts/Spieltexte for the stage (Theater Forum Cologne, 1992). There is also a script of Double or Nothing for stage adaptation available in Ger-

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of text, as well as the promoted unreadability of the textual material, invite countless readings and translations into other media, thereby constantly repeating and readjusting the ever-failing attempt to tell an untellable story. If personal and general notions of reality and history do not suffice to communicate coherence and meaning, then the systematic narrative ordinarily utilized to create a consistent textual world has to be overcome. This strategy, with Critifiction and Playgiarism as appropriative practice, asks instead for constant deferral of the unspeakable historical experience of the Holocaust and the personal, yet equally mistrusted, account of its survival. Critifiction and Playgiarism eventually offer a mode for confronting the remnants of feelings of loss, guilt, escape, and the impossible desire for meaning.¹³⁹ Federman’s multiple roles as a scholar, writer, critic, and, ultimately, critifictionist – in short, as an authorial subject with an intense interest in transgressing borders and exploding the limits of narrative – suggest that Double or Nothing is a paradigmatic case for elucidating Playgiarism. First published in 1971 – with the work commencing as early as 1966 (see Federman 1993a: 113 – 114) – and re-issued with FC2 twenty years later, his “early work produced postmodern fiction’s most thoroughgoing deconstruction of the fraudulence of authorial autonomy” (McCaffery 2011: 79). Considered the most discussed textual entity in his œuvre, the novel illustrates the claims of this variant of plagiarist practice best of all. As we will see in the course of the case study, the novel locates Critifiction and Playgiarism as, on the one hand, an early specimen of postmodern appropriation and, on the other, the strategy complying most with the self-reflexive, and thereby accepted, metafictional phenomena of early postmodernism. The novel’s paratextual signalling, the title Double or Nothing, already exhibits the critifictionist tendency to utilize certain telling metaphors. ‘Double’ can be associated with the notions of ‘copy,’ ‘twofold,’ ‘secondary,’ ‘ambiguous,’ or ‘cryptic’ (as in ‘double meaning’), and with ‘deceiving,’ ‘two-faced,’ or ‘false’ (as in ‘double life’ or ‘double standard’). With both sides of the word at play, the text’s sense-making is, from the outset, suspended, despite, or also because of,

man, a film script for Smiles on Washington Square, and a musical composition on Loose Shoes: A life Story of Sorts (by Michael Riessler, 2000; original spelling).  Although the indescribable and unnarratable incidents of the Holocaust certainly constitute an incisive series of events and trauma featuring prominently in Federman’s œuvre, the present analysis recognizes the notion of ‘untellability’ as crucial for the postmodern condition as such. Although at times I come back to the issue of coping with the mass annihilation the person Federman escaped, the implications of the genocide for Federman’s texts have been extensively discussed elsewhere. In addition to Suleiman (2011) and Wutz (2011), see e. g. CornisPope (2011); Stone (2011).

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the to-be-established interest in non-sensical and utterly unreadable fiction. This emphasis on non-sense becomes all the more pressing when read in connection to ‘double or nothing’ in particular. The reader learns the implications of gambling and play, of risk and audacity, and of exclusive binaries, again pointing to the incompatibility of sense and non-sense. In opening up notions of gambling with high stakes, and also partly of illegality, the text’s title works both as a gateway to the gambling den of the ensuing postmodern novel and as the risk-bearing motto for Critifiction and Playgiarism as such.¹⁴⁰ Leaving the paratextual opening behind, the reader encounters the novel’s unofficial subtitle, “a real fictitious discourse,” on the title pages (DoN iii).¹⁴¹ It takes the assumptions of the title even further, intensifying the contrast of realist and unrealistic paradigms, and placing the binaries side by side to designate a common discourse obscuring them both. Before the main body of text there is a visually rendered dedication (see DoN vi) and a telling epigraph – “Ce qui est dit n’est jamais dit puisqu’on peut le dire autrement / —Robert Pinget” (DoN vii; original emphasis)¹⁴² – quoting a Modernist avant-garde French writer of numerous nouveaux romans. The Pinget quote, a pronouncement of deconstructionist notions of text par excellence, sets the mood for Double or Nothing’s instable storyline and agenda of constant meaning deferral – “because it can [always] be said otherwise.” The following twelve pages– numbered ‘0’ to ‘000000000.0’ – form an experimental foreword bearing the paradoxical heading “This Is Not the Beginning” (DoN x). This contradictory inscription self-reflexively points towards the limitations of print, of linear writing, and consecutive pages that deny an alternative arrangement in the book-bound copy. Although unconventionally paginated, this suggested foreword commences right away with the generic opening of a fairy tale: “Once upon a time […],” while immediately frustrating that mode’s expectations with “[…] two or three weeks ago” (DoN 0; original emphasis) and a first sentence running the length of the whole page. That first page provides the reader with the only ‘hard facts’ to be encountered, which are meticulously elaborated on in the following text: the presumed first-person narrator of the text tells his own story and that of his protagonist. The latter attempts to describe

 Later variants of ‘doubling’ and the notion of mutual exclusion can be found in other Federman titles that include Take It Or Leave It: An Exaggerated Second-Hand Tale (1976), The Twofold Vibration (1982), DUEL-L (poems in English, French and German, 1991), as well as a collection of “microfiction,” The Twilight of the Bums (1996; see Federman 1996 – 2001: n.pag.).  The unnumbered pages preceding the main text body start with the first title page (i) and end with the first ‘chapter heading’ (x). This pagination is mine.  “What is said is never said because it can be said otherwise” (my translation).

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a man who moves to the United States from Poland, “though this was not clearly established” (DoN 0; original emphasis), after the rest of his family “had been deported they were Jews to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X*X*X*X” (ibid.). As these visually and lexically offset inversions already suggest an unstructured multivocality in the text, the story’s levels and corresponding narrative instances rapidly multiply. The First Person accounts for a Second Person’s attempt to chronicle a Third Person’s story which roughly correlates to an autobiographical version of Raymond Federman, i. e. a Jew who has emigrated to the United States after WWII. Since we learn about the First Person within the textual world of the novel, the ‘ultimate’ instance conveying the story to the reader has to be a ‘Fourth Person,’ who is suggested as the equivalent to the authorial subject ‘Raymond Federman.’ This Fourth Person qualifies as “an overall looker,” as “[s]omeone to control organize supervise if youwish the activities and relations of the other three persons,” who is ironically also regarded as “someone who can keep things going in an orderly manner who can resolve arguments smooth out difficulties Someone who is like a father or like a supervisor but not necessarily like an inventor” (DoN 000000000.0; original punctuation and typeset; my emphases in italics). While the text offers a surveying authority, “if youwish,” this authoritative stance is simultaneously denied all ‘inventive’ potential. The set-up of voices implied in Double or Nothing qualifies as a plagiarizing of hardly distinguishable identities emerging from a schizophrenic text that constantly repeats itself and confounds authorial subjects, narrative instances, and the textual world’s characters. This leaves the reader with an initial idea, however provisional, of the novel’s narrative structure:

Figure 1: The narrative structure of Double or Nothing

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Double or Nothing, from the very first page, suggests an extensive negotiation of several authorial and narrative agencies or positions, causing the story to leave the traditional confines of realist fiction. The suggested authorial subject ‘Raymond Federman’ (the Fourth Person) seems to continue to preside over the narrative territory as the assigned “supervisor” of the textual entity (see e. g. the novel’s cover and colophon); this subject prepares the grounds for the First Person, the “stubborn and determined middle-aged man,” (DoN 0) who “decided to record for posterity” (ibid.; original emphases) the activities of a meta-referential authorial subject (the Second Person). The First Person thus fulfills the functional requirements of a classic ‘editor’s fiction’ (Herausgeberfiktion), with the editor as a property of the textual world pretending to document the next narrative level chronicling the eventual story.¹⁴³ While being locked up in self-imposed isolation in a single room for 365 days the Second Person’s story level focuses on the chronicling of the 19-year-old man. The reader learns about the intense episodes of writerly procrastination while the Second Person tries to commence with the difficult venture of writing his text, and, soon enough, major doubts arise as to whether it will be started, let alone finished, after all. Instead, the Second Person remains occupied with making numerous lists and counting boxes of noodles that are supposed to last for his time of creative investment in voluntary isolation. Even given the fact that the discursive level of the novel is summarized by the end of the book (see DoN 260 – 267: “Summary of the Discourse”; original emphasis), this table providing page numbers and according topics still falls short of communicating a coherent storyline. This non-sensical attempt at clarification only mirrors the impossibility of the Second Person accounting for the Third Person’s history as a survivor of war and recent émigré. This writing of another individual’s past (or imagining/inventing it) is followed by an obsession with everything which could be considered even remotely helpful in starting the Second Person’s writing process. The attempt to account for a contained story of somebody’s past gives way to thematizing the qualities and inherent inadequacies of language per se, that is, the inability to definitively render a linguistic signifier equal to a signified. This obsession is further realized in the visual concreteness of supplementary objects (here: noodles) emerging from the positive space of ink on the page (see e. g. DoN 9, 10, 50, between 137 and 137.1, 155) and from the negative space of text-enclosed areas (see e. g.  On the concept of ‘editor’s fiction,’ with the fictional editor as a discursive agency within the text, see esp. Wirth (2008: 13 – 46). Literary cases in point are Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605/1615), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980).

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DoN 0000000000, 14, 15, 181). The empty space both connotes the possibility of things un-tellable by language and a void of representation and expressibility, as well as the “epistemological impossibility of ever escaping that very space” (Wielgosz 1995: 98). The text realizes the post-structuralist and deconstructionist notions of the all-pervasiveness of language that permeates (literary) existence in metaphysical determinism and echoes the inescapable prevalence of language that nevertheless fails to ultimately give and make sense of the experienced world’s signifieds – noodles, the young man’s story, or history as such. The Third Person’s past becomes a matter of interplayed, corrupted signs, of language that may not adequately represent the events and experiences of this individual and of past events:

Figure 2: Manuscript excerpt (DoN 70 – 71)

The erasure of the past becomes replaced by non-sensical objects, staccato speech and elliptic exclamations, or metafictional comments – “the/whole/ story/is a/break/with the past.” This erasure occurs because of the unrepresentability of specifically the Holocaust experience of persecution and death, and of

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history, after all, since the reality experienced is always deceitful, and the language describing it inconclusive. These early observations dealing with the proverbial title of the text, as well as the erratic storyline that chiefly concerns itself with the constant deferral of the Third Person’s life account, should provide a general idea of how Critifiction operates in terms of language criticism and the demonstration of its unrepresentability with respect to reality, history, and meaning. The plagiarisms of inter alia Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable (1953; see DoN 000000000), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 – 1885; see DoN 0), and Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969; see DoN 102) scattered throughout the text will consequently assist in substantiating the hypothesis that Critifiction is a proto-postmodern practice that dismantles this criticism and unrepresentability. For a reading of the plagiarist elements in Double or Nothing, especially the material borrowed from Nietzsche, Beckett, and Foucault represents pre-texts that propose: first, the ‘always-already-there’ as well as the ‘never-outside-of-history’ of Nietzschean and postmodern epistemology; second, the Absurd, a staple in both modernist Beckett and postmodern Federman, stressing the preference of the non-sensical over logic and coherence; and, finally, the theoretical investigation of culture as discourse whose operators and operations are not ontologically legitimized, but work within a network of invisible rules, or “discursive formations” (see Foucault 2007 [1969]: 34– 43). The samples from Beckett and Foucault will serve to illustrate the way in which Critifiction operates in Double or Nothing. The plagiarism of Foucault’s canonized philosophical work The Archaeology of Knowledge describes the ‘rupture’ Derrida identified as the paradigm shift of the strong linguistic turn that gave way to both post-structuralist/deconstructionist positions and postmodern phenomena: Is there not a danger that everything that has so long protected the historian in his daily journey and accompanied him until nightfall (the destiny of rationality and the teleology of the sciences, the long, continuous labor of thought from period to period, the awakening and the progress of consciousness, its perpetual resumption of itself, the uncompleted, but uninterrupted movement of totalizations, the return to an ever-open source, and finally the historico-transcendental thematic) may disappear, leaving for analysis a blank, indifferent space, lacking both interiority and promise? (Ibid. 42– 43; my emphasis)¹⁴⁴

 The italics in both quotes do not designate emphases on my behalf, but they indicate the identical passages that have been plagiarized in Double or Nothing.

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These lines close Foucault’s chapter on the explication of “Discursive Formations” and pose a polemical question concerning the “so long protected” scholarly assumptions for theorizing and practicing history in general and the history of science in particular. They denounce the implied “destiny of rationality” and academic “teleology,” as well as a desired “continuity,” a complacent “progress” of science towards an unobtainable “historico-transcendental” end. As an investigation not of what is essentially meaningful, but what makes an event, situation, or development appear culturally significant – i. e. ‘what are the conditions for the existence of meaning?’ –, The Archaeology of Knowledge represents a philosophical attempt at focusing on differences instead of consistent identities. Everything which – up to this point – was protecting and inspiring the storyteller on the threshold of his tale – the destiny of rationality and of teleology, the long continuous process of thought beyond time, the awakening and the progress of consciousness and its perpetual recapturing of itself, the unfin/ished movement yet uninterrupted of totalization, the return to an origin always open, and finally the historico-trancenden/tal thematic – all this might disappear re/vealing for analysis a blank different space without any interiority nor any promise whatsoever and this is only the beginning (DoN 102; my italics)

In Double or Nothing, Foucault’s rhetorical question has been turned into a declarative sentence, replacing the historian with “the storyteller on the threshold of his tale.” The narrative instance, here unclear, demolishes the categorical borders between scholarship and the formerly merely creative writer and eventually breaches that “threshold,” the text’s integrity or “interiority,” and the “promise” of entering a purely fictional world that follows fixed rules according to realist paradigms. What pertains to Foucault’s critique of historiography also holds true for fictional writing, thus corrupting the “promise” of a textual entity’s formal as well as semantic integrity. In this example, the extensive appropriation of Foucault’s canonized scholarly and philosophical work verbatim acts as a bold demonstration of post-structuralist theorems and as a catalyst for postmodern concerns. Before I further respond to this affirmative blending of theory, language criticism, and fictional material, another of the aforementioned examples will serve to illuminate the qualities of plagiarisms in Double or Nothing. Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953/1958), as the third in his trilogy of novels (with Molloy [1951/1955] and Malone Dies [1951/1956]),¹⁴⁵ is comprised of an absurd monologue of a likewise unnamed narrator and protagonist, while the other characters evoked, Ma-

 The first date designates the original French publication; the second refers to the first English translation.

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hood/Basil and Worm, are not entirely confirmed either as existing in the textual world of the novel or as parts of the schizophrenic identity of the ‘unnamable.’ As is common in Beckett’s texts, the novel lacks clear temporal and spatial cues, as well as a coherent plot, and the narrator-protagonist quickly loses interest in making sense and delivering on the promise of coherence and meaning after all. He or she or it¹⁴⁶ retreats into language to such an extent that what remains is only text or language itself, constantly renegotiating his or her or its own conditionality. The ‘unnamable’ ultimately serves as an allegory of the Modernist authorial subject, utterly suspicious of the representability of language, yet simultaneously having to resort to that system’s inherent structure and objectives. The last sentence – “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett 1970 [1953/1958]: 179) – sums up this paradoxical simultaneous embracing of and repulsion from language and points already to the never-ending supplementarity, or deferral, of a center, meaning, subjectivity, and the sense of an ending. Unsurprisingly, one of the parts plagiarized from The Unnamable in Double or Nothing emphasizes the common ground held by Beckett’s absurdist prose and Federman’s Critifiction: “Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric” (ibid. 7). In Double or Nothing: “Here all is clear … No all is not clear … But the discourse must go on … So one invents obscurities … Rhetoric” (DoN 000000000; original emphasis and ellipses). The two passages prove identical, apart from the suspension marks and the missing comma after “No” – details that substantiate the impossibility of silence as well as the discursive potential of punctuation. In addition, the phrase in Double or Nothing is preceded by a hint at the structural equivalence of the two novels: “For indeed the three of them agreed:” (ibid.); this directive pertains not only to the three presented narrative instances or characters in the critifictional text, but also to the schizophrenic, equally nameless narrator-protagonist in Beckett’s text. This analogy proposes several levels of programmatic appropriation: first, on the level of the texts’ structure; second, concerning both texts’ interest in a disorganized multivocality that is sometimes dissected, but more often hopelessly (con‐)fused; and third, with respect to permitting senselessness and the absurd to enter the story level, in order to indicate the impossibility of literary uniformity and textual stability. As a consequence, the plagiarisms in Double or Nothing serve an affirmative purpose, in terms of philosophical thought (Foucault) that assists in the decon-

 The French and English definite articles hint at a person and an object/location/situation, respectively.

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struction of categorical borders, but also as concerns the reiteration of canonical absurdity with Beckett’s novel. With respect to the latter, and knowing about Federman’s preoccupation with Beckett’s work (see e. g. Federman 1965, 1985 [1976]; Federman and Bishop 1970; Federman and Graver 1978), the appropriation suggests yet another incentive for inclusion, namely as homage and tribute to texts that are considered vanguard material for postmodernism. The analogous negotiation of the senselessness of life, language, and literature for representation and the expression of experience enables the plagiarism in Double or Nothing to join forces with the pre-text’s form as well as its conceptual and critical implications. Homage as a manifestation of respect for the mentor Beckett and his absurdist texts, indicates a hierarchy, a divide between authorial subjects;¹⁴⁷ yet since the inclusion of Beckett’s phrases from The Unnamable remains unmarked, itself ‘unnamed,’ the act of reverence is concealed, and it thereby dissolves into Double or Nothing’s anonymous texture, which writes itself or is alternatively composed by the multiplicity of narrative voices and authorial subjects involved. This multiplicity of narrative voices in the postmodern playgiarist text points the analysis now in the direction of the blending of theoretical thought, a critical agenda, and fictional material within Critifiction or, as Federman also called it, Surfiction (see Federman 1981 [1975]). In order to illustrate the phenomenon of a blending of these elements in the novel, I will further emphasize the fusion of narrative voices and the consequences arising with respect to language criticism and post-structuralist theorems. The four voices in Double or Nothing follow, or at least try to follow, their respective objectives: the First Person, the recorder, aims to put into writing the story of the Second Person, the writer, who plans to chronicle the emigration story of the Third Person, for which “he has to establish some sort of schedule for his creative activities, and then he has to plan carefully the details of his survival in the room […] and furthermore, he has to invent and tell of course the story of the young man” leaving Poland for “America the land of opportunities” (DoN 0; original emphasis). He has to do so “word by word and step by step, describing […] in detail and obviously realistically […]” (ibid.) what has happened to the émigré (which he very roughly sketches as the prototypical Renaissance-man-with-an-American-Dream tale). The Fourth Person, as suggested above, may be the authorial subject ‘Raymond Federman,’ that is the onlooker surveying the process of this particular critifictional text coming into being.

 The notion of ‘tribute’ in its historical meaning suggests this submissive allegiance even more, e. g. paying a (reverential) tribute to a territory’s conqueror, here Beckett.

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Although these four ‘persons’ are introduced on the first couple of pages, both in the foreword and the ensuing 260-page-long attempt of the Third Person, in which the text on the young immigrant is constantly delayed or deferred, the text cannot always be attributed definitely to one of these four ‘persons.’ In connection with the identified and hypothetical plagiarisms, a potentially everincreasing number of authorial subjects – and their narrative instances, respecttively – lead to an ongoing multiplication of voices. This multiplication proliferates perspectives, story levels, and ultimately meanings in its confusion of linear narrative and cause-and-effect relations. N+1 possible narrative instances foster textual excess that corrupts the texture in disappointing readerly expectations of a homogenous, or at least finely tuned heterogeneous, directive through the story.¹⁴⁸ The most serious consequence of this n+1 multivocality and perspectivity is a negotiation of meaning and voice that is subject to the denial of a transcendental referent and the ultimate sign: Once you get involved in the so-called self-reflexive type of writing where the outside voice becomes part of the text, when the author himself becomes fictionalized, then you encounter an endless process. There is always another voice outside the text, a voice that precedes, supersedes each narrative voice, as in the drawing of the hand that holds the pen that draws itself. Obviously there is a real hand and a real pen that does the drawing and which can never be seen in the final drawing, however complicated and deceptive it becomes. (Federman 1983: 300; my emphases)

This “endless process” exemplifies a constant perpetuation and deferral of the signified’s connection to the indicating signifier, a dynamic present regardless of the invisible “real hand” employing “a real pen” to enable these instances of emerging text. Therefore the authorial agent, whose “only power is to mix writings” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 146), creativity, and also intentionality, can be considered Double or Nothing’s ultimate denied signifying instance, the center deconstructionism identifies as metaphysical illusion, serving only to construct false notions of authorial individuality and textual integrity. What is always present behind this excess of multiplied narrative voices and plagiarized authorial subjects is language, or rather the process of it coming into being, a “necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. […] [I]t is language which speaks, not the author” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 143). Écriture takes over the production of meaning as only a

 On the manageability of multiple perspectives in postmodern literature, see Dolezel (1999); Richardson (2000, 2006); Zerweck (2000).

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‘momentary enunciation’ since “discourse dominates story” to the point of regularly “eclips[ing] the story proper” (McHale 2011: 95). Knowing of Federman’s tendency to rewrite and/or expand texts available as commodified entities, these material alterations only add one last argument to the programmatic practice of blending post-structuralist theory and postmodern fiction that “bears within itself the [proposed] necessity of its own critique” (Derrida 1978 [1966]: 358). In addition to this theoretically blended critical fiction, I find two elements conclusively establishing Critifiction’s methodological practice of Playgiarism in Double or Nothing: self-reflexivity and the “endless process” of linguistic play. Self-reflexivity finds its most convincing expression in Playgiarism, since the mingling of supposedly individually identifiable authorial voices, in combination with Federman’s choice of playful appropriation, always ends in frustrating the quest for the corresponding pairs of author – work, text – meaning, etc. Constant prolepses, analepses, and metalepses break up the narrative structure and lead to the persistent disappointment of readerly anticipation, with unreliable flashbacks and the incessant mingling of supposedly extratextual and textual story levels. The juggling with and within these levels further exposes and dissolves the artificial borders between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction,’ and it reassumes the title’s preoccupation with “the semiotics of bidding” (McCaffery 2011: 82). With these elements and the ensuing chaos, the randomness of playful gambling privileges the nonsensical over the orderly realist text. The authorial subject can never find stable signifiers to account for its experiences or ‘real’ events as such, and it equally fails in moving outside the metaphysical domain of language. The appropriate mode for ‘creative’ writing becomes playfully multiplying and appropriating whatever comes into view as that “montage/collage of thoughts, reflections, meditations, quotations, pieces of my own […] discourses […] as well as pieces of discourses by others (spoken or written – published and unpublished, authorized and non-authorized)” (Federman 1993a: 51; original emphasis). The novel ‘doubles’ the stakes for literary communication and thereby takes the well-known risks of unreadability into account just as much as it meets allegations of textual narcissism, with respect to metafiction (see Hutcheon 1991). The reader encounters the self-reflexive consciousness of an authorial subject that disclaims the text to amount to either an individual life narrative or an extra-textual truth: “When I talk about my background, my youth, I’m never really sure if I am dealing with true facts or if I am in fact re-inventing what I think happened and who I was” (Federman qtd. in Everman 1988: 45). If the postmodern writer can “never really be sure,” can never tell the difference between events or thoughts experienced, remembered, and fabricated, then

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the momentary enunciation of meaning may as well be handed over to language: “Language can but perfectly imitate language; more exactly, a discourse can but perfectly imitate a perfectly identical discourse. In short, a discourse can but imitate itself” (ibid.). The text suggests an intricate quality of writing to constitute only itself through imitation, by repeating, by ‘doubling’ the always-alreadythere. It thus reduces authorial originality to a label that indicates the valorization of individuality over textual dynamism and the infinite deferral of meaning. In sum: Double or Nothing creates an illusion of the text’s playful self-production, detached from an authorial, authoritative, and authenticating instance assigning referents, meaning, and, ultimately, value to master the “anxiety” (Derrida 1978 [1966]: 352) of disintegration. Critifiction’s plagiarist practice of enclosing fragments of accepted and canonized material emerges from the impossible endeavor of the Second Person accounting for the Third Person’s history, any definite historical experience, and an ultimately persuasive idea of reality. The appropriation of other authorial subjects’ material (here: by Nietzsche, Beckett, and Foucault) serves as a positive, fertile, and affirmative amalgamation of texts. Any text necessarily fails to provide the desired equivalence of reality/history and representation, and this motivates both a productive fraternizing and imaginative blending of literary assertions. This is the reason why Playgiarism, as the confusion of textual layers, narrative instances, as well as authorial subjects, promotes nonsense as a counterbalance to or compensation for the illusory endeavor of making sense and chasing centers. In sum, Critifiction and Playgiarism in Double or Nothing operate on two levels: on the one hand, they offer a historicizing of the post-structuralist and deconstructionist body of thought that constantly sees language as deferring and meaning as deferred; on the other hand, they suggest a dehistoricizing of literary traditionalism, i. e. of realist fiction, since the critifictionist text invites all textual material – Derrida’s traces – to take place on the same material surface of the postmodern novel. This means that the interwoven chunks of language can still be assigned to respective sources – a pre-text’s textual entity and corresponding authorial subject; yet the communication between the identifiable entities is not impeded (or marked) by temporal or spatial distance: this shared “text is eternally written here and now” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 145; original emphasis). If we take into account the fact that Critifiction in general and Double or Nothing in particular are textual realizations of post-structuralist and deconstructionist language criticism and philosophy, then Critifiction as a genre and Playgiarism as a compositional method for literary text production necessarily fail. As categorical labels, both terms and their respective phenomena feed

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into the textual ideology they actually seek to contest. They do so as they stake out their territory of literary practice, and, in opting for nonsense, they both define a clear-cut enemy stereotype – realist fiction, the belief in neutral language use, as well as authorial ingenuity and textual integrity – and the corresponding counter-strategy. With respect to plagiarisms found in Double or Nothing, i. e. the appropriation of pre-textual material to affirm the strategy’s critifictional aspects or even the homages to influential literary precursors, this strictly oppositional set-up further deteriorates as a truly subversive act. Playgiarism is plagiarizing without the complex challenges that the other strategies, especially ConText (see chapters 2.2.2 and 3.2), pose. Settling on the nonsensical assemblage of affirmative text chunks depicts creativity as detached from the void concepts of authenticity and originality; yet as the text constantly returns to the self-reflexive state of its own becoming, it exaggerates the playful, i. e. harmless corruption of authorial subjects and narrative voices in the text, and it eventually promotes this procedure as yet another form of literary imagination and inventiveness. Writing comes down to the “[a]rt of fencing and strategy / : / to find support on one’s adversary / to rest upon that which is attacked / to find strength in what is being destroyed!” (Federman 1977: 108). This approach only reaffirms the authorial subject as the privileged individual destined to design and foreclose the imaginative potential of language: “the joust / between differences of form / (obtained by words) / and differences of force (established by words)” (ibid. 109) brought about by “the slow / painful / patient feverishness / which overcomes the writer” (ibid. 111). As a proto-postmodern practice of radical appropriation, Critifiction and Playgiarism in Double or Nothing aim at refiguring literary perception by suggesting that the condition of language and narrative is founded on their inherent ambiguity, deferred meaning, and, hence, their unreadability; yet naturalizing this condition in Double or Nothing fails because of the purely oppositional gesture of assembling nonsense without inviting the animated struggle of ConText or the conceptual negotiation of meaning within Neo-Conceptualism. Within the metafictional mainstream of Federman’s 1970s postmodernism, Critifiction and Playgiarism epitomize an innocuous variant of literary plagiarism, the playfulness of which obstructs its full potential. In the end, this verdict ultimately also applies to the authorial subject of the novel. In facilitating the negotiation of what Foucault called “different classes of individual” (1983 [1969]: 113), that is between a downright denial of the relevance of individual authorial voice and writerly engagement, Critifiction yields an authorial subject that sees the production of nonsense as its central goal. This subject ‘supervises’ (see again DoN 000000000.0) the dis-ordered mass of textual

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material while making itself part of this disorder, as with the Fourth Person in Federman’s story. As a consequence, the authorial subject becomes the enactor of this nonsense, in that it allows the textual levels to interlace, and collapses textual borders in general and the writerly modes of theory, criticism, and fiction in particular. That subject thus shows a specific interest in “indulg[ing] in narcissistic games that prevent the reader from identifying with the characters of the fiction” (Federman 1988: 1155 – 1156), and it invites, or rather asks for, an “[a]ctive reading, a reading that rewrites the texts in the process of its own activity” (qtd. in Everman 1988: 36). The critifictionist aims to evade comprehension and becoming pinned down as the individual originator of a textual entity. As a blender, or bricoleur (sensu Lévi-Strauss), this subject seeks to dissolve in the all-pervasive mass and momentarily enunciated meaning of language.¹⁴⁹ Yet Federman’s obviously deep indebtedness to the prevalent absurdism of Samuel Beckett’s texts also suggests a different reading that weakens the authorial subject’s conceptualization of itself as postmodern supervisor and blender. This close alignment with, and the omnipresence of, the modernist predecessor Beckett call up Harold Bloom’s argument concerning an extensive ‘anxiety of influence’ (see Bloom 1997 [1973]).¹⁵⁰ This hypothesis implies a continuous effort on behalf of Western authors to write against their authorial predecessors: “[G]reat writing is always at work strongly (or weakly) misreading previous writing. […] [T]he anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading” (ibid. xix, xxiii; original emphasis). The anxiety of influence, or “The Anguish of Contamination” (ibid. 56) thereby represents the simultaneous prolongation, as well as perpetuation, of the literary ancestors’ significance in their own texts. An idea initially very much informed by the deconstructionist paradox of the futile attempt to exceed a perpetual presence, this luring anxiety is also some-

 The cover of the 1998 edition of the second version that is the basis for the case study at hand serves to emphasize this point. It depicts the author name next to seven other text frames: “Double or Nothing,” obviously the book’s title; yet it also shows signifiers of ‘everyday’ objects – “Noodles,” “Chewing Gum,” “Toilet Paper,” “Tomato Sauce,” “Toothpaste,” and “Craps & Poker” (a dice game). Apart from the title, all frames are represented in an equal way, with no distinct color scheme or exceptional font size emphasizing the author name among the other signifiers. Since the signifiers mainly denote material purchasable commodities, that all possess a distinct use and exchange value, the cover suggests the same for the authorial subject aligned with this name.  I am well aware of the two editions’ dissimilarity in several aspects, yet I refer to both editions since they retain Bloom’s most important argument of poetic influence in Western literature.

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thing that the authorial subject ‘Federman’ cannot escape: “In my mind I have made of Beckett a kind of spiritual father. […] I would almost say that everything I write is for Beckett, for his ultimate approval, which, of course, he will never give me, and must not give me” (qtd. in Everman 36; my emphasis).¹⁵¹ Writing “for Beckett, for his ultimate approval” becomes the disclaimer to a thus far convincing enactment of deconstructionist positions: Playgiarism as a proto-postmodern practice serves to methodically invalidate traditional writing modes in their quest for a wholesome depiction of reality and history; the blending of theory, language criticism, and fiction blurs and even transgresses the boundaries between categorical domains; and the crucial element of self-reflexive play assists in the critifictionist endeavor to unsettle the confines of language’s metaphysical determinism. The excessive orientation of the authorial subject Federman towards the overbearing literary ancestor that has arisen from the preceding investigation of Double or Nothing certainly weakens the potential of this plagiarist strategy. It does so by reinstating a conception of the authorial subject that only engages in producing nonsense and fusing voices by playfully appropriating them within the safe space of postmodern fiction. The critifictionist Federman thus handles the enemy concepts of authorial individualism and textual integrity with kid gloves, and thereby loses touch with the sweeping impact of literary plagiarism at large. The authorial subject for Critifiction and Playgiarism consequently runs the risk of feeding into the same patterns of inventive imagination that place the individual author (here: Beckett, the “spiritual father”) as the center of attention, interpretation, and also of that literary agency that playgiarist practice strives to overcome. Just as the postmodern texture of Double or Nothing puts the radicalism of plagiarist practice on the line by involving pre-textual fragments as cheap affirmations, the critifictionist authorial subject vanishes into the multiple layers of deferring language only to take a deferential stance toward the agent and œuvre of canonized literary commodities. Especially in comparison with the other examples of radical appropriation investigated in this study, Critifiction, within Double or Nothing, emerges as the least sophisticated and complex one. On the one hand, this may be accounted for by the genre’s proximity to by now mainstream text games in metafiction and the overall embrace of the targeted field of cultural production by the literary industry. On the other, the reverential homage certainly falls short of accom-

 Ironically, Bloom referred to Beckett in an interview as “[p]robably the most powerful living Western writer […]. He’s certainly the most authentic” (in Spirer 1989: n.pag.).

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plishing the decidedly critical writerly attitude towards the authoritative concepts at stake – namely individual authorial ingenuity and textual integrity.

3.2 ConText as Dissident Feminist Writing: Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988) With an œuvre of over 20 novels that are often classified as feminist pornography with a “deep moral dislocation” (Hoffman 1984: 16), texts which made their author a honorary member of the “rebel establishment” (Gates 2005: n.pag.), Kathy Acker puts more on the line with her plagiarist method of ConText than Federman does with Critifiction. The following analysis will show that the novel Empire of the Senseless (1988; Empire) negotiates between the hypotheses suggested by post-structuralist language criticism (including the constant deferral of meaning wrought by différance) and the emancipatory strategies of female subjectivity, i. e. how voice and telos can nevertheless exist in textual form. As became clear in chapter 2.2.2, with the comprehensive outline of ConText as a particular feminist mode of literary plagiarist practice, the abundance of appropriated text and historical context, the radicalism of taboo subjects addressed as well as the agenda of negotiating expression within and beyond the hegemonic system of patriarchal language: all of these attributes qualify Acker’s writing as different in kind from Federman’s jocular application. Acker’s practice of ConText is pertinent in at least four ways. First, as an illegitimate strategy against the commodification of literature as it is manifested in the male-dominated literary industry: an economic article which is part of a value chain and has a target market; second, as a legal commitment through Copyright that flouts its initial purpose of encouraging authorial productivity, of securing a producer’s livelihood, and “[of] promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (U.S. Constitution) (see chapter 2.1.2); third, since she plagiarizes almost exclusively from white men of the Western canon, as a critical stance against both a phallogocentric society as such and a literary canon dominated by male creative modes, products, rules, and criticism; and, finally, as a complex negotiation between the deconstructionist impossibility of meaning-making and an empowering female, or feminist, imagination issued from a marginal perspective. I selected Empire of the Senseless to illustrate the aesthetic impact and cultural ramifications of ConText as a method that results from the denial of fixed meaning in written language and feminist self-empowerment. The text echoes a variety of arguments made for this specific tactic of plagiarist writing: the inversion of readerly genre expectations in a bildungsroman, a self-destructive protagonist on an agonizing quest for self-awareness, an inevitable correlation of

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sexuality, violence, and abuse, as well as the impossibility of fully escaping phallogocentric rules in female creative production and subjectivity. As a late Acker novel, Empire has another advantage. The texts written between 1978 and 1988 – Great Expectations (1982), Hello, I’m Erica Jong (1982), My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1984), and Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (1986) – follow a rather unplanned impetus of appropriation, and they were later dismissed as “blatant deconstructions of the literary fathers” (Hawkins 2004: 638) and as “simplistic” (Acker 1991: 13). This assessment becomes at least partly comprehensible when we look at the most obvious literary pretexts – Dickens’ Victorian opus, Jong’s Fear of Flying, Cervantes’ own adoption of the chivalric tradition – and her treatments of public persona, such as the fictional autobiography of the filmmaker Pasolini and his unsolved murder. Empire, on the other hand, substantiates the radical conceptuality of the plagiarist approach and thereby constitutes a development towards the programmatic application of ConText. Despite the fact that the novel assembles supposedly random elements and numerous digressions, their implementation follows a rhythmic routine and methodical design, an impression Acker herself confirms: I suddenly had a theory for what I was doing [… ,] a theory that made sense to me because it wasn’t just abstract theoretical garbage. It was grounded very much in the political and social world [… and an] anger against the centralization of the Phallus […]. [N]ow that I understood what I was doing, I could start using some of this stuff more consciously. […] So by the time of Empire of the Senseless I could even plan things! (In McCaffery 1991: 90; original emphasis)

With respect to this later novel’s potential for ‘planning things,’ Empire accentuates three major aspects: first, the text embodies a dense network of plagiarist metaphoricity and a practice that is acted out on the levels of form, content, and ConTextual agenda; second, Empire contains comparatively more conventional postmodernist elements, illustrative visual elements, and obvious plagiarisms than earlier texts like Blood and Guts in High School (1984) that make the text far more accessible. Finally, the pronounced enemy concept of phallogocentric society further supports the programmatic quality of this corpus delicti. Acker’s 1988 novel abandons the shock moments of earlier novels and shows a development towards a more conceptual application of ConText. As she told Larry McCaffery in 1992, this growing alignment with a systematic and strategic practice resulted from her introduction to French literary theory with Sylvère Lothringer, and she came to realize that it was “only then that I began to find a language for what I was doing” (ibid. 89). Yet in describing herself as an authoress, there persists the paradox of intentionally imbuing this

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new-found language with a dimension of agency that echoes the neo-classicist poeta faber (‘the skilled authorial crafts[wo]man’): “Appropriation is not a literary strategy I’ve chosen to manipulate what’s happening in my books in certain ways. […] I literally can’t write any other way” (ibid. 90). These statements on empowerment and dependency already echo the ambiguous position as an author that she has come to acknowledge – the position of a writer in-between. They mirror the heterogeneous nature of the contemporary authorial subject that both ‘plans’ and aligns itself as occupying a marginal and often paradoxical position as a producer of literary text. With respect to the postmodernist staples of disruption and paradox, the various texts that make up the novel already point towards the excessive fragmentary nature of the novel with its incoherent plot, characters, and mode of writing. An inevitably insufficient synopsis of the plot not only illustrates the story’s disruptive features, but also mirrors the textual nature of the dissemination of signs and meaning and serves as a reference to the novel’s ideologically distorted reality of the conservative United States in the 1980s, an Empire of the senseless under the ‘Great Communicator,’ Ronald Reagan. Initially, the specific narrative situation as well as Empire’s structure and content establish the fundamental suppositions for ConText. The disrupted plot and the narrative perspectives dispersed throughout the text, which are themselves disturbed by numerous interjections such as authorial comments or pseudo-factual passages, thereby represent the basis on which the various stages of deferred text and multiplied authorial subjects are put to test. As suggested above and still similar to Double or Nothing, the synopsis of the novel’s plot proves to be highly inadequate: Having passed the standard leaves of title page, dedication (“to my tattooist”, Empire n.pag.), and a table of contents, the reader encounters the first black-and-white graphic element of the novel that may be compared to a traditional frontispiece. It shows a tattoo stencil depicting a skull cut off below the nose in whose eye sockets two human-like faces appear; next to the skull is a thorny tendril with two roses blossoming and a banderole reading “MY FAMILY FORTUNE” (see Empire 2). It is this metonymic entry into a novel abundant with identifiable yet concealed pre-texts, the wealth and destiny of the canonical heritage (“FORTUNE”) so to speak, that foreshadows the first chapter’s content: the bildungsroman anti-heroine Abhor tells her family history through the patronizing external focalization of Thivai (Empire 3 – 19). The two competing narrators and protagonists of the story are the triply marginalized Abhor – female, part black, and only part human (see Empire 3) – and the HIV-positive mercenary Thivai, both of whom have experienced incestuous relationships, violent abuse and suppressed desire within their families, as well as drug-induced hallucinations. They live in a counterfactual Paris taken

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over by Algerian revolutionaries around the time of the conservative Republican administration of Ronald Reagan (1980 – 1989).¹⁵² In three parts – “Elegy for the World of our Fathers” (see Empire 1– 86), “Alone” (87– 172), and “Pirate Night” (173 – 229) –, that consist of ten chapters each and numerous asymmetrical subheadings, the reader is confronted with alternating accounts by Abhor and Thivai, with the exception of the opening chapter “Rape by the Father” which is narrated by “Abhor through Thivai” (Empire, “Table of Contents” n.pag., 3), an initial hint at the external domination of female voice and empowerment. These textual markers of who is talking, which are regularly given in brackets in the table of contents and below the chapter title, already play with readerly expectations of the first-person bildungsroman narrator and with the authenticity, intimacy, and restricted knowledge Abhor or Thivai might possess. This multiperspectivity and also the unreliability of narrators, which the reader encounters during retrospective child accounts (see e. g. Empire 29 – 31) or via the textual evidence that confirms the speaker’s drug-induced brain damage (ibid. 32– 33), do not irritate to the point of total loss; yet the following interspersion of the first-person account with a great many disjointed references and voices inevitably does. In the second chapter, “Raise us from the Dead (Thivai speaks)” (ibid. 20 – 42), for instance, Thivai dreams of becoming a pirate, raping a child, visiting a brothel on the shore where he meets the officer Xaintrilles,¹⁵³ makes a reference to the fifth war of religion in France against the Huguenots¹⁵⁴ and remembers his mother who committed suicide by drowning in the sea. Within another ten pages, the reader further learns about his defective attitude towards women, the “neurological and hormonal damage” (Empire 32) done to his brain by drug abuse and a sexually transmitted disease,¹⁵⁵ a dystopian Manhattan as the only remaining location of white capitalist power (see Empire 36), and the significance of modern guerrilla warfare in an otherwise meaningless

 On counterfactual histories see Bunzl (2004); Ferguson (1999 [1997]: 1– 88); Hawthorn (1995 [1991]: 1– 38); Widmann (2009).  Xaintrilles is a reference to Jean Poton de Xaintrailles, a historic French fellow combatant of Joan of Arc who lived from c. 1390 – 1461 – a male deputy to a leading woman in France’s Hundred Years’ War. In the following and unless they are examined in greater detail, all intertextual references will be explained in footnotes.  This reference is introduced by the year 1574 (see Empire 26) and implies the transition from nationalistic to economic warfare leaving the conceptions of good and evil disseminated. Thivai observes: “the sailors the soldiers the poor people the disenfranchised the sexually different waged illegal wars on land and sea” (ibid.).  The acronym ‘HIV’ in the telling name ‘T-HIV-ai’ suggests an infection with the virus and his suffering from immunodeficiency. Additionally impaired by brain damage, Thivai clearly echoes Gibson’s hero Case in Neuromancer.

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society: “In such a world which was non-reality terrorism made a lot of sense” (Empire 35). The chapter finally ‘ends’ with an obvious plagiarism of William Gibson’s science-fiction bestseller Neuromancer (1984) that describes a governmental totalitarian system equally violent, misanthropic, and brutal, and a code Thivai has to steal for a certain Dr. Schreber¹⁵⁶ who had promised him a drug for his brain defect. The code reads: “Get Rid of Meaning. Your Mind is a Nightmare That Has Been Eating You: Now Eat Your Mind” (ibid. 38). This attempt to recount the second chapter’s storyline shows that the maxim of insignificance, of senselessness given with the novel’s title, is already laid out in the inconsistent progression of events and their narrative instance. Despite the textual cues “Thivai/Abhor speaks” and although the chapters loosely provide the reader with connected events or lines of thought, he or she experiences two neither fully complementary nor fully contradictory narrative perspectives on similar incidents. Similarly to the blending of narrative voice in Double or Nothing, the reader cannot relate to a single or dominant narrator. For an assessment of a postmodern text’s narrative situation this represents a “mimetically impossible case” (Richardson 2006: 103 – 105) of voice and narration as individually discrete utterances merge without explanation or causal linking. This inconsistency in narrative guidance continues with the steady change of style. The reader is presented with imitations of historical, supposedly objective accounts (see e. g. Empire 74– 80), the introduction of additional intertexts (e. g. Winter [50],¹⁵⁷ Toussaint L’Ouverture [65]¹⁵⁸), as well as a regular shift in focalization and the assumed narrator’s identity (see Empire 3, 20, 45, 61, 89, 109, 141, 175, 209). The corruption of a single narrative identity and the blending of several

 ‘Schreber’ refers to Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge who around the turn to the twentieth century experienced severe psychosis that “Dr.” Siegmund Freud, who never met the patient in person, on the basis of Schreber’s memoir Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, 1955 [1903]) diagnosed as paranoid dementia. Schreber’s case is frequently discussed in scholarly works throughout the century, e. g. in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1977 [1972]), Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht (1960), and Jacques Lacan’s Seminar on the Psychoses (1955/56).  In part I, chapter 3, female protagonist Abhor is sent on a mission to Algeria by Dr. Schreber with the code ‘WINTER’ that both has the connotation of ‘death’ here attributed to women (see Empire 52) and that again refers to Gibson’s Neuromancer where the artificial intelligence WINTERMUTE manipulates humans for its own purposes.  Toussaint L’Ouverture was one of the eminent leaders of the Haitian Revolution (1791– 1794) abolishing slavery after a continuous war with France. In Empire, L’Ouverture precedes another rebel persona, “Mackandal” (see Empire 74– 81) referring to the slave leader François Mackandal (d. 1758) who killed the French plantation owners in Haiti by distributing herbal poisons through a network of slaves. See James (2001 [1938]).

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of them together support the rivalry of narrative perspectives in the text and, on the level of text origin, the multiplication and ‘obfuscation’ (sensu Cixous) of authorial subjects that ultimately give way to a plagiarist textuality within this senseless empire of the novel. Moreover, a blending of post-structuralist theory and postmodern narrative text occurs. It takes place on three levels: first, the text directly features a poststructuralist mindset by commenting on the text’s heterogeneous composition in a meta-reflexive way; second, the disrupted story displays a corruption of the textual ideal as an integrated whole by including themes and metaphors that echo theory; and third, consequences for textual agency and practice are carried out by radically mixing material across genres, pre-texts, and authorial subjectivities. Empire’s meta-reflection on literary and theoretical text addresses almost exclusively the issues of language-production and meaning-making. In the second chapter of part II (“Alone,” 87– 172), “The Beginning of Criminality / The Beginning of Morning (Abhor speaks)” (109 – 140), the reader encounters one of these theoretical interjections that negotiate post-structuralist paradigms: The demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless. Then why is there this searching for an adequate mode of expression? Was I searching for a social and political paradise? Since all acts, including expressive acts, are inter-dependent, paradise cannot be an absolute. (Empire 113; my emphases)

Shortly before this statement, Abhor has left a compulsive relationship with Thivai and is on a quest that has her experiment with different identities on offer, such as the pirate, the sailor, and the criminal. This search for a distinctive selfhood and individual subjectivity is suddenly disturbed by her insight that an “adequate mode of expression is senseless,” that the prevalent conception of a metaphysical existence, especially one within language that follows the idea of transcendental signification, is void, a grand scheme itself unmasked as the ultimate fraud. The ensuing rhetorical question “Was I searching for a social and political paradise?” refers to a site or ‘center’ (sensu Derrida) she dismisses as utopian (“cannot be an absolute”), an eventual Empire of the senseless where ultimate meaning and conclusive sense are in vain. They are only unsettled alliances of an unstable signifier and an even more volatile referent that corroborate the post-structuralist staple of a “nothing outside of the text” and the potential for only-temporary meaning-making. Just as Abhor realizes this incompatible in-between position that rejects an ultimate signifier, Acker’s text echoes the deconstructionist paradigm of constant meaning deferral and the crucial role language yields as both the problem and the solution for the teleologically organized metaphysics in which an individual

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is caught up. Yet although the quest for representation and the “mode of expression” is undertaken in vain, the inevitable quality of this entrapment simultaneously offers a writing position that realizes this constant deferral of absolutes in the complex ‘inter-dependencies’ of the literary texture. Abhor gives up the quest for individual identity just as Empire rejects textual integrity. Acker’s partisanship towards the double assignment of ‘being given meaning’ and of ‘giving meaning’ as well as her awareness of the political, economical, and moral pre-coding of “all aspects of language” (Acker 1997: 4; see chapter 2.2.2) mean that she conceives of linguistic signs as dynamic text production, that “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings […] blend and clash” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 146). Abhor near the end of the chapter muses about this “space” and the available options she may have within this plethora of possible meanings. She declares: Ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language which normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning. But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions. (Empire 134)

Here, Abhor as the marginalized character of the story openly criticizes older (“[t]en years ago”) strategies, “nonsense, since it depended on sense” in particular. Her quest for a mode that allowed her to represent herself is of course condemned to futility. She dismisses the reaffirming quality of nonsensical (decidedly sense-less) art practices such as Surrealism and Dadaism as well as Beckett’s absurdist texts, ways of expression Federman’s courting Playgiarism in Double or Nothing still believes in. For Abhor the attempt to contest the dominant way of writing and its metaphysical order by simply negating it reproduces this paradigms’ essentialism.¹⁵⁹ A compliancy with these paradigms that claim to announce the end of all metanarratives is sufficient for neither the character Abhor nor the authorial subject Acker since the mere negation of repressive conditions means falling right into the trap of the dominant culture – “the prisons of meaning” –, a consolidation that necessarily numbs all emancipatory attempts. The endeavor to voice a marginalized female subjectivity by way of ConText involves denouncing both the mode of striving for a textual utopia that contains

 This also echoes a reproach made against second wave’s sex-difference feminism (‘woman’ presupposes ‘man’ as its counterpart) and post-structuralist demands for the metaphorical death of the author (death that allows for life).

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the possibility of sense (“a social and political paradise”) and also the artistic opposite that simply opts for creating nonsense. Abhor rejects this latter approach as a simple inversion of the established discourse that is quickly absorbed and reintegrated. In the textual world of Empire, Thivai represents this writerly alternative in that he opts for mere criminal subversion and non-sensical white noise. He does not embody the patriarchal mainstream, but a paternalistic avant-garde that presumes to wage the valiant struggle for emancipation from the margins. Abhor, rejecting means that reaffirm patriarchy with the mode of the absurd, opts for another strategy: “Nonsense doesn’t per se break the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes” (Empire 134). The utmost taboo that has the potential to ‘break the code’ of language as a means of making temporary sense is ConText, a strategy that rejects both the phallogocentrism of Western society and the reaffirming logic of nonsense. As the inclusion of overtly theoretical material has shown, the path Abhor is taking is one in-between, one that corresponds to her desire “to be mad, not senseless, but angry beyond memories and reason” (Empire 51). Her anger against the sense-making of the phallogocentric system as well as the oppositional nonsensical strategy with ConText and the theoretical interjections eventually leads to an in-between ‘pseudo-sense.’ This notion opts for permanent disguise and an orbiting of the conventionalized centers of meaning. In writing, multiple authorial subjectivities and textual identities are layered, pretexts in a “multi-dimensional space” are dynamically combined and constantly overwritten. The interspersion of a supposedly unified textual surface with passages from other textual entities creates an only momentary signification that relies on exactly that dynamism and ambiguity for which Abhor longs. With reference to the second level – the translation of post-structuralist theory into postmodern narrative – the thematic and metaphorical transliteration of these theoretical paradigms needs to be taken into account. In doing so, the obvious major analogy – that of voler (‘to fly’/‘to steal’) and writing, drawn by Hélène Cixous – deepens this reciprocity of theory, criticism, and fiction, and thereby adds to the potential of ConText as a strategic mode of plagiarist literature. As suggested in chapter 2.2.2, Acker’s preference for the symbolic impact of ‘flying’ in her work is manifest as “woman’s gesture – flying in language and making it fly” (1991 [1975]: 343 – 344), as introduced by Cixous’ écriture féminine. In proclaiming the distinct difference between ‘flying as fleeing’ and ‘flying as orbiting’ in her essay “Writing, Identity, and Copyright” (see Acker 1997: 103), Acker rejects completely abandoning the center that would draw her as authorial subject and her heroine Abhor into either licit commodified text production or into the equally accepted role of the experimental trailblazer.

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Instead, she substitutes this flight into comfortable writing positions with what I have previously called ‘gravitational attraction’ and ‘temporal and spatial distance’ to the supposed center and phallogocentric essence. This again recalls Roland Barthes’ momentary “enunciation” of meaning within the operations of ècriture. This establishment of an authorial voice and a decidedly female subjectivity is not exhausted by Abhor’s account of her quest for a provisional identity, but is a comparison of her own and Thivai’s imagination in which the male lack of the ability to ‘fly’ is confirmed. In the course of the novel, Abhor’s journey, one which refuses conformity with either end of the patriarchal spectrum – turbo-capitalist society as well as terrorist nonsensical exhaustion –, is set squarely against these options. Whenever Thivai lays out his version of confronting the conventional modes of representation and expression, he aggressively vilifies the commodified ideal of freedom to match his nonsensical interests: “Liberty, shit. The liberty to starve. The liberty to speak words to which no one listens. The liberty to get diseases no doctor treats or can cure. The liberty to live in conditions cockroaches wouldn’t touch except to die in” (Empire 163). Thivai detests both the materialist notion of the American Dream that sees people as “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights” (Declaration of Independence) and the promotion of an ‘Empire of Liberty’ (Thomas Jefferson) that guarantees prosperity without borders. This liberty – “to starve,” “to speak words to which no one listens,” “to get diseases,” etc. – is an option Thivai overtly dismisses as misguided sense and which he seeks to replace with nonsense. In a feverish trance he undergoes during his separation from Abhor, for instance, he fantasizes about the potential of Persian scripture that does not follow Western logocentrism and Aristotelian theories of causality: “The movement of the hand across the page in the Persian language is the movement of the spirit or of fire” (ibid. 164). He finds this writing as not subject to logos and rationality, which – for him – represents a convincing destruction of congruity and freedom at the same time. He consequently compares this culture’s Urtext, the Qur’an, to pornographic material and to his own notion of ‘flying’: According to Sheik Nafzawi, the Koran’s a manual for fucking. […] Like a drunken bird. Like a bewitched lovebird. Like a mad lovebird maddened, the Koran’s verbal turbulence – the thousand and one verbal variations, the thousand and one and more variations, similitudes within dissimilitudes within likenesses – all transform into something beyond, about to move into flight. (Ibid. 165 – 166; my emphases)¹⁶⁰

 Sheik Nafzawi (Abu Abdullah Muhammad be Umar Nafzawi) is the author of the Arabic sex manual The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight written in the fifteenth century.

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Thivai expresses the joy of this foreign tongue’s “thousand and one verbal variations,” the “similitudes within dissimilitudes within likenesses” that free, or rather flee from, the Western belief in the referentiality of language “into something beyond, […] into flight.” His orientalist enthusiasm for the holy scripture of Islam finds no fault in the equally logocentric mode of expression that Abhor dismisses as senseless, and he surrenders to his cowardice disguised as fear: I would have dived into the ice-cold water to escape fear. Daddy Monster Fear. All I’ve ever wanted is freedom from fear or to fly. But the ice-cold freedom which I barely tasted, tasted only in my imagination, was too weighty for a child whose identity is predicated upon Monsters. I wonder whether the names which I give things, how I name things, determine, to any degree, how things happen. Probably not. (Ibid. 171)

Although Thivai expresses his sincere desire to obtain freedom (not liberty) “or to fly,” a goal for which he would go to great lengths, he still cannot desist from the power of language, “the names which I give things.” Thivai offers only a weak comment on the decisive question concerning the possible relation between signifier and signified: “Probably not.” He will not go all the way and, by engaging in oppositional nonsense, he reaffirms phallogocentrism, a necessary balance that allows for the binaries of ‘life – death,’ ‘high – low,’ or ‘mind – body.’ The plagiarisms I identified in the chapters narrated by the male protagonist, i. e. when “Thivai speaks,” corroborate this strategy of mere opposition and also his impossible quest to effectively “fly[…] in language and making it fly” (Cixous 1991 [1975]: 343). When, for instance, in “On Becoming Algerian” (Empire 141– 172), he informs the reader about the novel’s setting in a dystopian Paris after the Algerian revolution and about some drug experiments performed by the CIA, this storyline refers to the CIA operation known as Project MKULTRA conducted from 1953 to the 1970s.¹⁶¹ In this interrogation research program, American citizens were unknowingly dosed with hallucinogenic drugs in order to investigate the substances’ ability to acquire information from uncooperative suspects, a mind-controlling procedure meant to support Cold War policies and the Red Scare. Thivai illustrates these historical events with the notorious beginning of Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poem “Howl” (1956): “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix […] (1959 [1956]: 9). In Acker’s novel, these lines are appropriated almost verbatim: “I saw my friends in that brothel destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked dragging themselves

 The New York Times disclosed the project in 1974. See Marks (1979); McCoy (2006).

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through the whitey’s streets at dawn looking for an angry fix […]” (Empire 145; my emphases). The historic events of MKULTRA which Thivai decorates with a poem that survived an obscenity trial in 1957, one important for the progress of the freedom of speech, included the rental of whorehouses in San Francisco and New York City, both considered capitals of the Beat Generation.¹⁶² Addicted to the hallucinogenic substances, in need of another “angry fix,” and tormented by lobotomies, Thivai’s “friends” re-experience the desolation and “madness” of Ginsberg’s opening. They capture the vanguard situation of the Beat Generation after World War II, a male-dominated group of experimental writers who confronted realism in literature with two major techniques: spontaneous confessional prose, which suggests a genial stream of consciousness on the material page, and cut-up surrealism translating Cubist collage and montage practices into literature.¹⁶³ With “Howl,” Thivai who desires to fly and gain freedom from the social constraints of mainstream culture, resorts to a literary product of the counter canon with all the bells and whistles of the commodified avant-garde: violence, legal allegations, homosexual promiscuity. On the one hand, the text configures the historical events and MKULTRA’s abusive implication of torture; on the other, it plagiarizes a poem that was legally charged for expressing the Beat postWWII sentiment of feeling outcast (‘beaten’), an emerging visionary consciousness, and the holiness of this marginalized situation (‘beatific’). The passage matches Thivai’s cultivation of an underground criminal existence he has adopted in opposition to the majority society. The substitution of “friends in that brothel” for “best minds of my generation” in the plagiarized passage questions one of the pre-text’s fundamental hypotheses. Thivai’s version dismisses the idea, implied by Ginsberg’s lyrical I, of a unifying elevation: there are no “best minds of my generation” anymore, but “my friends in that brothel” who are narcotized in order to complete a governmental experiment. With the Algerian conquest of a counterfactual Paris, on the other hand, the “whitey’s” dominance over a European culture capital has ceased: the altered social circumstances put the Caucasian race in the position of Gins-

 For further reading on the development of the Beat Generation as well as its most significant places see Campbell (1999); McDarrah and McDarrah (1996); Morgan (2010).  For the supposed immediacy created by spontaneous prose see e. g. Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” in Charters (1995: 484– 485); Dardess (1975); Douglas (2000). For Burroughs and Gysin’s cut-up technique see e. g. Burroughs, Grauerholz and Silverberg (1998 [1960 – 1967]: 179 – 245); Lydenberg (1978); Robinson (2011). The forms many Beat writers made use of in their writing are, of course, not limited to these two practices.

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berg’s “negro,” shattering white supremacy within society, yet doing so simply by inverting the binary of white/black. Ginsberg’s “best minds” as well as Thivai’s “friends in that brothel” are downtrodden, beaten and heteronomous characters who may only fly or flee from the rigid mainstream environment by embracing the commodified outcast existence society assigns to them. Both in contrast to the phallogocentric system that excludes all phenomena that diverge from the white, male norm and to those voluntarily opting out of this norm, Abhor’s desire to fly/to steal resorts to a method far more immersed in Cixous’ emancipatory metaphor. In her vision of flight from a very early point in the story, she compares herself to a flying bird who knew that pleasure gathers only in freedom. For I was soaring through the sky, my huge white and grey wings stretched out to the horizontal limits of my vision. […] I flew downwards, hollering with pleasure […]. This is what the people said to the sky. ‘Now the mad bird has won. Now even criminals can fly.’ (Empire 12– 13)

Abhor imagines the conTextual analogy of ‘flying’ and ‘stealing’ suggested in écriture féminine by Cixous: the reader learns about the female protagonist who “throw[s] off the agents of sense” and “empt[ies] structures” that have prevented her from her desired mode of expression “turn[ing] propriety upside down” (Cixous 1991 [1975]: 344) and revealing the senselessness of this system’s protocol. The devices Abhor uses are “huge white and grey wings” or later also “those wave tops, even though they were dangerous, [to] toss me upwards” (Empire 52). These mechanisms work as metaphors that discover the freedom to live and create in a ‘flying I,’ an elevated agent who attains her orbiting status by writing. The mode of this writing is ConText that repeats canonized patterns and ultimately transgresses the plagiarist taboo defending immaterial property in Western societies. Before embarking on the novel’s final episode in which she learns to motorcycle and questions the arbitrary rules of an official road user guide, Abhor states: “And so that I can move so swiftly, even when I’m not dreaming, that I fly everywhere anytime and I escape all cops forever” (ibid. 211). This guide represents yet another canonical example that will conclude the female approach to gaining freedom despite the fact that there remains nothing outside the confining demands of phallogocentric society.¹⁶⁴ This condition will then

 In the novel, this phallogocentric system is epitomized with the Reagan administration (see Empire 15, 45, 83, 114), the American intelligence service (AI, see ibid. 36, 40), and the French occupation and exploitation of Haiti in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as of North Africa (Algeria) in the twentieth century (see ibid. 26, 68 – 78).

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be taken into account with greater detail by looking at the intricate linking of writing/stealing as a violent body practice that ultimately creates the ‘flying I.’ When Abhor finds a motorcycle in the woods and even manages to ride it, Thivai disagrees with her performance since she does not know the proper rules for driving in public. The Highway Code, the government guide on driving and road safety in the UK, is supposed to compensate for this lack. She initially tries, submissively, to fathom the sense of these rules: The problem with following rules is that, if you follow rules, you don’t follow yourself. Therefore, rules prevent, dement, and even kill the people who follow them. […] Disobeying rules is the same as following rules cause it’s necessary to listen to your own heart. (Empire 219)

Again in addition to denouncing both sides of the agency spectrum – “disobeying” and “following rules” – Abhor consequently keeps to the logic of a self-taught new driver: “the cop […] informed me that my manner of driving would possibly get me in trouble and probably killed. […] Then, the cop told me I was dangerous to all living men” (ibid. 223 – 224). The ‘flying’ rider/writer Abhor/Acker is “dangerous to all living men” since her “manner of driving” does not correspond to the established rules of conduct such as The Highway Code, intellectual property regulations, and literary ethics. These ethics deem the eclectic notions of authorship valid, and hold plagiarists responsible for not only violating the good manners of literary production, but also for corrupting the sanitized practices of originality and authenticity. With respect to ConText negotiating the theoretical implications within the textual world of Empire of the Senseless, I deem the metaphor of ‘flying’ most significant for Thivai’s and Abhor’s quest for freedom. Thivai strives for nonsensical alternatives that reaffirm the rationale and majority agenda of a phallogocentric society and therefore remain manacled to these paradigms. Abhor as a mouthpiece of conTextual practice challenges them quite differently: she understands the metaphysical determinacy of her material existence and her expressive options; she embraces the in-between position she has to continuously fight for – owning language can only be realized in the process of writing itself, but never in the static rules of a unified text entity. After the direct articulation of language criticism and an inscription of theoretical metaphors that propose the in-between as desirable, I see the radical mixing of material across genres, authorial subjectivities, and extratextual regulations such as intellectual property as the most pervasive consequence of the authorial subject Kathy Acker and of ConText as feminist plagiarist practice. First, mixing obscures the major layers important for the idea of literary produc-

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tion, i. e. ‘the literary,’ ‘the critical,’ and ‘the theoretical’ (similar to Critifiction); second, it blurs the authorial self that would legitimize a ‘work’ as a defined amount of textual material; and, third, it affects the axiomatic institution of codes of conduct with intellectual property rights. All three levels uproot the perception of text and authorship as ownership as well as interpretive sovereignty in order to radically illustrate its limits for female literary production. Empire of the Senseless consists of innumerable textual fragments, including Gibson’s Neuromancer (mentioned above), Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1787) and Juliette (1796), The Highway Code, and, as we will see below, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain. With Empire, the uniqueness of each entity as a topos and literary topography is mixed, and together they form a ConText with a plethora of ambiguities. Since Acker’s writerly agenda relies on the constant deferral of meaning and agency, it is able to translate the demands of post-structuralist and deconstructionist language criticism into the texture of a literary environment. In addition, it develops a textual position from which the female protagonist Abhor, as well as the authorial subject Acker, can speak/ write. The mixing of all these discrete entities, especially in terms of literary, ethical and legal transgressions, draws attention to “precisely that which the codes forbid.” It breaks up language by acknowledging it both as the problem and the solution to the question of creative empowerment through writing. This distinctly feminist perspective demonstrates its potential when the taboos are played out on another material surface visible in the process of Acker’s creative interference – the female body. I will conclude my case study of Empire of the Senseless with an aspect that has prompted fierce reactions both from feminist scholars and readers with an interest in the ethical dimension of Acker’s work: the attempt to write from the disintegrated body that involves the problematic notion of pain as pleasure and the masochist equation of the textual and the sexual. Both dimensions continue the quest for disowning male authorities and for temporarily establishing an empowerment of the female writer. The passages related to the body and the protagonists’ corporeality are constantly infused with the desire for stimulation: be it Thivai’s addiction to ‘the drug’ and his involvement in the narcotics trade (see Empire 38, 62, 141– 142), the sexual craving and repressive promiscuity in search of an orgasmic outlet, or the initial experience of sexuality as assault within the nuclear family – all of which inform the protagonists’ later carnal knowledge. Yet the routines supposed to meet these desires may neither fully satisfy nor offer progress for the respective character since all of these instances are consistently accompanied by the notions of suffering, pain, and violence: “Daddy taught me to live in

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pain, to know there’s nothing else. I trusted him for this complexity” (Empire 10), as Abhor asserts. In the conditioning of the daughter to receive pain as a given for the female body and in being subjected to the Law of the Father, the destructive situations of self-inflicted harm represent the unfulfillable desire perpetuated throughout the novel. In addition to corrupted social institutions such as the family, school, or the police, plus the presence of Abhor’s father, Thivai also attends to the oppressive blend of sexuality and violence: after Abhor has left him for the first time, in a section ironically titled “Romanticism” (ibid. 61– 62), he has brutal bondage fantasies that leave his imagined victim subjected, concluding simply: “In my world, one doesn’t say goodbye to someone” (ibid. 62). Sexual violence is played out in the writing presented to the reader, be it a ‘real’ event within the textual world or only as a fantasy. This is particularly interesting since Thivai is an outlaw himself who votes for terrorism to counteract dominant representations of society in general and capitalism in particular; yet he simultaneously strives for control over women whom he usually addresses as “a fuck” (e. g. ibid. 27, 85, 126) or “cunt” (ibid. 29, 166, 177) and thereby reduces them to their sexual anatomy and respective function as an accessible commodity. In this postmodern dystopia, the body of the female character remains profoundly affected by the inevitability of phallogocentrism – be it in intratextual actions or in the book’s dependency on meaning-making through language. Yet Abhor never posits female innocence as a counterpart to male violence. This would only reaffirm the dichotomies of male – female, activity – passivity, or logos – pathos. Nor does she play according to Thivai’s ‘classic’ strategies of terrorism and counter-violence to confirm such polarities ex negativo. Since the violence directed at her body was initially induced by traumatic incidents within the nuclear family by her abusive father, the renegotiation of this experience occurs rather through the repetition of pain and its rebranding as a pleasurable event. When Abhor, in lieutenant attire, consults a gypsy fortune-teller at Paris harbor, the latter answers her inquiry for a satisfying relationship as follows: The lieutenant is struggling not to fall overboard, but he must fall overboard if he’s to experience anything besides loneliness. The lieutenant must fall overboard if he’s going to experience pleasure or pain. Pleasure and pain are always fucking. (Empire 116; my emphasis)

While Abhor’s male approach – both in its primary metonymic representation of the lieutenant’s uniform and with its masquerade means for the suppressed subject to prompt authority – is disowned as a valid strategy (“must fall overboard”), the disjunctive ‘or’ is dissolved by the gypsy’s conclusion that pain nec-

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essarily implies pleasure and vice versa – they “are always fucking.” Abhor has to embrace this reciprocity despite an endlessly repeated pursuit of sexual desire that is never fully consummated and which can never fully communicate some sort of meaning: a signifying and significant sexuality. As the recurring topics of rape, incest, pornography, and torture amply demonstrate, the pain-as-pleasure principle echoes the female character’s masochist disposition. These experiences are constantly negotiated via the violent abuse committed by male characters or by the phallogocentric society that commodifies female bodies. The story itself refuses to offer a positive character development or optimistic resolution. The affirmative quality of painful pleasure under patriarchal domination only addresses the reconciliation of the feminist project through an analogy of the sexual with the textual, a reconciliation that yet again takes place by prizing open a supposed whole – namely, the body of writing, the textual unit’s integrity. The writing body of the female authorial subject as well as the written body of the text demonstrate the crucial paradox of ConText: on the one hand, the ongoing quest for sexual and textual fulfillment is stuck in the pain/pleasure homology that can only ever repeat itself but never arrive at a final signification; just as bodily satisfaction is never truly accomplished – and therefore always encompasses the experience of pain –, the artistic act of writing will fail to overcome the limits of subjective expressiveness in language. On the other hand, despite the constant deferral of meaning, this endeavor will nevertheless continue to strive for a voicing of this desire in the text, and ultimately for an agency within writing. After pondering the option of celibacy – to be read as abstention not only from sexual intercourse, but also from accepted writing methods – Abhor argues: “If my body mattered to me, and what else was any text: I could not choose to be celibate” (Empire 64). This denial of chastity is comparable to an eschewal of an authentic ‘virginal’ speaking voice. Thus the text resorts to other authorial subjects that evoke notions of textual fornication and authorial multiplication within the textual entity of Empire of the Senseless. Looking at the various instances of signification through the body, and thereby putting into practice Cixous’ demand for somatically ‘signifying’ meaning (see 1991 [1975]: 338), three major aspects can be mentioned to illustrate Empire’s mode of body writing: first, the situation of Abhor’s body as a site of negotiating identities and speaking voices; second, the practice of tattooing as an analogy of the sexual penetration of the body and the plagiarist puncturing of the textual; and third, the appropriation and redefinition of a classic scene from American literary history – the ‘liberation’ of Abhor (Jim) by Thivai (Huckleberry Finn) and Mark the motorcyclist (Tom Sawyer).

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The first point addresses the female body with respect to its sexual identity as a commodified construction serving phallogocentric conventions. In her posthuman existence Abhor bears a “transparent cast” that Thivai describes as a “transdermal unit, separated from her body, connected to the input trodes under the cast by means of thin red leads. A construct” (Empire 33 – 34). Yet she neither carries this device as a mere prosthesis, a surrogate flesh that complements her as a woman, nor as a protective armor that objectifies her. Rather, her body conforms to Donna Haraway’s feminist ideal of the cyborg: “chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism” (1991: 150). Finally, she is cut off for being black (see Empire 105, 145, 179, 197, 201) thereby rendering her triply marginalized: only partly human, a woman, and part of an ethnic minority with a long history of oppression and slow emancipation.¹⁶⁵ Her chimeric condition designates a being in-between with an inconclusive body identity, not subject to those static dichotomies that define reality and representative modes. As a dubious body, Abhor escapes easy categorization and control; she is a construct that reveals humans’ own artificiality and challenges clear-cut assumptions about the gendered and racialized body. These characteristics of the textual protagonist can already be transferred to Acker’s body of writing, the alleged integrated whole of the novel Empire of the Senseless. As a piece of postmodernist fiction, what according to McHale it “imitates, the object of its mimesis, is the pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape of advanced industrial cultures” (1987: 38). Employing ConText – conceptually and illegally appropriating textual material by other male writers and weaving it into ‘her’ narrative – uncovers the unnatural constructedness of every text, the ultimately “anarchistic ontological landscape,” by unmasking the artificiality and unoriginality of the creative process. Abhor claims: “I can’t distinguish between my memories of dreams, waking actions, and what I’ve read and been told. For they’re all memories” (Empire 53). These memories on the micro- and the textual appropriations on the macrolevel recall Derrida’s textual traces; they corrupt Empire’s body identity as the reader recognizes Abhor as being a post-human science-fiction character (i. e., the cliché cyborg) and spots idiosyncratic phrases from familiar American classics. Abhor is not only half-human, half-cast; her character is also re-cast from William Gibson’s now canonical 1984 science-fiction novel, Neuromancer. ¹⁶⁶ In

 For the double marginalization of black women see Hill Collins (2005); hooks (1981).  Despite Gibson being a Canadian citizen and Neuromancer an initial underground publication, I categorize the novel as an American classic for two reasons: first, with the undeniable success of the hacker/sci-fi story with several re-editions (6.5 million copies sold by 2006; see Cheng 2006) and adaptations (see Balfour et al. 1988; de Haven and Jensen 1989), the text

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addition to Case (Thivai’s model), Gibson’s dramatis personae include Molly, a cynical cyber-mercenary who shows little remorse for her victims and constantly disguises her identity and body (see Gibson 1984: 25, 30, 175, 182– 183).¹⁶⁷ Abhor is her non-heroic copy, an epigone on a quest she has yet to learn to accomplish. Yet although she betrays clear similarities to the plagiarized Gibsonian heroine, she does not turn into the highly sexualized cyber-being Molly, a robotic vixen who fulfilled the carnal expectations of a dawning science-fiction nerd culture in the 1980s. With her role-playing and cyborg sexuality, Abhor remains a being in-between, who with her hybrid body shakes all prevalent static dichotomies of male – female, human – non-human, etc. Abhor’s body refuses clear attribution and integrity just as the plagiarist texture defies all textual ontology and single subjectivity. In order to draw out any semblance of meaning, the reader must accept both Abhor’s imprecise body identity that negates fixed gender categories – or, indeed, the very notion of the human as such –, and the consequences that arise from the equally unfixed text identity which is no longer aligned with a single authorial subject. The theme of tattooing (see e. g. Empire “dedication,” 86, 114, 130, 148) and the imprint of these images in the book (see ibid. 2, 88, 174, 222, 229) have two effects that perpetuate the negotiation of Abhor’s body identity and its ambiguous state: first, with tattooing as pictorial penetration, the reader identifies the body as a site of and means for creativity; second, the permanent image suggests an ideal metaphor and mode of expression as an enduring insigne. On a thematic level, the tattoo, the literal painful penetration and inscription of the body provides a means of expression that cannot be realized by linear writing, cohesive argument, or normative poetics. It is a radical translation of ConText that empowers subjectivity since language not only enters the material page of a manuscript, but also points back to the matter Acker writes from (the body of the historical author) and that the protagonist speaks from (the textual body). Thus the analogy of tattooing and writing suggests a self-fashioning that exceeds established literary production and which enters the lived skin of the story’s agents.

has gained widespread attention and was particularly well-received in the US; second, various prestigious sci-fi prizes (the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philipp K. Dick Award) and an appearance on lists such as Time Magazine’s “100 best English-language novels written since 1923” (see Grossman and Laycayo 2005) qualify Neuromancer as a postmodern ‘classic.’  Other appropriations from Neuromancer (N) include Chiba City (Empire 27) where Gibson’s story commences, a central control network that aims to command global communication (WINTERMUTE in N, MAINLINE in Empire), and the parallel of drug addiction in Gibson’s Case and Acker’s Thivai. The gang of urban terrorists in Neuromancer, the Panther Moderns, reemerges as the Moderns (see ibid. 36).

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In the second chapter of the second part, “The Beginning of Criminality/The Beginning of Morning (Abhor speaks)” (see Empire 109 – 140), Abhor wanders through the streets of Paris and ponders her own status in a society based on binary oppositions that leave her “catatonic” (ibid. 110), immobile, and apathetic. With Thivai absent – “I saw no possibilities. Thivai was gone. I panicked” (ibid. 113) –, Abhor is looking for viable identities that either pertain to her triply marginalized body or address her desire for impossible community: “no roses will grow on a sailor’s grave” (ibid. 117). Her visit to a barber where she has her head shaved in an initial act of catharsis offers her a first chance of alienation from the binary system and its corresponding body image: I felt so comfortable, when I was inside this operating room, I began to dream. The haircutter, one of the few women who wasn’t a prostitute [… ,] was stocky. Her hair was dead, white. […] When she asked me what I wanted to look like, I replied, ‘Yours.’ […] She didn’t ask me again what, who, I wanted until she had shaved off my hair. (Ibid. 111)

The clean surface of her black head indicates the options Abhor may choose from: shaving designates an evasion of clear-cut gender traits; it is a confrontation of the external signifiers of sexual attribution to deny patriarchal authority that classifies head hair as a relevant female asset; it is a preparation of the bodily surface that will before long become penetrated with images and writing; and it is finally a gesture of painful self-assurance and pleasurable disguise that affirms Abhor’s quest for empowerment. After this initial liberation she meets Agone, a Cuban artist who decides to become a sailor since it comes closest to his ideal of the criminal, an outlaw existence that least compromises with the duplicitous agents of society. Abhor perceives him as unusually self-conscious and strong and makes him her criminal idol, a hint towards her own identity: “Due to Agone, I was no longer nothing. I was now on my way to being somebody. A criminal” (ibid. 120). In pronouncing her desired identity Abhor marks a decisive moment since this marginalized status implies the beginning of a fabricated selfhood. With the main protagonist of the story established as an in-between individual who opts for the illegal margins of society, the ideal of the criminal is linked to the practice of tattooing and its social consequences: the permanent image serves as a mark that “[c]ruel Romans had used […] to mark and identify mercenaries, slaves, criminals, and heretics” (ibid. 130) and as a social insigne: “Tattooing continued to have ambiguous social value; today a tattoo is considered both a defamatory brand and a symbol of a tribe or of a dream” (ibid. 130).¹⁶⁸  Thivai in contrast cites an expert opinion that connects tattoos to the average imagery of

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The potential of this literal writing on the criminal body as practice and metaphor ultimately unfolds when Abhor analogizes the painful writing of the body with language that unfurls from the sexual and within the textual: [The] primary language [of the ideal unconscious] must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus, an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of a language or languages which aren’t acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a set of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn’t per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes. This new way of tattooing consisted of raising defined parts of the flesh up with a knife. (Ibid. 134; my emphases)

The “forbidden” languages refer both to Empire’s themes of pornography, sexual violence, and blasphemy, “which aren’t acceptable,” and to the illicit practice of abusing existing languages within the plagiarist strategy of carrying out an “attack on the institutions of prison via language,” – analogous to Cixous’ “imbecilic capitalist machinery” (1991 [1975]: 335). ‘Breaking the code’ can thus occur by “speaking” both the ‘unspeakable’ realities and by employing the strategic methods of plagiarist disruption, of ConText. Tattooing, opening up the material physique of the body as well as the textual surface (“raising defined parts of the flesh up with a knife”) and injecting ink and canonized pre-texts ultimately acts as an apt metaphor for the use of the two different strategies of language criticism. As a consequence not only of the marginalized character of the textual world Abhor, but also of the criminalized authorial subject of the extra-textual world (Acker), tattoos as material inscriptions signify “icons of power and mystery designating realms beyond normal land-dwellers’ experience [, … and] transferring to the bearer some sense of existing outside the conventions of normal society” (Empire 140). Inviting “some sense of existing outside,” the reader witnesses a different écriture – a variant of Cixous’ body writing –, both in the desire of the prison and echoes the banal processes of meaning-making of the center: “Between one-third and two-thirds of all prison inmates wear tattoos. Being tattooed shows a tendency for violence, property crime, and self-destruction or self-mutilation. There is a ‘strong relationship between tattooing and the commission of violent, assaultive acts. This propensity toward violence in general may well be signalled by the violence these men have done to themselves in the form of tattooing.’ – some doctor” (Empire 148; my emphasis). This ‘expertise’ takes into account prison inmates as paradigmatic bearers of tattoos in the first place and links body modification to the ethical character of the individual on the basis of dubious psychoanalytical findings. In referencing “some doctor,” the medical discourse for authenticating information with an alleged expert seals the difference between Abhor’s holistic and the phallogocentric implications of body writing.

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the female protagonist and the practice of the female authoress of ConText. Accordingly, Abhor concludes this chapter by referring directly to the implications of an outlaw existence, of orbiting the phallocenter of male creativity and literary production, and offering the only ‘way out’ by literary means: “The realm of the outlaw has become redefined: today, the wild places which excite the most profound thinkers are conceptual” (ibid. 140). As conceptual as the programmatic practice of ConText. The tattoo not only pierces the material skin and provides the five drawings that rhythmize Empire’s structure, but also serves as a pervasive image of penetration by alien substances, i. e. external pre-texts. The most consistent episode in which canonic material is plagiarized for the sake of body writing takes place in the next-to-last chapter “I Realize Something (Thivai speaks)” (ibid. 175 – 208): a literal tour de force through Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). As the subtitle implies, Abhor’s male terrorist counterpart, the mercenary Thivai, is the narrator. In the only part of the novel that includes an epigraph of sorts, Abhor’s decisive painful steps in the direction of self-assertion within certain masochist restrictions are foreshadowed, a development Redding identifies as “[n]ot a pretty sight” (1994: 297): “But the blazing will to live: to live anew. And the struggle of these people to realize themselves in the world of modern times, whose sin is to have been made without them” (Empire 171; original emphases). Abhor’s emancipatory quest starts with an almost joyful prophecy that cancels the previous events and counterfactual depression with a “But.” It promises the reader not only a reward for the painful struggle and oppression Abhor underwent at the hands of phallogocentric society and the discourses and agents that had offered to provide for the woman victim, but even an option to innovate, to freely imagine and create and “live anew.” Yet these naïve expectations are quickly deceived by suggesting that this “blazing will to live: to live anew” comes at the price of yet more struggle, of ever-repeated attempts “to realize themselves in the world of modern times,” and of the eventual determinateness of a logocentric society that only prolongs the pain, defers meaning, and denies ‘true’ agency. After a longer period of individual quests Thivai and Abhor meet again. The mercenary offers to provide food for her in disguise. Yet in contrast to Abhor’s lieutenant attire and her denial of hair as female insigne, passing herself off as an androgynous being with authority, Thivai in a reenactment of a scene from Mark Twain’s bildungsroman dons women’s clothes, “female drag which made me look helpless […] to search for food and pharmaceutical drugs”

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(ibid. 178).¹⁶⁹ This search disqualifies Thivai/Huck as a male provider who cannot make full use of Abhor’s deceitful strategy of parodical camouflage and body performance. What follows this disguise-gone-wrong is another analogous scene that sees Abhor/Jim and Thivai/Huck set out in a little rowboat to examine a shipwreck in the Seine where two pirates plan to murder a third for treachery.¹⁷⁰ All of a sudden, Abhor’s language changes into the African-American idiom of Jim’s vernacular from Twain’s novel, and she copies his fear of going aboard verbatim: “I doan’ want to go fool’n’ ’round er no wreck” (ibid. 185; Twain 2003 [1884]: 66). This shift in language and character in the novel is threefold: first, the parallel characters Abhor and Jim – although moving ‘freely’ before the repeated encounter with Thivai/Huck – are immediately subdued by the representatives of a patriarchal hegemony;¹⁷¹ second, it addresses the alternative offered by Thivai and Huck since they are also outlaws, shunned by the majority society, and hence possible allies for the ostracized Abhor/Jim – Thivai as self-proclaimed terrorist and mercenary, Huck as a mischievous run-away orphan with no manners and education. Finally, the shift that results in a blending of Abhor’s and Jim’s story suggests a parallel path towards emancipation in terms of eluding the language dependency within a phallogocentric framework by using the vernacular (Jim) or écriture (Abhor).¹⁷² As outlined above, controlling another character or collective in the novel usually involves sexual violence. In order to appropriate and abrogate its destructive impact, the resulting pain is therefore translated into a necessity for the characters to separate from societal binary oppositions and to transcend simplistic dichotomies: “In my isolation and in my desperation […] my sexuality was a source of pain. That my sexuality was the crossroads not only of my mind and body but of my life and death” (Empire 65), Abhor claims, gradually realizing the benefit of autoaggressive pain as a means of empowerment. In the re-enactment

 The corresponding passage from Twain’s novel has Huck Finn in girls’ drag retrieve information ashore while the fugitive slave Jim waits on Jackson Island. Huck is soon caught in the gender act by the woman he is sounding out, yet gets away with another lie disguising that he was not killed by his father (see Twain 2003 [1884]: 54 ff.).  See the respective passage in Twain (2003 [1884]: 63 – 70).  Abhor becomes the woman to be cared for and the sexually available and exploitable partner while Jim’s slave existence is perpetuated in Huck’s behavior who considers slavery a natural given and abolitionism an anarchic project.  Further plot aspects (see below) also recall the fact that the canonized classic has been accused of reaffirming stereotypes of black people and of exploiting the alternative behavior of the oppressed character as it becomes visible in Jim’s superstition, naïve logic, and complicit fatuity.

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of Jim’s prevented escape, she accordingly votes for the conscious immersion in agony as a way of overcoming external control: Everytime I talk to one of you, I feel like I’m taking layers of my own epidermis, which are layers of still freshly bloody scar tissue, black brown and red, and tearing each one of them off so more and more of my blood shoots into your face. This is what writing is to me a woman. (Ibid. 210)

The letter that contains this passage (see ibid. 209 – 210) is already the result of Abhor’s rite of passage with Thivai/Huck and the motorcyclist Mark as Huck Finn’s fellow con artist, Tom Sawyer. The process Abhor describes here illustrates the entanglement of self-inflicted torment and artistic production. It proves essential for the female character and again analogizes the two complicit realms of the physical body and the literary text that are both pierced and penetrated to ‘shoot blood in the face’ of the colluding enemies: female commodification and male-dominated literary production. At this point in the story, Abhor has already survived the re-enactment of one of the most well-known scenes in literary history: Jim’s imprisonment and the recurrently postponed rescue mission by Huck and Tom (see Twain 2003 [1884]: 231– 276). Abhor, initially betrayed by Thivai – “I was going to get Abhor in prison in the first place cause she was as strong as I was” (Empire 192) and because she would not requite his oppressive love –, is locked in a run-down shack. Working along the storyline and often verbatim dialogue of Twain’s account, the two men prevent Abhor’s easy escape and restage the supposedly humorous rescue of Jim by constantly prohibiting it. On the surface, they may only parody their pre-text’s well-known utterances and absurdity, namely that the rescue of the slave/woman has to involve illogical plans full of thrill, adventure, and violence: “it’s too blame’ simple; there ain’t nothing to it. What’s the good of a plan that ain’t no more trouble than that?,” Tom argues (Twain 2003 [1884]: 232; original emphasis), while Mark dismisses Thivai’s all-too-easy scheme as “no plumb good. It’s no good, Thivai, cause it’s too easy cause nothing ever comes easy to no one. Not even piracy. We need a harder plan” (Empire 195). The similar phrasing describes a scene of comic rescue that is structurally identical: the liberation of Abhor/Jim has to follow certain rules that guarantee a proper adventure with archetypal characters (hero, villain, victim) and a corresponding action that involves risk and physical danger. Yet one hundred years ahead in textual time, Twain’s farce receives a provocative turn as the episode is repeated and exaggerated. With Abhor as the black female captive, the slave’s inferior situation as a black man is enhanced by misogyny, perpetrated by fellow con artists – a sick male mercenary and a gay motorcyclist – who impede Ab-

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hor’s liberation. Putting Abhor in Jim’s place, the senseless rules of the rescuers who are in need of adventurous strategies are further emphasized. Just as Tom Sawyer is obsessed with romance novels that prescribe rules of conduct to complicate action (see e. g. Twain 2003 [1884]: 7– 10), Mark (a nominal allusion to the pre-text’s authorial subject) likewise calls forth the imperatives of hard work – “nothing ever comes easy to no one” – and risky heroism.¹⁷³ In the scenes concerned with the ridiculous efforts to free (and re-confine) the prisoners, both ‘teams’ endlessly defer their freedom as they follow a literary ideal that is fed by other pre-texts.¹⁷⁴ The illusion of Abhor’s emancipation is just as deferred and disabled as the notion of the transcendental signifier, the ultimate sign necessary for stable meaning-making and a teleological argument. This parallelism eventually becomes a most powerful stratagem with respect to the dire consequences of the fake dangers and inflicted violence for Abhor, the ultimate nexus of the sexual and the textual, of pain and pleasure, as well as bodily penetration and literary productivity. From the demand for risky heroism Thivai extrapolates consequences for Abhor’s anticipated behavior during their adventure: A man has to endure pain and more severe tribulations to show that he has the power to make someone of himself. Being maimed is the way a man shows he’s a man.’ […] I informed Abhor she had to be a man to be a pirate. If she wasn’t a man, she was as good as dead. (Empire 202)

Wishing she were chained to the bedpost in her shack, Thivai and Mark vote for her “to get permanently and seriously maimed” (ibid.) since “there are lots of historical examples, throughout human history, of how humans cut off each other’s ears fingers and limbs for moral and other good and proper reasons” (ibid. 200). In restaging Twain’s embedded allusions to canonical romances

 Thivai comments on Mark’s scheme as being too risky, yet he accepts its long-term effects and reward: “Mark’s plan was so complicated it was sure to get me and him killed. Which was good. You can’t be a pirate unless you die by hanging. I didn’t care about the other details of his plan” (Empire 196). Likewise, Huck goes along with Tom’s strategy to keep his cover for the Phelpses, yet he concedes: “[Tom] told me what [his plan] was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it” (Twain 2003 [1884]: 232– 233).  Tom Sawyer refers to several male role models from pre-texts they have to follow for heroic reasons: “Why, hain’t you ever read any books at all? – Baron Trenck, nor Casanova, nor Benvenuto Chelleeny, nor Henry IV., nor none of them heroes? Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-maidy way as that?” (Twain 2003 [1884]: 238).

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they also insist that Abhor chronicle her rescue in written form: Thivai’s line “instead of a penknife, we’ld smuggle Abhor a pen. The pen is mightier than the sword” (ibid.) plagiarizes the famous metonymic adage by Edward BulwerLytton from his Richelieu (see 1839: II.2) thereby mocking the solemn humanist phrase by contrasting it with this violent environment of exploitation in Empire. It is an elaboration of the hegemonic principles of writing that are deemed proper and valuable. Thus, Abhor is turned into the target of Mark and Thivai’s heroic farce in two ways: as a pawn that pays for their desire for chivalrous audacity and as a participating witness who pays tribute to their supremacy. After Abhor has received the vital tool for proper expression, Thivai realizes that she does not “know how to write because, being black, she was uneducated” (Empire 201). They have to “s[i]t her down in some shit to learn her how to write properly” (ibid. 203). Soon leaving the pen behind to illustrate the pain – “[w]riters need disability or madness they can overcome in order to write” (ibid.) –, she is ordered to cut her fingers and use the seeping blood as her ink. In Thivai’s opinion, a female writer must endure even more suffering than a male author to live up to the expectations of the creative process: “I told her good that if she wanted to be great, as great as a man, she’ld have to learn how to endure tribulations even more severe than pain and still keep her mouth shut” (ibid.). Thus Abhor may only follow the rules of creative production as far as the dominators’ convictions are met.¹⁷⁵ They again stage themselves as noble emancipators for the woman’s liberation – teaching her how to write. All the same, she is rejected as a human who has to “keep her mouth shut.” Further described as a dog (“cause women don’t see well, they’re always running after the wrong person”, ibid. 198) or supernatural evil (“I recognized this animal which […] was more dangerous than any witch”, ibid.), she is “exempt from human morality” (ibid. 200). Refusing to recognize Abhor as an equal individual, either as human or as a female writer, exemplifies the perpetrators’ phony scheme to commodify her for their own amusement and tyranny: “Making Abhor into a great woman writer obviously was going to take more blood than sweat” (ibid. 205; my emphasis).

 These convictions echo authorial concepts in two ways: on the one hand, the suffering author who has to “endure tribulations” refers to the socially and economically troubled writer who produces art for its own sake or as a committed, non-profit practice and is therefore denied substantial support from the mainstream literary scene; on the other hand, the literalized metaphor of ‘blood writing’ in its emphasis on immediacy mocks a devotion to the artistic act that exceeds both the merely imaginative process and the skill-oriented craftsmanship of the poeta vates and the poeta faber, an implication that ridicules the artist of the avant-garde.

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The rescue attempts “that ain’t no more trouble than that,” and which in both texts are narrated by the privileged character of the story, chronicle the implications of phallogocentric superiority over black slaves/women: freeing the subjects is not an option for the male characters since they strive to leave the hegemonic structures intact; what they stage as an attempted liberation may only be completed by following the rules of adventure derived from canonical (male) dare-devils.¹⁷⁶ In doing so, the emphasis again lies on repeating phrases. The replication of language lays bare its ongoing oppressive force and may only be beaten at its own game of constant meaning deferral, by the conTextual appropriation of material charged with topoi such as homosexuality, sadism, felony, fetishism, and general abuse. The passages in Empire of the Senseless that appropriate verbatim phrases, thematic structures as well as moral prescriptions from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn serve to demonstrate the conTextual design of post-structuralist theorems and the dire consequences of the female quest for subjectivity as it slashes its own path through the phallogocentric thicket by writing straight from the body. The pre-text’s authorial subject, whose pen name is ‘Mark Twain,’¹⁷⁷ is both appropriated and absorbed into a narrative that declares the question of an original author irrelevant since the pre-text is drawn into a Barthesian “tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred” (1977 [1967]: 147). Whether it is Twain or Acker who as authorial subjects have reconstructed these scenes from the tissue of language is irrelevant. Yet Empire of the Senseless not only repeats the potential of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman by evoking substantial parallels; it also charges the template with the “forbidden languages which aren’t acceptable,” the phallogocentric foundation and oppressive violence against the ‘Other’ which, even in the counterfactual dystopia of the novel, finds its embodiment in the marginalized female protagonist. The main changes from Huckleberry Finn to Empire therefore take place on the level of character: Victimized Abhor, who finally takes action herself by simply jumping out of the shed’s window (see Empire 207), surpasses the sadist nonsense of the men’s plans that derive from canonical texts – Twain’s direct pretext as well as Tom’s beloved adventure stories that perpetuate traditional heroism. She develops her own strategy, namely breaking away from patronage and

 Mark and Thivai even consider claiming her as a martyr, which corresponds with the female authorial writer as both freed and ensnared by phallogocentric forces (see Empire 200 – 201).  The authorial identity of Samuel Langhorne Clemens is already corrupted by his decision to write with the nom de plume ‘Mark Twain,’ which in itself celebrates the constructedness of the artist’s selfhood and authenticity. For debates on Twain’s chosen name see e. g. Fatout (1962) and Twain/Clemens (2003 [1883]: ch. 50).

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ridiculing it: “Mark asked her what it was like in jail. Do the sufferings of jail make a human stronger? ‘No.’ ‘Then what does jail do for you?’ ‘When I was in jail, I could have torn my heart out and eaten it, then, out of boredom’” (ibid.). Abhor’s and Acker’s method of deriding such paternalist meaning-making with ConText does not simply demand the expropriation of the power over ways of expression from men. It involves a notion ‘beyond patriarchy’ that orbits the restrictive and ‘boring’ phallogocenter and deceives readerly expectations. Her textual project is therefore twofold: to orbit the traditional styles and agents of representation and to momentarily pierce these limits from the margins by way of differing and deferring. This reveals both the absurdity and insufficiency of phallogocentric creative production and analogizes this textual penetration with the painful, yet pleasurable inscription of the sexual in the female body by violence and literal body writing (the tattoo, blood ink). Abhor’s letter to Thivai and Mark after her escape from the shack as well as Twain’s pre-text reveal the men’s perverted logic: “You two collaborated in keeping me in jail by planning escapes so elaborate they had nothing to do with escape. That’s western thought for you. This is what I’m saying: you’re always fucking deciding what reality is and collaborating about these decisions” (ibid. 210). The story deceives the reader’s expectations of a positive peripeteia as an ultimate resolution for the bildungsroman heroine since Abhor herself is continuously derided by her ex-lover: “Of course, you’re a free person. You are perfectly free to ride a bike even if you don’t have a clue how to ride and drop dead in the process […]. I just wanna know. If you’re free, Abhor, why do you bother protesting?” (ibid. 212). Thivai denies the woman’s right to reaffirm her position within a limited framework of social bonding and determination. Thus Empire refrains from the pedagogical peripeteia that would bring a relief for Abhor and it ends with only a fragile promise of future signification: “I stood there, there in the sunlight, and thought that I didn’t as yet know what I wanted. I now fully knew what I didn’t want and what and whom I hated. That was something” (ibid. 227). ConText as a feminist strategy of literary plagiarism is fully realized in Empire of the Senseless. The preceding observations have substantiated the assumptions I outlined in chapter 2.2.2 and that I consider crucial to ConText’s peculiar forms, its inscription of theoretical notions and, ultimately, its cultural agenda. In comparison to Playgiarism in Double or Nothing and also to Neo-Conceptualist plagiarist practices in the twenty-first century, Acker’s text not only brims with aesthetic experimentation and revels in blending authorial subjectivities; it also challenges the cultural territories that Playgiarism still acknowledges and affirms. One of these challenges is the assessment of ConText’s potential for female creativity. Throughout the course of the novel the reader learns of the difficulty of

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expression in a phallogocentric culture. An authoress has the same expressive means at her disposal as male authors. In sharing a similar cultural and creative environment, she is thus forced to draw on the same language that serves as a central means of her oppression. The authorial subject realizes the relevant implications of post-structuralist and deconstructionist language criticism such as the questioning of the subject, textual disintegration, and the disappointed attainment of static meaning. These implications are then instrumentalized to undermine the firm assumptions of text (from unified to dispersed), narrative (from coherent to disrupted), authorship (from individual to plural), and the extra-literary environment (from commodified ownership to creative commons¹⁷⁸), and together they strive for the deferral of conclusive sense and significance in language. By endorsing this theoretical and critical perspective on the text, yet complementing it with a feminist agenda, a complex mode of body writing deepens ConText’s radical impact. The outlined analogies of the textual and the physical as they are performed on the contested body of the female protagonist succeed in breaking up prescribed textual characteristics. This becomes especially pervasive since this writing from the body and translation of a lived experience into the dynamics of the text is charged with the additional taboos of violent sexuality, pornography, and incest. I established the characters’ sexual desire and their embrace of even the most violent assaults as analogous to the intricate penetration of the textual body with alien material, namely that of (male) authors. It is therefore this body writing at the heart of the conTextual plagiarist agenda that fleshes out the abstract considerations of post-structuralist theory. With respect to ConText’s challenge to the self-contained authorial subject as well as to authoritative agencies, Acker’s translation of theoretical concepts into literary material is crucial. The literary text is still charged with a certain inalienable aura and morale, yet it remains alienable in the form of the commodified product and unified for the sake of marketability. This alienation of the historical author and his or her text is what Acker called the “obfuscating relations between this society’s writers and this society” (1997: 101) – a reproach that channels Cixous’ “imbecilic capitalist machinery” with its “crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives” (1991 [1975]: 335), i. e. intermediaries such as literary agents, publishers, lawyers, or franchise book chains, most problematic for

 Here I use ‘creative commons’ in the sense of ‘shared imagination.’ The foundation Creative Commons that offers alternative copyright licenses for authors to dynamically assign rights to their works nevertheless provides a connecting factor for the discussion of contemporary practices of intellectual property, an issue that features prominently in the conclusion to this study.

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the expressive potential of a text. Here, the connection between the socio-economic, the legal and the literary sphere in ConText is obvious and convincing. In this light, ConText is a radical and complex challenge to a commodified interest in authorial powers and interpretive sovereignty. It relativizes the idea of textual integrity which, in the contemporary marketplace with its interest in economic revenues and marketable authorial individuals, presupposes the originator’s writerly motivation, creative influences, and traditionalist embedding. These parameters – individuality, originality, authenticity, and calculable investment – are the sine qua non for a writer to publicize herself through the aforementioned economic proxies. The impact of Acker’s writing lies in “obfuscating” the constructed integrity of text and authorship as well as this fabricated unified meaning of a text by mingling numerous subjectivities in the intra- and extratextual world of her ‘own’ novel. From the discussion of postmodern plagiarist practices Kathy Acker’s role as an authoress consequently differs from Playgiarism’s authorial subject, i. e. the playful bricoleur of genre and textual borders who abrogates language’s referential function and opts for nonsensical reaffirmation. Hers is a more radical renegotiation of the female authorial voice within the determinate framework of literary production. The breadth and depth of this challenge confronts one on several levels: first, Acker refuses the responsibilities of the agreeable mainstream author as well as the experimental or avant-garde author; second, with the criticism in her secondary texts and the barely concealed mixing of commodified pre-texts, she rallies against the creative industries and the economic capital of literature; and third, she discusses her own authorship by corrupting it with other authorial voices, thereby delivering herself up to the pathological plagiarist connotations of criminality, incest, or bastardy. With Acker we thus encounter a female authorial agency that remains distinctly connected to her persona and this persona’s agenda. Her open discussion of her determination to pursue this particular creative mode of textual appropriation and her celebrity status as punk authoress, trained scholar, intellectual artist, and literary enfant terrible ironically yield an authorial subject that in her writing abandons individual presence and marketable glorification. To conclude this case study of ConText I will therefore identify a weak point that relativizes the strategy with respect to the dominating forms of literary production. One of the major shortcomings of Empire is its elitism and presupposed sophistication. The broad selection of pre-texts that are drawn from different cultures, language environments, and literary periods requires a devoted and skilled readership willing and able to recognize the manifold layers of her texts and to actively unearth them. This focus on an audience equipped with the necessary

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cultural investments runs the risk of falling short of the cultural agenda that ConText purportedly holds dear. On the one hand, this entails the idea of breaking up the codes and “speaking precisely that which the codes forbid.” But the code, or rather how it has been organized and semanticized in previously issued material still requires knowledge of these pre-texts, their context, and literary historical significance. Given this need for extensive pre-knowledge, the liberation and democratization of text goes almost completely unrecognized by the majority of potential readers. This circumstance ironically renders her emancipatory texts into elaborate conundrums for an elect intelligentsia. On the other hand, and this is additionally linked to Acker as public persona, her reputation within the non-mainstream public remains that of the experimental bogeywoman, a merited part of a “rebel establishment” who makes herself at home on the well-fed margins of the late-twentieth-century literary world. Her idolization is sustained through the equally commodified mechanisms of avant-garde culture: Acker is, for instance, prominently featured on the re-edited covers of her novels for New York publisher Grove Press; she has been widely and posthumously discussed in academic conference settings and performance venues,¹⁷⁹ and commemorative essay collections;¹⁸⁰ she had her own biopic Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker? (2007) by Austrian filmmaker Barbara Caspar, which was accepted to various international film festivals (see ackerfilm.com); and followers, finally, may even sit at her writing desk on the premises of non-profit publisher Les Figues Press in Los Angeles.¹⁸¹ Critics may consequently find fault with the contradiction that arises between her über-present public persona and the project she claims to be engaged in – a contradiction that proves the sheer pervasiveness of the commodification of literary practice. Returning to Acker’s own assessment of her conceptual writing practice – “I could even plan things!” –, one may finally argue that the high degree of intentionality in the conceptual appropriation of male pre-texts for the sake of corrupting authorial subjectivities undermines certain post-structuralist demands. Was it not écriture itself that confused the clear-cut assumptions concerning a

 These forums included “Lust for Life: The Writings of Kathy Acker” (November 2002) in New York City, featuring scholars such as Catherine Stimpson, Eve Sedgwick, and Gayatri Spivak, or the two-month exhibition “K. Acker: The Office Ruling ‘n’ Freaking” (April–June 2011) in the Gallery of La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseilles, that besides a regular exhibition included events with critic Sylvère Lotringer, theorist Rosi Braidotti, and writer/scholar Matias Viegener.  See Hardin (2004); Mackay and Nicol (2009); Scholder, Harryman, and Ronell (2006).  I thank the editorial and executive directors of the press, Vanessa Place and Teresa Carmody, for pointing this out to me.

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text and its presumed individual originator? Is it not to fall back on a traditionalist cultivation of the skilled poeta faber by emphasizing planning? The regular discussion of disruptive writing – e. g. of post-colonial rewritings and possibly ConText – either aligns it with business operations and literary etiquette or scandalizes it, often in order to exclude it from the literary canon. Either way, the literary product Empire of the Senseless has an individual authorial subject, a genre attribution (“a novel”), material integrity, and copyright notices that ironically prohibit reproduction without permission from the publisher, all of which lends itself to charges of hypocrisy. Of course, such charges – mainly directed against the credibility of the authorial subject – ultimately work according to the immobile system of cultural production that sanctions artistic capacities and agencies (see e. g. Lessig 2004: 28 ff.; 2008: 36 – 50 and chapter 2.1.2) rather than renders its mechanisms more flexible (see e. g. Lessig 2008: 51– 83, 117– 176). Nevertheless, ConText as a plagiarist strategy designates a necessary shift from the proto-postmodern playful variants of Critifiction and Playgiarism towards the feminist interest in emancipatory subjectivity. It is the practice of body writing in particular that contributes to more complex operations of literary theft, operations that outgrow the too-easy contrast between sense-making and nonsense.

3.3 Neo-Conceptual Appropriative Writing 3.3.1 Uncreative Writing as Constrained Transcription: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (2003) Answering and substantiating the assumptions of chapter 2.2.3 concerning plagiarist repercussions in the twenty-first century with Neo-Conceptual practices, the three attending case studies commence with Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, published in 2003 with the independent press The Figures.¹⁸² Deemed by Juliana Spahr “without a doubt the leading conceptual poet of his time” (qtd. in Cole and Emerson 2005: n.pag.), in response to his 2005 volume The Weather, Kenneth Goldsmith is at least considered Neo-Conceptual-

 The cachet ‘independent’ indicates commercial publishing houses that routinely focus on literary niches on a non-profit basis. These small presses do not serve as imprints to cater to certain demographic consumer segments, but are financed by means of individual and public sponsoring, and often resort to either marketing limited editions or books-on-demand. See also chapter 2.2.3.

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ism’s most comprehensive writer. In the following introduction of the author person, his broad range of activity provides this case study with initial insights into Goldsmith’s approach of Neo-Conceptual appropriative writing, insights that are further substantiated in the ensuing analysis of the volume Day. In addition to literary publications, this activity includes editorial and translation work, DJing, literary criticism, activism, and journalistic writing, as well as teaching at the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania since 2004.¹⁸³ With respect to his academic employment, Goldsmith has taught various undergraduate seminars ranging from experimental writing to “Writing Through Culture and Art” (on the diversity of text types concerned with contemporary art) to “Interventionist Writing” (Fall 2008), inviting students to exploit language “as a way of upending normative modes of discourse and reception,” to “Scribing a Non-Expressive Sexuality” (Fall 2010), where the theories of Laura Mulvey, Donna Haraway, and Antonin Artaud complemented a discussion of the erotic within the virtual dissemination environment of the Internet (see seminar abstracts in University of Pennsylvania 2011a: n.pag.). These seminars unite Goldsmith’s artistic as well as didactic interest in decidedly secondary practices such as “appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, [and] plundering, as compositional methods” (University of Pennsylvania 2011b: n.pag.). Considering the fact that Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein (conceptual poet and key figure of language poetry) are also part of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania,¹⁸⁴ the appointment of Goldsmith as a teacher of uncreative writing may signal an institutionalization of his conceptual strategy. Goldsmith’s uncreative writing pedagogy simultaneously testifies to an interest in both the practice and the instruction of soon-to-be writers. He encourages, for instance, exercises that are, in the literary world, traditionally deemed deceiving and unoriginal: “In it [the course], students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing” (Goldsmith 2011: 8). The lecturer thus invites comparisons to classical  His activities as a weekly radio DJ lasted from 1996 – 2009 for non-commercial FM radio station WFMU in New York City called “Intelligent Design.” With respect to his academic activities, Goldsmith additionally held the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University in the academic year of 2009/2010. In 2013, he was appointed the first ever Poet Laureate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where he hosted a series of conceptual readings.  Charles Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature (since 2003); Al Filreis is the Kelly Professor of English, as well as the Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, which houses both an undergraduate critical and creative writing program.

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painting schools, where creative work was first understood as an imitative practice in which the students model their own paintings on established artworks. These imitations were considered equally artistic, although not deemed original in retrospect. Already proceeding from Goldsmith’s didactic interest is a literary program raising both readership, as well as student, consciousness of notions of originality, authenticity, and artistry. Goldsmith is known, furthermore, as a key digital archivist for avant-garde poetry and as a founder of UbuWeb (ubu.com) established in 1996. UbuWeb is an online forum and open-source database for avant-garde literature and audio-visual material, with a focus on Concrete Poetry, and conceptual poetics, as well as artist interviews and rare film footage, for example from the renowned experimental multimedia magazine Aspen, founded by Phyllis Johnson in 1965. On UbuWeb, a prospective community finds high-quality files promoting a freely accessible resource of poetry material to create an archive or, as Damon Krukowski called it, “a library or museum” (2008: n.pag.) of avant-garde art production conveying “an almost blind enthusiasm for words and sounds” (ibid.). The “almost blind” hoarding of these diverse types of material already point to the demands of net neutrality and a notion of language as leveled, flexible, and manageable code within the digital environment. In addition to this interest in compiling vast quantities and ranges of material, the strictly non-commercial nature of the enterprise deserves particular attention. UbuWeb exclusively relies on philanthropic sponsorship from and cooperation with institutions such as the online audio archive PennSound, with Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis as co-directors at the University of Pennsylvania, The Electronic Poetry Center at the State University of New York (SUNY Buffalo, since 1995), and the free-form community radio WFMU. Like these institutions, UbuWeb accordingly commits to a manifesto and statutes that echo its interest in ‘free culture’ paradigms and unfettered democratic access to text, alternative modes of intellectual ownership and licensing, gift culture, and the promotion of art as a fundamental right.¹⁸⁵ The productive interdependence of language and technology is central to these statutes, as “now-standard tools used to make language move and morph, stream and scream, [are] distributed worldwide instantaneously at little cost” (UbuWeb 2011b: n.pag.). In accordance with the findings of 2.2.3 regarding NeoConceptual appropriative practices, the opportunities that the virtual holds in terms of production, dissemination, reception, availability, access, and speed, sug-

 See, for instance, UbuWeb’s copyright regulations, stipulating that all materials are free for “non-commercial and / or educational use only” (UbuWeb 2011a: n.pag.).

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gest technology as the crucial catalyst in the publicizing of this avant-garde practice. The rise of the virtual has created conditions that have permanently altered the ways in which we perceive and process language, and for which we must develop and communicate new parameters of media literacy. Apart from his involvement in academia, as a publisher and online archivist, Goldsmith’s own work as a writer, as well as discussions of his thirteen books of literature (as of 2013), clearly point towards a strictly Neo-Conceptual poetics of constrained transcription. The following remarks therefore highlight the privileging of uncreativity by comprehensively addressing five volumes that echo Goldsmith’s programmatic use of conceptualism. In No. 111 2.7.93 – 10.20.96 (1997; No. 111), for example, the reader encounters a process, lasting over three years, of collecting sounds, words, phrases, and whole texts organized alphabetically, phonetically, rhythmically and by ascending syllables according to a rule Goldsmith set for the project beforehand: for two years, Goldsmith collected all of the words and phrases he encountered ending in the sound ‘schwa’ ([ə]), the most frequent vowel in the English language, and then subsequently arranged them in a sequence by syllable count. The extensive volume (606 pages), pronounced a “useless encyclopedic reference book” (Goldsmith qtd. in Perloff 2003: n.pag.) by its ‘collector,’ came into being shortly before high-performance personal computers fully took over routines and calculating tasks on a day-to-day basis. The constraint of listing the sound ‘schwa’ in a sequence of ascending syllables ‘manually,’ and thus possibly imperfectly, proved, in the author’s words this whole kind of churning through. Nobody has [computer] programs that could count all those things, so I had to count them by hand […]. And I’m sure there are many mistakes, although I counted the entire thing through four times. I know there are still mistakes. I kind of figure they’re still finding corrections in Finnegans Wake. (Qtd. in Strausbaugh 1997: n.pag.; original emphasis)

No. 111’s last entry, VMMCCXXVIII (see 1997: 588 – 606),¹⁸⁶ interestingly, transcribes D.H. Lawrence’s short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner” from 1926, a transcription without paratextual references. In replicating the blending of fable, fantasy, and fairy tale surrounding the defective values of post-WorldWar I British society, it is not its content, theme, or morale which qualify it for No. 111, but solely the two conditions ‘number of syllables’ and ‘end-sound [ə].’ Therefore, No. 111, as early as 1997, practices constraint and appropriation

 The individual entries in No. 111 are listed according to Roman numerals, suggesting an ancient collection of epic poems as with, for example, Martial’s or Homer’s works.

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as a Neo-Conceptual program: “theoretically, I felt that I could have included any short story or even full-length novel into 111 and would have been justified in doing so. It was just a matter of nerve or finding the courage to do so” (qtd. in Perloff 2003: n.pag.). Three years later, Goldsmith goes yet further exploring the implications of appropriative practice with Fidget. For this text, he spends an entire Bloomsday (June 16, 1997) dictating his every body movement into a tape recorder and carefully transcribes it hour-by-hour (from 10am to 10pm): “Eyelids open. Tongue runs across upper lip moving from left side of mouth to right following arc of lip. Swallow. Jaws clench. Grind. Stretch. Swallow. Head lifts” (2000a: 8). By means of this paratactical enumeration, over 90 pages Fidget accounts for the authorial subject’s body language. Yet the language used in this effort can never escape the ambivalent and necessarily deficient linguistic signifiers employed. In its temporal restriction, the choice of date for the endeavor as well as the descriptive pedantry, Fidget adopts James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as its frame of reference.¹⁸⁷ In contrast to this conceptual pre-text’s stream-of-consciousness technique and the attending unfiltered effect on the reader, however, Goldsmith’s body language rains in hourly cascades that create the engaging illusion of a monolog of physical movements.¹⁸⁸ These motivate “a condition of shifting reference points and multiple levels of observation that inevitably undermines the author’s objective approach” (see Fidget’s back cover). Although the authorial subject’s goal is yet again to reduce his ‘object’ to certain elements and pursue the transcription to create “a catalogue of mechanical movements” (ibid.), the  Fidget additionally draws from Andy Warhol’s 1968 work a, a novel that entails the transcription of conversation tapes between the pop artist and Ondine, one of Warhol’s ‘superstars’ of the Factory years. The crucial point for assessing the conceptual significance of a, a novel lies in the detail that the tapes were transcribed by numerous typists who proceeded differently in assigning names and editing the material on their own authority. The supposedly authentic content, which often qualifies the work as a roman à clef, loses this genuineness in the process of transcription and enters the realm of the fictionalized, the fragmentary, and the literary. For discussions of this text, see e. g. Bockris (1998) and the 1998 edition of a, a novel, which includes a comprehensive glossary and commentary by Victor Bockris.  The cascading of body movements found in the print version of Fidget is even more emphasized in its interactive online version as a Java Applet from Coach House Books (see Goldsmith 2000b): moving lines of flight meander across the screen with the temporal progression of the registered movements running in the background. The individual phrases appear and disappear sequentially, as well as simultaneously, thereby re-creating the conceptual difficulty of recording minute actions from a single point of view. This involvement is further heightened with the invitation to the reader to alter the course, alignment and movement of language by means of his or her own cursor interventions.

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rhythmic register nevertheless produces a poetic effect of its own and translates the (unconscious) everyday into an expressive text with poetic implications.¹⁸⁹ Before concluding this selective survey of Goldsmith’s writing, his ‘American Trilogy’ (2005 – 2008) will serve to illustrate the author’s turn toward the ‘external everyday’ that reaches its pinnacle in the Neo-Conceptual appropriation exhibited by Day. ¹⁹⁰ The trilogy consists of Weather (2005), a detailed transcription of 365 days of radio weather reports, Traffic, from 2007, which contains an elaborate sequence of traffic jams and accidents taken from daily broadcasts, and Sports (2008), in which the reader re-reads the events of the longest nine-inning Major League game in history.¹⁹¹ Comprised of arrangements built from appropriation via transcription, the Trilogy goes decidedly beyond the limits within which this sort of annexation is deemed a creative joke with a catchy punch line (comparable to Fitterman’s “Directory”; see chapter 2.2.3). Spread across an average of 110 to 120 pages, the endlessly repeated drama of weekend weather forecasts and gale warnings, Brooklyn Bridge gridlock and minor accidents, or the race from base to base, accommodating player substitution and strategic time-outs, Goldsmith’s account surpasses the everyday. In keeping track of the supposedly informative and helpful comments by the reporters, the reader perceives three major phenomena in the continuous flow of previously discontinuous passages: first, the detachment from effects of immediacy and simultaneity, as we usually listen to weather forecasts, traffic reports, and sports broadcasts with a belief in their topicality and factual precariousness – ‘Will the sun shine and the hurricane spare New York?’, ‘Will I get to my Connecticut cottage despite congestions in the tri-state area?’, ‘Will the Yankees turn the game around and win by a hair?’; second, the reader encounters the rhythmicality and poeticizing of factual language as a result of steady repetition, a quality that will also be of prime importance for the close examination of Day; and third, the manifest contradictions of per-

 Goldsmith’s Soliloquy from 2001 continues to work with the elements of constraint and transcription. Here Goldsmith tape-recorded each of his spoken words for seven consecutive days. The goal of assessing how much a week’s worth of spoken language amounts to also features in the book’s motto: “If every word spoken in New York City daily were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, each day there would be a blizzard” (2001: 489; original emphasis). This work, furthermore, combines the previously mentioned ramifications of body writing, the friction between subjective and objective experience, and the idea of language hoarding.  The phrase ‘external everyday’ is used in contrast to the pedantic body writing of Fidget and Soliloquy. These I consequently consider ‘internal everyday.’  For a discussion of the American Trilogy, see e. g. Wershler (2008), Zultanski (2008); on Weather, see Marjorie Perloff’s analyses (2005, 2007) as well as her detailed investigation of Traffic (2010a: 146 – 165); Sports is discussed in Fama (2008a, 2008b).

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sonal analysis and the short- to midterm assessment of what will happen next. In sum: in transfiguring the everyday, Goldsmith’s American Trilogy, with three different everyday mediatized experiences, captures the transience of up-to-date information from only momentarily available meanings, a literal conception of the ephemeral, the ground for which, as we will see, is already prepared in Day (2003). Day qualifies for an in-depth analysis of the Neo-Conceptual appropriative approach with respect to three levels: the advantage of a fixed, replicable pretextual entity – a complete issue of The New York Times –, its temporal limitation – The New York Times issue of September 1, 2000 –, and the consequent possibility to examine Goldsmith’s influence and modifications made in the adoption of the pre-text. Concerning the fixity of the pre-text which Goldsmith appropriates, it should be acknowledged that the medium of a newspaper nevertheless consists of numerous identifiable and non-identifiable voices and authorial subjects, such as journalists, editors, copy-writers, readers, etc. These make up a complex network of multiple perspectives and textual frames, as well as manifold outcome interests and strategies such as the transmission of information, entertainment, purchasing incentive, and so on. Thus the newspaper’s textual mass provides Goldsmith and the reader with various text types, functions, and a predominantly non-literary quality that can be surveyed and assessed from the outset of the comparative analysis – an advantage not necessarily valid for the transient ‘pre-text’ of body movements (in Fidget), weather reports, traffic news, or sports broadcasts (in the American Trilogy).¹⁹² Day consequently enables a precise description of the Neo-Conceptualist practice of appropriation and its transformation of the ‘ordinary/non-literary’ into the ‘literary.’ In order to render the elements of Neo-Conceptualism visible and to produce an accordingly comprehensive assessment of these general strategic arguments and the actual case study, the self-contained nature of The New York Times newspaper issue also proves beneficial for looking at the temporal and spatial determination of the pre-text. Focusing on one particular daily issue that the inhabitants of New York City could purchase at local newsstands on Broadway or in Brooklyn, these dimensions can be narrowed down to the aspects of topicality

 The practice of recording data verbatim, such as weather or traffic news, usually allows for only short-term storage, since the content is not crucial for reproduction and archiving. In the US, traffic news, as well as sports commentary, largely depend on the subjective assessment of reporters on site, either surveying gridlocks via helicopter or on-site cameras, or viewing from the commentator’s box in the stadium or the mixed zone where athletes and journalists meet post-game.

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and the obsolescence of news transposed into poetry. This supports the interpretative argument of self-containment in textual sources both similar to Playgiarism’s and ConText’s appropriative method (identifiable ‘alien’ text that can be referred to other authorial subjects) and significantly different with respect to the communicated transparency of strategic constraint.¹⁹³ Finally allowing the assessment of authorial influence in the comparative examination of both the original newspaper issue and the transposed textual material in Day, the latter promises a welcome manageability because it grants us access to a replica of the pre-text. Thus Day represents a consequential execution of the Neo-Conceptualist appropriative agenda in its invitation to closely compare clear-cut textual borders: Day here, NYT there. As shown, with the focus on a contained pre-text, The New York Times Friday edition of September 1, 2000, Goldsmith’s endeavor in Day is ideal for commencing the Neo-Conceptualist case studies. The appropriation of this pre-text’s material is confirmable to the highest degree, since the reader and researcher may consult an issue of this precise paper from the archives, via microfilm or other visual reproduction. Of course, the by now most common, as well as fastest and easiest way of accessing the content of the issue, is the free online version of The New York Times. Here one may make use of the embedded search engine, which offers a comprehensive hit list for the query ‘September 1, 2000’ from The New York Times Article Archive.¹⁹⁴ This hit list’s order is automatically sorted by “closest match” and provides the searcher with the directory of 224 articles published on that day, starting from the location marker “Front Page” to the closing “Automobiles” piece “High Fashion for Fall: Black Tie and Tailgates” (see New York Times 2011a: n.pag.). Apart from the decisive change of medium, the digital ‘copies’ do not contain any of the original’s graphical elements, such as images, photographs, or tables, let alone non-article material, such as advertisements, page numbers, mastheads, scannable barcode, or the issue’s price indication

 Despite deciding on Day, which covers The New York Times issue as its self-contained pretextual entity, with all text available and replicable at the same time, the incorporated ordered chaos of text types and authorial subjectivities remains subject to the plurality of (uncredited) origins and copyright infringement that may be potentially persecuted.  The New York Times has introduced a permissive paywall concerning the access and purchase of articles online. Digital subscribers can obtain 100 archive articles from 1923 to 1986 every month while nonsubscribers may purchase mainly text-based articles for $3.95 each. All articles before 1923 and after 1986 are entirely free of charge for subscribers; nonsubscribers as identified by their regular IP address may access 20 free articles every month. On different models of paywall and restricted access to newspaper material and online revenue for the suffering print media sphere see Goodale (2011); Pérez-Peña (2007); Salmon (2011); Stelter (2011).

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on the front page.¹⁹⁵ To track Goldsmith’s transcription of the newspaper and to assess the plagiarist impact this ‘recording’ has, the researcher has to return strictly to the materiality of the original analog pre-text, or at least its faithful reproduction (microfilm), which allows for the following comparative description. The transcription of that day’s issue, termed a “full-frontal act of appropriation” in a nonfiction (!) review of Publishers Weekly (see 2003: n.pag.), initially reads as a straightforward practice of constrained recording, since the pre-text entity is copied and re-typed line by line, column by column, page by page, section by section. Yet Goldsmith not only appropriates the language material offered by individually authored articles or those from institutional news agencies, but also the non-editorial paratextual signifiers derived from advertisements, movie theater bulletins or the weather forecast, the issue’s publication date, stock exchange data, letters to the editor, sports results, page references, volume info, price mark, crossword puzzle, and the masthead. This reproduction of the vast assortment of different text types, genres, and modes of visual representation, while on the one hand an act of meticulous ordering, is, on the other, accompanied by a disruption of that order in which the words reappear in Day. Bearing the multidirectional alignment of newspaper articles on one page in mind, Goldsmith’s reproduction perforce does not follow the directions of the original paper, because he is constrained in appropriating the issue in the traditional alphabetical Western typeset of horizontal left-toright, line-by-line, and top-to-bottom directionality. In, for example, an article on the Pentagon’s decisions on test missiles, starting on page one, the end of the last column ends mid-sentence with “[c]ontinued on Page A9” (Day A1: 11; see Fig. 3). Day does not follow this direction, but proceeds with a caption to a photograph depicting a scene from a tennis match between Andre Agassi and Arnaud Clément (see Day A1: 12; Fig. 4).¹⁹⁶ As a consequence, the alignment of text in Goldsmith’s book does not take into account the content-related coherence and integrity of the article; it simply cuts off at points where the syntactic structure is disrupted and continues with the next random linguistic element, be it article, caption, a Wall Street warrant

 The majority of items still includes information on the photos at the end of the digital articles, supposedly showing their original caption. The newspaper’s archive offers these supporting files as available for purchase via its photo sales department (see New York Times n.d.).  Goldsmith transcribes the paper according to its sections, A1–F7, that are also included in Day’s marginal peritext (see Fig. 4). The following parenthetical references in addition give the page numbers in Day.

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Figure 3: Manuscript excerpt “Continued on Page A9” (Day A1: 11)

Figure 4: Manuscript excerpt “Exit Agassi” (Day A1: 12)

listing, or an indication of a “Sale” at Macy’s.¹⁹⁷ This extension of plagiarized material, that is the change in attitude towards what is considered text, is therefore enhanced with the interest in constrained formal stylistic alignment that exceeds the subject matter of a self-contained article and its topical relevance on the September day to which it corresponds.¹⁹⁸ The final peculiarity with respect to initially describing the process of plagiarist appropriation in Day relates to a step towards layout uniformity. The pretext of The New York Times consists of numerous formal variations, such as those in typeface, font size, column width, text wrapping and alignment, printing in regular, bold or italics, discrete conventions of line spacing, the use of colors, bulleted lists, indents, margins, hyphenation, progressive section headings, and so on. Consequently, the variety of layout does not only arise with the mere difference between text and image, but also with the multiplicity of empirically reader-friendly printing that supports accessibility, easily communicated con Other ‘cut-offs’ repeatedly occur on the following pages (see Day A1: 12– 16) before the first advertisements by Cartier (including Copyright mark), “Vermeil. Quartz [, …] The Mall at Short Hills, Short Hills, New Jersey …,” Rolex, etc. They also open section A2 and the issue’s “News Summary” with respective section references (see Day A2: 17– 20) and the paper’s corrections on its own account (see Day A2: 20 – 21).  Answering US First Lady Michelle Obama’s question on the quality of that particular day’s news – “What kind of news day was it?” – Goldsmith, during the Poetry Student Workshop at the White House, countered that “[t]his was a very slow news day, it was the Friday of Labor Day […]. I picked a nothing day. I didn’t want a dramatic day, I wanted a boring day” (White House 2011).

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tent, and, in the case of custom fonts, the exclusive quality of The New York Times brand with respect to its recall value. In Day, however, this carefully designed variety collapses into the font design of 9-point serif Bookman Old Style, over 836 pages, in comparison to the newspaper’s dimension of 114 and its broad range of typesetting. Despite the occasional preservation of capitals, the text is released from its narrow columns into the new confines of justified alignment (with no italics or bold font), where line breaks do not necessarily follow those of the pre-text. Likewise, formerly horizontal neighbors in the newspaper are now arranged vertically, i. e. in chronological succession for the reader. Page breaks are regularly indicated by the pretext’s header “THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2000,” plus the respective section reference (compare e. g. NYT A3; Day A3: 22), thus again prioritizing page and section units over content and thematic grouping. Hence, the faithful reproduction of The New York Times issue of September 1, 2000, is disrupted and altered with respect to format and formal leveling. In Day, the reader witnesses four features that echo the findings of chapter 2.2.3: Day’s negotiation of language as code and the attending paradigms of leveling, dissolution, and poetization of all text; the book’s notion of the concreteness of the individual sign and the constraint of the literary machine; the NeoConceptualist variant as a détournement of the leveled code, entailing a deconstruction of the textual fields journalism and literature; and, finally, the appropriation of mainly functional language, with Kenneth Goldsmith still presiding as the uncreative code manager of Day as a literary machine. The following remarks therefore utilize these features to frame Day as the first case study and draw initial conclusions to determine the levels on which the challenge of conventional literary production takes place. Oriented by the general model of literary communication, this questioning and advancing from form to function to agent mainly affects three of these levels: first, the reader of Day, in the process of text type transition and code leveling, finds profound alterations with respect to the textual channel; second, in the conceptual détournement, we witness an ensuing profound renegotiation of literary and non-literary text itself; and third, Kenneth Goldsmith, as Day’s authorial subject, functions by monopolizing the unidentified mass of the newspaper’s potential authors. The descriptive remarks above, on the instances of format disruption and formal adjustments, have already pointed to textual developments towards uniformity and consistency in the appropriative reproduction of The New York Times. In order to exceed the particular hierarchies that result from the numerous genres and text levels of the newspaper, the paradigm of language as code

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requires textual appropriation and realignment in order to succeed in dissolving, leveling, and rendering literary the mass of journalist text and advertising, the institutional paratexts as well as the supporting visual elements. The dissolution of these elements in Day is first of all achieved with respect to borders between individual articles, as well as between written and visual material. In reproducing only the written linguistic signifiers of the issue, both the spatiality and lexical semantics are disrupted, as visual inserts become detached from the surroundings that define them and render them meaningful, either as photograph captions or, for example, the legend and inscription of illustrative maps: section A3 (see Day 22– 24), for instance, recreates an article on the children of Shoko Asahara, the Japan sect leader of Aum Shinrikyo, who ordered the sarin gas assault on the Tokyo subway in 1995. The reader initially encounters one page of continuous reporting that is properly introduced by the article’s headline, subheadline, authorial credit, and the statement of place:

Figure 5: Manuscript excerpt “Hard Legacy” (Day A3: 22)

At the top of Day’s page 23, however, the text continues with the caption to a photograph that supposedly depicts “[f]our children of the founder of the Shinrikyo cult, Shoko Asahara, playing near their home […]” (Day A3: 23; see Fig. 6). This intrusion is followed by the deconstructed visual device of two maps – one explicating the region’s location in Japan, another zooming-in on that region (see NYT A3). The words within these maps are transcribed and inserted from the pre-text, where they originally played the functional role of providing geographical orientation and designating the spatial dimensions of the reported events. In the extraction of only the linguistic signifiers from the maps and their vertical alignment on the manuscript’s page, the device entirely loses its explicative function. The reader encounters only the stripped-down leftovers of the original context:

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Figure 6: Manuscript excerpt “Insert Caption and Maps” (Day A3: 23)

The former borders between the article’s main body, and the offset caption and the maps of Japan, respectively, dissolve. The Neo-Conceptualist text, therefore, engages in the transgression of the functionality and hierarchy of these conventional borders. Yet as Day appropriates this heterogeneity of article elements (within the individual piece), editorial text types (among the different articles), and the newspaper’s overall components (editorial matter, commercial promotion, classified advertisement, radio and television listings, restaurant guides, etc.), this dissolution reveals its two dimensions: on the one hand, the reader witnesses an establishment of order as the disparate elements of the newspaper page’s layout are brought into linear sequence; on the other hand, what is offered can also be identified as productive chaos, since the column alignment, lines of demarcation, and visual aids usually provide orientation and inherent order among these elements. The conceptual appropriation of the eclectic textual variety of The New York Times therefore creates an ambiguous tension between coerced order and emerging disorder. It is in continuously reasserting this oscillation between hierarchy and disruptive textual anarchy in both publications that the appropriative interference draws attention to the ever-present patchwork quality of textual entities: dislocating the orderly New York Times segments by following the paradigmatic Western reading directions left-to-right and top-to-bottom, disorder and readerly irritation emphasize language’s ambiguity and plurality of meaning. Before going deeper into the analysis with the leveling and poeticization of language material in the transitory appropriation from the newspaper to literature in Day, I want to establish three characteristics of formal dissolution that one may infer from the previous remarks. First, dissolution takes place within

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the manufactured self-containment of the journalistic article itself (i. e. between article text, photograph caption, disintegrated map, article text, etc.). This affects its layout, typesetting, attending hierarchy of textual elements among themselves and between text, supporting images, and specified sources; second, dissolution occurs with the dismounting and recombination of the articles contained on single newspaper pages: in addition to the corollaries stated above, it is the collapse and dehierarchization of levels between numerous editorial pieces that further suspend the border between differently coded text entities; and third, the border between formerly coherent building blocks, such as ‘US test missiles’ or ‘sarin assault aftermath,’ and the vast array of commercial linguistic signifiers in the paper is transgressed. These include, for example, inhouse notices such as “You can order / The Times Book Review / by mail” (Day A3: 25)¹⁹⁹ or advertisements vital for the newspaper existence that, displaying commodified products aimed at the paper’s readership, usually represent a functional contrast to allegedly objective and fact-oriented reporting.²⁰⁰ In Day, where the borders between the textual entities of the NYT issue have visually dissolved and the respective linguistic signifiers are no longer marked or arranged according to their text type or semantic primacy, the priorities of main text body over image, political analysis over advice sections, or editorial over advertising become consequently dehierarchized. The dissolution of the maps into a written record of all linguistic elements involved in Fig. 6 and the embedding of the signifiers “Sea of Japan / Otawara / […] / Pacific Ocean / 0 Miles 30 […]” indicate that a radical leveling of code takes place in both the transgression of textual borders and, ultimately, the transition from the newspaper to literature. The lack of lines of demarcation of any kind thus abolishes an inherent hierarchy of issued content by having all text ‘happen’ on the same material surface of Day’s manuscript: maps and photograph captions, as well as commercial promotion, copyright notices and newspaper paratexts, stock exchange bulletins, and movie reviews are all reduced to their linguistic substance and dissolve in the superficial homogeneity of written text, an undiscriminating écriture based on conceptual constraint. Simultaneously, the reader identifies frictions in the course of Goldsmith’s book: expectations for consistency from an article are initially met since its self-containment as well as topical and narrative consistency is maintained by

 For similar kinds of in-house references, see e. g. also Day (A4: 31– 32; C2: 211; C5: 229; C6: 135; E3: 524).  The paper’s dependence on commercial suppliers becomes obvious when looking at numbers from 2005 indicating that ca. 70 – 80 % of newspaper revenue comes from advertising that subsidizes production costs. See e. g. Siegert and Brecheis (2005).

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a unity of place, time, and/or objective – the bleak situation of a Japanese sect leader’s children in the aftermath of public catastrophe, for example; yet with the intrusion of leveled linguistic elements from devices formerly meant to illustrate, i. e. the map of Japan, the explanatory function of the narrative becomes momentarily suspended. Day’s leveling of all linguistic material of The New York Times issue therefore reinforces the dissolving element’s engagement in the deconstructionist notion that the free textual fabric dominates classifying genres – think of Derrida’s questioning of natural and self-evident text systems such as ‘journalism’ and ‘literature’ (see 1997: 47– 48). The phenomena of dissolution and of leveling disparate textual entities, with respect to conceptualizing language as code in Goldsmith’s text, becomes particularly manifest when we turn to the crossover from the medium of the newspaper to the commodity of the literary book. With the act of appropriating the mass of linguistic material provided by the newspaper’s textual archive, and in leveling the differences and hierarchies of text types, the conceptual reframing of that material for a book of “POETRY” (see Day’s back cover) suggests an important move towards the literary. On the one hand, the book’s classification as poetry is of course substantiated through institutional agents of the literary marketplace, such as the publisher and the literary critic, the meta- and paratextual information on Goldsmith as authoring mainly fictional content, and the treatment of Day in criticism and reviews as literary.²⁰¹ Yet, on the other hand, in the transition from the frame of the newspaper to that of the literary work, the reader also witnesses a change of code that can be seen as its poeticization. In leveling the hierarchies of various text types and tracing the transposition of text from one environment to the other – a decidedly Situationist move, as will be shown –, respective languages of news or advertising extend their qualities beyond the merely functional. In Day, these poetic qualities and the attainment of literariness are primarily accomplished by juxtaposition, repetition, and rhythmicality. A collage emerges when formerly disparate entities are placed side by side: the still identifiable journalist text type of the investigative political essay “A.C.L.U. Will Defend Group That Advocates Legalizing Sex Between Men and Boys” (see e. g. Day A14: 70 – 71), the theater review of the revue “Berlin to Broadway With Kurt Weill” (see Day E2: 516 – 517), and classified advertisements such as “Restaurant-BARTENDER For exclusive midtown French restaurant. Must have exp &  The review of Day in Publisher’s Weekly (see 2003), mentioned above, forms an exception, in classifying the book as nonfiction. Interestingly, the same organ identified Goldsmith’s Day, Soliloquy, and The Weather as nonfiction while Traffic and Fidget qualify as fiction (see Publishers Weekly 2011b).

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basic knowledge of French. Fax resume to 212– 593 – 4964” (Day F7: 828) all blend into one another. Similar to notions of collage in the visual arts, for example Pablo Picasso’s “Still Life With Chair Caning” (1912; synthetic Cubism) or Robert Rauschenberg’s so-called combines such as “Factum I&II” (1957), Day incorporates a variety of parts that only in ‘reading’ across the respective borders, allowing contrast, dialog, and the illusion of simultaneity to emerge, take effect.²⁰² Uncreative writing such as Day echoes the idea that this juxtaposition is more than the sum of its parts. The emotive effect results from the contrast between the various newspaper pieces, as well as the unexpected collision across the formerly definitive column-structure and other visual order-enforcing devices; yet in contrast to modernist and postmodernist visual collage or William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s literary variant of Cut-up,²⁰³ the source material of the pre-text(s) is not understood as accidental or contingent; it holds, rather, to the constraint of transcription meant to erase all creative quality by abiding by certain rules. Nevertheless, the element of juxtaposition results mechanically from the decision to appropriate a textual entity, the structure of which is already plural and heterogeneous. In appropriating, i. e. liberating the formerly contained and therein functionalized language-body, the transition towards the poetic is accomplished through the tension between the expected and the unexpected within a dehierarchized text. The two other crucial elements granting Day a poetic quality are repetition and an ensuing rhythmicality. These aspects mainly result from the functional framing device of the newspaper layout. In the pre-text, it is the paratextual information that is consistently repeated: every page in The New York Times displays a header that includes the respective section number, the name of the paper, the respective weekday, and the date (see Fig. 7 and 8):

 For comprehensive discussions of visual collage, see e. g. B. Taylor (2004); on the difference between analytical and synthetic Cubism see Cottington (2004: 165 – 195); on Robert Rauschenberg’s work see e. g. Joseph (2003: 121– 172); Steinberg (2000: 24– 30).  Brion Gysin, early on in his career as a painter and writer, claimed that literature was lagging behind the impulses of collage and montage from visual art. Cut-up as aleatory literary practice meant to break open and challenge the linear sequentiality and intentional application of language and emphasize qualities of coincidence and random combination. On Cut-up see e. g. Burroughs (1962; 1964); Fahrer (2009); Gysin (1964).

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Figure 7: Manuscript excerpt “Header” (Day A2: 17)

Figure 8: Manuscript excerpt “Header II” (Day B5: 175)

Since this combination of details is repeated on every single page of the pre-text, the reproduction in Day necessarily has to follow suit. Yet the reiterated appropriation of the header represents not only a lexical cue for the reader that he or she is entering a new page of the pre-text, thus figuring as a rare ordering device within Day; in its incessant replaying it also assumes the poetic responsibility of a conciliatory chorus within the diction of the newspaper’s ‘free verse.’ The changes within the chorus vary from “The New York Times” to “The New York Times International” or “The New York Times Metro,” along with the combination of numbers and letters that follow the sequential regularity of the pretext’s pagination. In line with notions of the lyrical verse-chorus form found in, for example, the villanelle or the virelay, the initial segmenting function of almost identical lines by the end of a ‘stanza’ (i. e. the pre-text’s entity of one page) serves as a constant reminder of the past life of the material. It is this header-turned-chorus reminder that functions as a paratextual (as header) as well as an intratextual (as rhythmical structure) literary device within the appropriative environment of Day: the reader perceives the repetition of the pre-text’s semantics (newspaper’s name and attending pagination) as a continuous reference to the amount of functional language providing the basis for Goldsmith’s book; but the reader is also faced with the effect of an intratextual poetic measure, i. e. the newspaper header as a lyrical chorus. The poetic device of repetition thus also becomes a rhythmical device for Day, as well as evidence supporting the tension between order and disorder brought about by Goldsmith’s plagiarizing transcript. The rhythmicality of The New York Times header, which in Day assumes a poetic quality in its ambiguous position as both factual paratext and lyrical chorus, negotiates the liminal state the newspaper’s appropriation first induces. The reader is therefore constantly referred to the pre-text’s existence, its structured form through sections, pages, and layout, but also to this pre-text’s potential for disorder, polysemy, and poetic quality. In sum, the poeticization of the issue of The New York Times in the Neo-Conceptualist appropriative strategy occurs by means of textual border dissolution,

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dehierarchized leveling, juxtaposition, repetition, and an ensuing rhythmicality. Following Derrida’s criticism of the supposed naturalness of a textual system of literature, a criticism that distinctly problematizes the systemic demarcation of literary and non-literary material in contrast to his “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” Day from the outset seems to underwrite the post-structuralist notion of the linguistic signifier’s opacity. It is especially the juxtaposition of numerous text types, without the pre-textual formal demarcation through layout and visual devices, as well as the effect of rhythmical repetition, that acts out this call for dissolution, the recognition of language’s inherent ambiguity and the ensuing pluralization and différance of all meaning and, if nothing else, text types and genres. Post-structuralist and deconstructionist paradigms, such as the dissolution of textual borders already discussed, as well as an emphasis on the poetic quality of all text qua the inherent ambiguity and deferring implications of language in Day, assist in the formal treatment of the pre-text’s material. Neo-Conceptual practices manage to adopt these paradigms in the act of appropriation and they do so against the backdrop of language as code in an established writing environment, attesting to the potential malleability, unrestricted access, and virtual quality of text and language. Hypertext theorist and literary scholar George P. Landow already declared hypertext fiction as having the potential to actualize critical theory’s paradigms, namely to regard and treat language as virtual and ever-deferred (see Landow 2006 [1992]: 2– 9, 53 – 68). This potential is equally present in the Neo-Conceptualist specimen of Day. With the dominant paradigms of digital text production and dissemination – net neutrality, free access, and open source – Neo-Conceptualism, with its progressive poetics, models its modes of literature accordingly and pronounces these adaptations its programmatic basis. The second significant feature that qualifies Day as a prime example of NeoConceptual appropriative practice is concerned with the notion and proclamation of conceptuality. As suggested in chapter 2.2.3, this programmatic approach to producing poetic material relies on older avant-garde practices of the twentieth century, among them Concrete Poetry and the basic interest in constraint that compares the production of text to setting a literary machine in motion. The utter concreteness of the linguistic signifier with the word-by-word, lineby-line, column-by-column replication of the editorial hybrid first of all lies in plainly coopting the material. This means that, in contrast to the preceding case studies, Double or Nothing and Empire of the Senseless, the plagiarized text entities are neither additionally added to or enhanced with allegedly original material by the plagiarizing authorial subject, nor are they hybridized in a complex mélange of numerous pre-texts that are often difficult to identify. The con-

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creteness of Day arises from the conceptual statement and ‘plan’ to only appropriate the clearly demarcated textual entity of The New York Times in the particular compilation of discrete linguistic information the average newspaper reader could purchase on September 1, 2000 in New York City.²⁰⁴ It is the interest in and formulated plan of the concrete transcription of that particular day’s newspaper that represents the key feature in assessing the conceptual basis that leads to the actual literary product of Day. In tracing the movement ‘concept – process – product,’ appropriation, for Goldsmith’s example, does not in fact emphasize process, as it is the case with Double or Nothing; the main focus for appropriation in Day shifts to the initial creative, here pronounced ‘uncreative,’ act of setting the process in motion. To make this phenomenon more obvious, I divided Day’s conceptual basis into, on the one hand, the concreteness of the linguistic signifier, and, on the other, the dependence of appropriative processuality on restrictive rules, meant to eliminate all traces of creativity from the outset. With respect to the concrete signifier, what is appropriated from the newspaper is, first of all, the mass of all lexemes that may be tangibly transcribed: complete text entities, captions, header material, mentions of Copyright, brand names, individual letters, acronyms, telephone numbers, and dates, as well as any linguistic signifier identifiable in cartoons, photographs, or tables, no matter if it references something relevant or not. The mode of appropriation thus adopts allegedly objective material, the linguistic form of which – either Arabic letters or numerals – is replicated verbatim. This replication takes place regardless of the content and meaning of these signifiers, only taking into account their form, their material concreteness, and concrete presence. The paradigm of ‘form over content,’ realized in the act of faithful lexical duplication in Day, echoes Augusto de Campo’s claim that signifiers are “indifferent vehicles” (2007 [1956]: 213) that can be plagiarized without any meaningful change. The adoption of words in their concreteness, for example, “a Sony® Vaio® laptop” (see Fig. 9 and 10), is reminiscent of Concrete Poetry’s interest in the reduction and brevity of pronouncements and the potential of language to communicate using its own formal properties. The signifiers ‘a Sony® Vaio® lap-

 I am aware that the asserted discreteness, congruity, and uniformity of the newspaper issue is easily corrupted considering The New York Times’ range with respect to its various editions (metropolitan, Washington, DC, the Tri-State area, domestic and global, the latter in cooperation with the International Herald Tribune). Since Goldsmith’s pre-text copy can be limited to those purchasable in New York City and the relative discrepancy of content does not affect the overall interpretation of Day as an example for Neo-Conceptualist practice, these differences are acknowledged, yet are disregarded in the analysis of Goldsmith’s book.

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top’ assume a semantic level all of their own, since their significance cannot derive from the subject matter of the advertisement, but from the very act of appropriating the communicative form of the subject matter.

Figure 9: Transcript of advertisement (Day A5: 33)

Identifying the concreteness, which results from the prioritizing of form over content, occurs along with the restrictive mechanism of constrained uncreative production. Day follows the assignment of transcribing an issue of a newspaper word-by-word, without adding any extra creative material. The sober regularity implies ‘faithful transcription,’ an ‘inclusion of all linguistic signifiers,’ and their ‘equal value’ within the new confines of Goldsmith’s publication – all pointing to the Neo-Conceptualist concern of language as leveled poetic code. In coopting the material from one functional environment (journalism) and placing it in another (literature), however, the lexemes found in the paper, and eventually their semantics, are forced into becoming radically open – Jason Christie rightly points out that in Day, “the original [is put] through a transformation” (Christie 2005: n.pag.). Nevertheless, I disagree with Christie’s insistence that “[Goldsmith still …] maintain[s] the integrity of the original” (ibid.). His verdict may be valid for the element of constraint that orders the writer to carefully transcribe all linguistic material found in The New York Times on that particular day. Yet precisely in ‘trans-scribing’ or overwriting the confines of layout and practicing the leveling of linguistic elements mentioned above – weather and world politics, the arts supplement and advertising – the new document, Day, cannot guarantee the

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Figure 10: Excerpt pre-text (NYT A5)

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clear maintenance of an “integrity of the original” if integrity involves all aspects of pre-textual representation. Even if the Neo-Conceptual authorial subject is to follow the initial program of faithful and uncreative appropriation, this subject must, nevertheless, make decisions that allow for the formal succession of letters, numbers, and words beyond the paper’s original confines. Thus the ideal constraint within appropriative practice has to concede to the particular uncertainties of page and column breaks, hyphenation, and the order of the letters and numbers from a chart or table; this clearly exceeds Christie’s notion of “maintaining the integrity of the original,” as the text becomes a product of the oscillation between coerced order and resultant disorder discussed above. With the constraint the conceptual practice set into motion, a literary machine is constructed that disintegrates the order of The New York Times. In doing so, it dissolves the paper’s informative, interpretative, and entertaining functions, as this literary machine rips the sign from both the formal and the intended structure of the pre-text. This mechanic dissolution of the formerly coherent textual form, the newspaper, and its discourse journalism, reinforces the language-as-code paradigm. Yet the application of constraint simultaneously carries another major side effect: the leverage of the pre-text’s fundamental raison d’être, namely topicality. The newspaper’s content relies heavily on the day of its issue, here September 1, 2000. In this way it is able to provide a readership with the relevant practical coordinates of the everyday – the weather or imminent regional construction zones, current political commentary, and the coverage of (local) events that either refers to a deictic ‘yesterday’ (as a review), ‘today’ or ‘tomorrow’ (as an announcement). This temporal peculiarity and condition for the genre becomes suspended in the process of constrained transcription as it relocates the former topicality of the newspaper within the conceivably lasting poetic environment of literature. There, the attending attributes include ‘sustainable,’ ‘slow-moving,’ and ‘long-term validity,’ thus representing a temporally distanced and detached mode of processing ‘information’ and language. Returning to the preceding discussion of The New York Times header-chorus and its partial function as a reminder of the pre-text’s existence in Day, this repeated element can also be said to continuously evoke the historicity and ephemerality of the source. That day’s ‘news’ is quickly outdated and surpassed by floods of more recent information, new socio-political events and developments, the latest movie releases, and effective commercial bargains. The analysis from the article on the Pentagon possibly postponing a missile shield test (see Day A1: 11), for instance, may have expired (or have been proven wrong) by the next day and the printing of the next paper. The stock exchange indexes, to use another example, have already changed by the time the newspaper reader

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purchases his or her issue, let alone by the time the reader of Day has purchased his or her copy in the years that follow publication. One may also see this ephemerality in the temporal cue “[r]ight now” preceding the bargain “RadioShack is offering a great deal on clear digital Sprint PCS Service and a Sprint PCS Phone™ […]” (Day B5: 178), which also loses its relevance for prospective customers in the literary aftermath. Day therefore manages to produce four central effects in its appropriation via transcription: first, the linguistic sign, in its concreteness, proves formally identical as an ‘indifferent vehicle’ that is reproducible regardless of its content and previously assigned primacy, e. g. ‘editorial main body over graph caption over classified advertisements’; second, the form-over-content paradigm assists in the dissolution of borders between genres and the production of disorder via the orderly extraction and transcription of these ‘vehicles’; third, the constraining rules render the programmatic disregard of formerly coherent semantic units and their textual integrity more obvious; and finally, constraint manages to upset the pre-text’s most significant raison d’être, namely to provide its daily readers with the latest opinion, advice, and entertainment, i. e. “All the News That’s Fit to Print” (The New York Times’ motto since 1897). Building on these four effects, the approach’s full impact as a programmatic appropriative strategy in Day arrives with the pronounced détournement of uncreative code. This feature is modeled after the preceding observations with respect to dissolving and transgressing borders between genres. The relocation of the linguistic material from the newspaper to the book, published three years after the pre-text, conforms to the Situationist demand for an alienation, irritation, blending, and re-evaluation of disparate writing environments, these being the communicative organ of the newspaper here and a volume of free verse poetry there. In the following discussion, this process of détourning will focus on the effect of these aspects on the qualitative idiosyncrasies of journalist practice. Journalist writing, that is the editorial main body, the informative and op-ed articles, refers to particular practical and textual characteristics that legitimize the role and function of these attributes, i. e. writerly standards as well as readerly expectations. Looking at selected publications that deal with the establishment of this productive and receptive context, shared journalistic concerns include the following: journalists are asked to orient themselves to facts, to provide preferably objective, fair, comprehensive, and informative accounts of events and broader phenomena; they are devoted to truth, accuracy, and consistency, integrity and decency, pursue harm limitation and “public enlightenment,” and they “serve the public with thoroughness and honesty,” as the Soci-

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ety of Professional Journalists writes in the preamble to its Code of Ethics (2011: n.pag.).²⁰⁵ The journalist as authorial subject therefore displays certain similarities to and differences from the eclectic notion of the literary author figure within the literary marketplace as outlined in chapter 2.1.1: on the one hand, the literary authorial subject is equally confronted with demands for authenticity and reliability, the legitimization of the text through the individual author, and the didactic purpose of a text often maintained, in which the relevance of a publication is dependent on the promotion of knowledge and social progress; on the other hand, literary authorial subjects are asked to create distinct originals that allow for fundamental subjectivity as well as thematic and stylistic diversity. Therefore, as a textual system in contrast to journalist praxis, literature renegotiates phenomena of the everyday more freely and features a different use of language. This is particularly binding for the literary form of poetry, with its heightened subjective quality, lack of plot, density of description, and lyricism (see Nünning and Nünning 2009 [1998]: 48 – 49). When the journalistic material of The New York Times issue becomes transposed, and thus enters the literary realm of non-functional language, its purposes – and not only that of topicality – are fundamentally shaken. In the détournement of journalistic writing within the declared environment of literature and poetry – a transposition reminiscent of Debord’s misuse of the city map in a mountain landscape, intended to alienate the everyday (see chapter 2.2.3) –, the appropriation takes place in annexing material authorized by others, individual journalist authors, The New York Times’ editors, as well as numerous anonymous, corporate, or insufficiently replicable writing agents who are not even referenced in the pre-text. The ‘misrepresentation’ claims the allegedly objectivist perspective, which includes the transfer of facts, events, and reported context, into an environment that necessarily lies, the fictionally charged textual world of the literary work. Newspaper articles “viewed by a reader as temporary, utile, proximal and ultimately disposable” (Christie 2005: n.pag.) are consequently confronted with the book’s “sacrosanct status” (ibid.) and indispensability. The appropriative movement from the quotidian to the quasi-eternal not only blurs the line between ‘high’ and ‘low,’ but also between the authorial competencies and social responsibilities that classify genres and text types for reasons of applicability. In Day, the reader becomes the chief witness to an invasion of the commonplace

 Comprehensive accounts of journalistic duties and responsibilities include, for example, Berry (2008); Hausman (1992); Ward (2005, 2010).

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words and text, which is then transformed into the fetishized commodity of the perpetual longevity of meaning, value, singularity, and sustainability accompanying a book. The détournement in Goldsmith’s work consequently succeeds in mutually poeticizing the ordinary and trivializing the allegedly exceptional. Yet the translocation of the journalist pre-text conveys an additional critical perspective that relates back to the ‘classical’ postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives, or the possible communication of Truth and Reality. The moment the supposedly objective and comprehensive language of journalism, motivated by integrity and driven by honesty, enters the gates of inevitable ‘dishonesty,’ the corruption of text in general and of journalist ethics in particular takes center stage: the objective truth once claimed becomes depraved. This is as much because of language’s inability to express and represent according to language-critical standards, as it is because the claims of journalist ethics to produce ‘truth’ constitute lies in their own right. Especially in tearing down the borders between the editorial and the commercial linguistic signifiers in advertisements, the criticism of journalist ethics acquires its full force. As mentioned above, the productivity of journalism in general and of newspapers in particular relies heavily on advertising customers for its existence, customers that pursue distinct interests – namely establishing brands, communicating buying incentives, and selling commodities. While the capitalized signifiers “LONG ISLAND / FARMINGDALE / MENS S&B WAREHOUSE […]” (see Day B2: 160; see Fig. 11), for example, designate the location of commercial distribution, where the “LABOR DAY MENSWEAR MARATHON” attracts potential buyers for “4 DAYS ONLY,” the preceding editorial covers a portrait of artist Eric Fischl titled “PUBLIC LIVES; In Capturing Star, Artist Goes for the Spirit” (see Day B2: 158 – 160).

Figure 11: Borders dissolved between editorial and advertising (Day B2: 160)

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Ironically, the feature preceding the advertisement is very much focused on the life and working process of a renowned New York City artist whose paintings are described as being able to “unlock[] the unconscious” and spark “a process of free association” (Day B2: 160). The journalistic coverage of Fischl, his reputation, family background, solvent celebrity friends, creative inspirations, and body language framing the direct quotes (e. g. yawning, B2: 159; assenting nods, B2: 160) conform to the standard personality-based and artistic intent-oriented art pages. This kind of treatment establishes the artist’s legitimizing function to authorize and authenticate a commodity on the art market.²⁰⁶ The borders between the genres of editorial and advertisement have already been shown to dissolve through appropriation and the leveled mass of linguistic signifiers transposed to the willfully deceiving environment of the literary work. In addition, however, the resulting unimpeded juxtaposition unmasks the feigning of ingenuity in the portrait found in the art pages of the pre-text (concerning the feature’s form) as well as the increasingly problematic notions of artistic inspiration and economic exploitation (concerning the feature’s content). The commercial promotion of a menswear sale, which follows the piece, suddenly appears more honest to the reader than the sugarcoated journalist vignette of the established artist Fischl as portrayed by the mediating journalist writer Joyce Wadler. The détournement of all signifiers available in Day thus suggests a commentary on the practice of balanced journalistic writing previously considered substantial and esteemed. The ethics of journalistic writing are already tarnished by that writing’s juxtaposition with advertisement, and the fact that the former subsists on the latter only takes this demystification one step further. With advertisers usually deciding on news organs that are widely circulated to a large section of the market and that cater to a particular stratum of readership – The New York Times addresses a cosmopolitan clientele interested in independent investigative journalism²⁰⁷ – the editorial segments continuously run the danger of commercial infil-

 These references include Fischl’s 14-foot nude statue at the National Tennis Center in New York City that serves as the in-medias-res opening of the feature (see B2: 159) and his $1 millionworth work “Noonwatch,” which allowed him to purchase two real-estate properties on the East Coast (ibid.).  With respect to The New York Times’ style, layout, and content, this can be derived from various characteristic elements, for example the paper’s use of honorifics instead of unadorned last names, the traditional six-column format since 1976 (which had been eight columns before), the late introduction of color photography (since 1997) and the record of Pulitzer-Prize winners (106 between 1918 and 2011) awarded for excellence in journalism across all available categories. See e. g. Berger (1951); Chomsky (1999); Deptalla and Pühringer (2001); New York Times (2011b).

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tration and biased reporting that play to the sponsor’s interest.²⁰⁸ If the editorial branch of the newspaper, for example, adopts a controversial perspective that may or verifiably does alienate the accustomed readership/consumers,²⁰⁹ advertisers may quickly react and withdraw their commitment to the paper in order to avoid jeopardizing their business interests. In order to please their subsidizing sponsors, journalistic writing within the high-cost production setting of print media constantly risks commercial absorption or may at least be tempted to drop investigations on contentious topics. The claim to cover “[a]ll the News That’s Fit to Print” necessarily has its caveats. In sum, the détournement of the newspaper’s entirety of linguistic signifiers, resulting from appropriative practice, can be said to not only nullify the topicality of the material pre-text, but also journalism’s ethical entitlement to objective truth-finding and influence, a quality that can be summed up with two of the practice’s major criteria: veracity and verification.²¹⁰ Goldsmith appropriates journalistic material, which appears to conform to these principles, and installs it in an environment that claims to delude, one that allows for the ambiguity of literary language and the plurality of meaning against the backdrop of the network-neutrality promise; Day levels and combines the pre-text’s patchwork of functional signifiers, expropriating editorial writing its obligations of current and ethical reporting. Moreover, as the juxtaposition of the artist’s portrait and unadorned advertising has shown, formerly differentiated text types become both blurred and unmasked. The preceding remarks connect to the findings concerning Neo-Conceptualist appropriation in four distinct ways: first, the dissolution and leveling of code

 Concerning the dependence of editorial work on advertising clients and commercial sponsorship on the one side, and a demand for the freedom of the press on the other, see e. g. Frost (2007: 37– 55); Spence et al. (2011: 95 – 123).  For The New York Times, incidents like these were, for instance, the publication of the Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Elsberg in 1971 or the international diplomatic cables from Wikileaks in 2010, along with various other newspapers such as The Guardian, Le Monde, or Der Spiegel. Concerning the Wikileaks case, the paper’s chief Washington correspondent, David Sanger, commented on the readers’ reaction towards the decision to report secret cables, as well as Senator Joe Lieberman’s claim to investigate The New York Times’ role in assisting in an act of espionage (see Owen, Adams and MacAskill 2010; NPR 2010).  Kovach and Rosenstiel, in The Elements of Journalism, suggest nine responsibilities journalistic writing must take up: truth, loyalty to its readership, verification, independence from the object of investigation, monitoring of legislative powers, public criticism and balanced reporting, relevance, comprehensiveness, and personal conscience (2007 [2001]: 35 – 244). The second edition, published in 2007, also includes defending the “rights and responsibilities of citizens” (2007: 245 – 256).

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that follows the paradigm of net neutrality disregards borders of attribution with respect to individual authorship and textual integrity, as well as borders between genres; second, the reader witnesses a poeticization of code with juxtaposition, repetition, and the ensuing rhythmicality upon the text’s induction into the literary environment of Day as a ‘certified’ book of poetry; third, the necessity of constrained transcription as appropriative method exposes the illusion of an unhampered literary machine; and fourth, the eventual détournement of the journalistic pre-text brings about a radical defamiliarization and revelation that the ethical etiquette of truth and accountability in journalism must involve some degree of manipulation. Goldsmith’s Day, with respect to these four observations, appropriates the entirety of linguistic signifiers in The New York Times as a self-contained pretext, and this constrained appropriation results in the textual masses colliding in the literary sphere. This collision oscillates between producing order, from disparate newspaper layout to the literary left-to-right, top-to-bottom writing protocol, and disorder, i. e. the interference of mainly editorial, paratextual and commercial language with dissolved genre and visual borders, an oscillation so far fundamentally linked to the conceptual restraint of transcription. Yet, concluding this case study with an examination of the pronounced uncreative authorial subject, we must finally examine the function of the publicized authorial subject of Day, Kenneth Goldsmith. The appropriation of functional code by the uncreative authorial subject can be compared to an appropriation of the sheer mass of code from unnamable multitudes and varieties of authors – journalists, reporters, editors, columnists, copy editors, meteorologists, photographers, commentators, commercial copywriters, graphic designers, readers, and anonymous authorial agents. Analogous to the dissolution of borders between prior article entities on a textual level, the Neo-Conceptualist transcription variant in Day unifies and integrates, i. e. consolidates, these manifold authorial subjectivities in the process of leveling the dehierarchized newspaper-turned-code and of détourning all participating authorial subjects within the poetic sphere of the literary text. The paratextual pieces of authorial information, such as “By ERIC SCHMITT” (Day A1: 11), “By ELISABETH BUMILLER” (Day B1: 151), or “By Mario Vargas Llosa” (Day A27: 138),²¹¹ resurface in Day as textual references to these authorial subjectivities. Yet these references, with their translocation into  The Nobel-Prize winner Vargas Llosa served as a guest writer on judicial action plans against tobacco companies’ deceitful marketing. It is interesting to note that his name is not capitalized in Goldsmith’s transcription. This is due to the fact that he is not part of The New York Times’ permanent staff and acts as a guest author.

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Day, lose both their identificatory and authenticating function for the respective former textual entity: first in terms of the temporal distance between the original publication on September 1, 2000, Goldsmith’s transcription sometime between that September day and Day’s publication in 2003, and the act of reading the transcription; and second, with respect to a detachment that results from the article’s lapsed topicality and informative temporariness, as well as a diminishing ethical responsibility in the journalistic commitment to truth, integrity, and verification. Therefore, the authors’ names in Day become ‘mere’ textual traces, hints at a pre-textual relevance, signifiers of both the temporal distance and functional detachment as infinitely deferred in the literary negotiation. The annexation of these author names and functions renders them inoperative, especially when their textual products are blended with the anonymously included signifiers of commercial text (see e. g. Day A2: 21; A27: 141– 146; E2: 516), theater listings (see e. g. Day E5: 536 – 550, 552– 556, 561– 585), corporate authorship in the form of news agencies such as Associated Press or Reuters (see e. g. Day A1: 15; A9: 46; B1: 152; C4: 216; D8: 509; E7: 552), extensive stock exchange data (see C1–C15), and sports scores (see Day E14: 588 – 589). Finally, amateur classified ads display authorial subjects that are indeed referenced; yet they remain obscured by unrevealing box numbers and random contact ciphers (see e. g. Day E31: 720 ff.). The entirety of actual and anonymous authorial subjects of The New York Times issue of that day thus suggests that individual authority is not only unnecessary, but that the complete exposure and confirmation of each and every authorial subject is also impossible. In the act of the authorial subject Goldsmith, who claims authorship only in terms of the conceptual design for producing Day, appropriating the mass of code, dissolving pre-determined borders, and consequently defamiliarizing it, the project devours all known and unknown authorial designations and reduces them to the level of code: just as text will never realize the correspondence of signifier to signified, the textualized individuality taken as an entity’s origin is equally non-identical with the author persons Eric Schmitt, Elisabeth Bumiller, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Day operates as the environment in which the dis- and relocation of the mass of the newspaper’s code takes place, one which redefines borders, functions, and the integrity of the pre-text. The authorial subject Goldsmith becomes the melting point within this environment that sets the literary machine of constrained transcription in motion. The authorial subject is thus cast as maintainer of a distinctly uncreative process that is said to unfold by itself, and this subject initially claims to only record the outcome of the appropriative exercise. As a direct consequence of the literary machine persistently working its way through

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the pre-text, authorial intervention is supposedly pared down to a minimum: Day’s agenda is not only ostentatiously uncreative with respect to its own author; it also ‘un-creates,’ i. e. belies and disowns, the pre-text’s idiosyncrasies as a news organ (up-to-datedness, provision and negotiation of information) and its authors’ functional qualities of mainly journalistic (truth-finding, subject-independent, opinion-balanced, etc.) and promotional agency (increasing consumption, managing brands, possessing a partisan agenda). Yet despite these impersonal elements there are still various authoritative decisions involved. As outlined at the very beginning of this chapter, the détournement demands from Goldsmith a willingness to ‘not-create,’ but rather to select. Goldsmith must decide on certain crucial options and discard others, precisely in order to produce a contrast between conflicting parameters within genres or different media such as newspaper vs. book, editorial/commercial/ etc. content vs. poetry, or topicality vs. longevity. The authorial subject of Day must, therefore, find answers to a number of questions: what is there to appropriate? Answer: All letters, lexemes, coherent phrases, from all articles, copywritings, headers, copyright notes, masthead, and visual devices, in short – all traces of linguistic signifiers, of ubiquitous language beyond the confines of one coherent textual entity; what does he not copy? He omits photographs proper, caricatures, illustrations, graphs, table borders, and other non-linguistic elements, and thereby makes an additional point in defining Day’s conceptual range of ‘text’; and, finally, how does he appropriate? It turns out that the regular mode of typesetting must be changed, as well as the heterogeneous newspaper layout, which must be made to conform to the conventional patterns of Western script in the literary format and text alignment with respect to line and page breaks, and, finally, the chronology of the appropriated signifiers. The initial endeavor to interfere with the newspaper pre-text as little as possible proves a difficult one since, as Day’s authorial subject concedes, “[t]he act of transcription […] as a hands-off, bone-dry act of coldness is a fallacy” (Goldsmith qtd. in Perloff 2005: n.pag.). In terms of assessing the consequences of authorial detachment and intervention, respectively, this fallacy of a ‘cold,’ mechanical treatment of form indeed resuscitates some qualities of authorial agency beyond those of an enabler of the literary apparatus. The interest in decidedly not-creating, in refraining from the aesthetic implications and literary merits of the contemporary ‘original author’, suggests in itself a possible accommodation of a creative and even original agency.²¹² Because “with every key-

 In the form and processuality of the writerly act, Goldsmith’s authorial agency can be aligned closest with manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, interestingly preceding the eventual

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stroke comes the temptation to fudge, cut and paste, and skew the mundane language” (Goldsmith 2011: 118), i. e. to act upon the pre-text, the authorial capacity in Day lies in constantly fighting the urge to create by paring authorial intrusion down to the conceptual minimum. Consequently, the creative act, or rather the coming-into-being, of Day by means of faithful transcription has to contend with instances of inevitable authorial decision-making. Even with the experiment of strictly mechanic reproduction without the supplementary enhancement of other textual material (as in Double or Nothing and Empire of the Senseless), the authorial subject leaves traces of its own in the conceptual appropriation of the pre-text and necessarily “foil[s] the exercise” (ibid.). In acknowledging this constant risk of failure for the impersonal literary machine, the major achievement for the authorial subject Goldsmith as consolidator lies in suppressing the desire to intervene, in evading writerly situations that suggest individual and original poetic composition: uncreativity reigns as the paradoxical reproduction of a heterogeneous pre-text that appropriates the formerly self-contained code of The New York Times and unifies all of the actual and potential authorships within the paper, placing them all on the same material level. With Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, the Neo-Conceptualist agenda of understanding text as ubiquitous code, valorizing of linguistic form over textual content, in uncreativity that defamiliarizes the known in place of familiarizing the new, and, finally, conceptualizing the authorial subject as merely the enabler of a literary machine and as possessing the capacity to select, compile, and direct, is carried out most comprehensively. Following this agenda, the crucial elements of Neo-Conceptualism become especially visible in Day. This occurs not only with the dissolution of borders both within the pre-text and between The New York Times and the volume of poetry under scrutiny, but also in the persistent alienation of previously published material brought forth by the strategic appropriative practice of transcription.

mechanical period of text production with the printing press and its ensuing consequences of democratization, individualism, and education. The skilled copying of text mainly taking place in monasteries and universities, the faithful transcription of and loyalty to the pre-text’s entirety, is echoed in the treatment of The New York Times; in addition, both practices share verifiable modifications to the respective pre-text in that the skilled monk would include changes concerning materiality (from scroll to codex, from papyrus, vellum, and parchment to paper or different qualities of ink) or content, in case the dominant contemporary belief system asked for exegetical variation or censorship. On the peculiarities of manuscript culture, see e. g. Mayer (2004); McLuhan (2002 [1962]: 106 ff.).

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As promised at the beginning of the case study, Day, in its comprehensiveness, renegotiates the central concepts of the postmodern appropriation of textual entities – authorship, ownership, originality, literary commodification, and authenticity – on three levels: with respect to the level of the channel, we witness a material transition from the everyday newspaper, and its heterogeneous text types and authorial subjects, to the quasi-homogeneous format of Day as a volume of poetry. This kind of renegotiation affects the former’s scope – The New York Times is 114 pages while Day is 840 –, format – the dimensions shift from 12x23 inches to 10x6,5x1,8 inches –, and weight – the paper weighs in at circa half a pound while Day weighs in at four pounds, as well as the familiar alignment of the constituent elements such as articles (headline, subtitle, main body, supporting graphs, etc.), advertisements, and photographs, that have likewise seen a reduction in their integral linguistic signifiers. Regarding the level of the text, the signifiers contained in the pre-text become détourned (in the Situationist sense) in their appropriation and translocation within the literary dispositif of the poetic text: the plagiarist act with Day is equivalent to a displacement of origin, in that the interspersion of renegotiated presence occurs beyond the absent environment of the pre-textual newspaper issue. The daily paper’s signifiers are, however, also fundamentally dehierarchized as the editorial material is leveled with advertising, stock exchange charts, movie bills, sports results, classifieds, etc. Neo-Conceptualist appropriation therefore both irritates, i. e. blends, the pre-textual matter, and reorganizes, i. e. orders and systematizes, it according to the programmed design of the literary machine allegedly producing Day. Ultimately, Goldsmith’s Neo-Conceptualist practice of uncreative appropriation precipitates the renegotiation of the pre-text’s authorial subjects. Thus the dissimilar individual sources are taken up and, if possible, referenced in the literary environment (“by ERIC SCHMITT”). Yet, as it has been shown, this practice cannot be ascribed to an interest in an authentification of the textual mass, but to the conceptual constraint of transcribing all linguistic signifiers of the pretext: the authorial subject is downgraded to the elemental signification of its representation in language, i. e. to dehierarchized, reproducible, emulated code. Goldsmith, as the referenced authorial source on the book’s cover, nevertheless assumes responsibility for the words at his re-typing fingertips. He does so by means of selection, with choices that bear upon the identification of the linguistic material to copy, that determine its position and alignment on the pages of the book, and that eventually keep the literary machine going; he also formulates the rules of the mechanics, of the underlying poetic concept, and relativizes the uncreative approach of his comprehensive appropriation; and finally, he re-

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mains the authorial focal point in terms of authentication, in presiding over the détourned and professedly uncreative production process at hand. The approach of constrained transcription in Day again does not fully annul authorial agency after all; it contributes rather to a naturalization of the reproduction of text as a (un‐)creative strategy, taking into account the changes surrounding textuality in the digital environment.

3.3.2 Appropriating Legal Texts: Vanessa Place’s Tragodía I: Statement of Facts (2010) The law that we studied was not always the actual law of judges or statutes but an ideal from which new branches were ever springing as society became complicated and the new rights of its individuals clear. (Reznikoff 1977: 168)

As with Kenneth Goldsmith’s multiple responsibilities as poet, critic, and lecturer, the Neo-Conceptual practice of Vanessa Place involves assuming multiple roles in the production and processing of text. Considering her professional double-life as a defense attorney and an experimental poet, the following discussion of the text Statement of Facts, from 2010, will take the foundations and consequences of this heterogeneous background into account to determine the quality of appropriation and textual relocation from the legal to the literary sphere.²¹³ As a defense attorney, Place has been involved in over 1,000 felony cases and appeal proceedings, focusing on sexual violence and predation. Both as a public defender, i. e. a court-appointed lawyer, and as an individually paid defense counsel, she is familiar with the legal environment as well as ordering policies, and has a profound knowledge of judicial presuppositions. These include the permanent risk of administering right and law at the expense of justice, as well as prioritizing bureaucratic rationales that can be transparently confirmed over the sanctimonious championing of named justice, liberty, and the confirmed regulative power of the law.²¹⁴  In addition to these two careers, Place’s activities include serving as publisher of the nonprofit press Les Figues. Based in Los Angeles, she, with fellow writer Teresa Carmody, serves as co-director of the press, which concentrates on collaborative projects including joint readings, performances, fund raising for publication and print-on-demand campaigns. Despite this concern with and commitment to the publicity and dissemination of experimental literature, her schizophrenic subsistence as lawyer and poet will take center stage in this discussion.  Professor of law and judicial theorist Raymond Wacks concedes to “law’s often self-righteous espousal of justice, liberty, and the rule of law” (2008: 2).

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Place’s day job includes drafting appellate briefs primarily on cases of sexual assault and forcible abuse being retried in court, with the ultimate goal of either renouncing or commuting the previous sentence. In the words of fellow writer Goldsmith, this ongoing “task of copying and editing [involves] rendering complex lives and dirty deeds into ‘neutral’ language to be presented before a court” (2011: 101– 102). The composition of protocols detailing the events leading to the initial trial and ensuing retrial provides the basics for the tripartite brief, consisting of a statement of facts, a statement of the case, and a concluding argument. What develops out of the transition of the legal authorial objective of these appellate briefs to the domain of conceptual literature can be considered the appropriative gesture in Place’s work. The literary text reproduces the wording drafted and used within the functional environment of the legal rape case almost verbatim and furnishes the collected statements and arguments with paratextual signals that determine the same material as literary. This case study will investigate the conceptual design, the mode of appropriation, as well as the consequences that arise for the text, the authorial subject, and the readerly point of view, respectively. A selective introduction to Vanessa Place’s writing will assist in contextualizing her three-part trilogy Tragodía (2010 – 2011), the opening ‘act’ of which, Statement of Facts from 2010, I will examine more closely. La Medusa (2008), a specimen of Place’s work of particular note, prepares the ground for what will emerge as her crucial interest in the ambivalence of postmodern existence and meaning. The reader encounters an initially modernist, multi-perspectival novel, comprised of 500 pages, that in alternating episodes describes the movement in and around the vast and decentered city of Los Angeles, “a series of conjoined colonies, a city with no downtown” (Place 2008: 78). In linking the passages with filmic directives such as “Fade In” (e. g. ibid. 226, 294, 316), interspersing rundown billboards in the individual narratives, or having the characters communicate with disinterested dramatic dialogue, the background of Tinseltown and the ubiquitous pursuit of celebrity happiness in ‘the industry’ is both made tangible and deconstructed: the city of angels resembles the eponymous Gorgon beauty of Medusa, with her similarly lethal mesmerizing attraction and the ability to turn onlookers to stone. La Medusa, in casting L.A. as the figure of Greek mythology, works as a ‘classic’ modernist break-up of self-contained narration. Yet the work also exhibits a profound interest in postmodern multimodality running through the eclectic verbal material: the language of fairy tales and descriptive parataxis, free verse, lists, and the mentioned filmic directives are combined with additional imagery, scribbling and ink blots, scientific graphs, and ‘non-writing’ such as ellipses, blank spots, and gaps. It points to the inconceivability of both the persistent significance of the city and its mythical quality, and the brainless organism of jelly-

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fish (medusae), with only a loose network of communicating nerves. With respect to the appropriative practice at hand, and the negotiation of the equivocal subject matter of right and justice in rape cases, the novel serves as point of literary departure for Place to lay bare the inconsistencies of myths – Los Angeles and Medusa – which, in Tragodía, corresponds to the exhibition of an a priori bestiality of rape offenders and their often swiftly delivered conviction. Published two years later, running parallel to the trilogy’s first part, the nonfictional volume The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law highlights these inconsistencies. From the perspective of a defense appellate attorney, Place elaborates on the legal as social construction of ‘rape,’ ‘guilt,’ and ‘morale,’ and on how the legal environment renders and enforces conceptions and the corresponding management of sexual violence. In doing so, the focus with The Guilt Project is more on the ethical, on how legal positions are formed with cases of sexual violence and the construction of the offenders’ ‘guilt,’ indeed the way in which we come to terms with “our most despised citizens” (Place 2010a: 1– 2), “the most loathed of the loathsome” (ibid. 3). The Guilt Project discusses the difference between ethics, in this case collective positions on issues that constitute and challenge the given, in terms of what is deemed right and wrong, and morals, where individual behavior is judged against the background of conventions constituted and challenged in the ethical realm. The volume provocatively examines the routines of injustice practiced against these “most loathed” citizens. Cases of rape are tried with ideologically predisposed notions of guilt in the initial assessment of the case, the eventual litigation (especially with the prosecutor’s line of argument), and the resultant verdict: Place outlines these particulars as cultural practices beyond the “cool impartiality over hot situations” (Place 2010a: 3), a central quality the legal discourse is naively meant to represent and repeatedly enact. The professional involvement of Vanessa Place in the issue becomes visible in the structure of the book and the chapters: “Guilt and Me,” “Guilt and Science,” “Guilt and Culture,” and “Guilt and Politics” broadly comment on the different aspects of the issue, concluding with the verdict that rape trials function as symbolic “Theatres of Punishment” (see Place 2010a: 231– 240). In this dramatic arena of the rape trial, “an acrobatic between the interests of the State” (ibid. 3) unfolds, involving the suspects at risk of conviction, and the general participating public educated as potential victims, lay expert witnesses, and judges. This setting and dramatic structure has, in Place’s view, contributed decisively to the multiplication of the amount of rapists and extensive media coverage since “vengeance is yours, mine, and ours” (ibid. 6). This markedly non-literary work, dissecting the naturalized mechanisms of incurring guilt within the authoritative domain of law and emphasizing the so-

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cially constructed nature of trials, establishes Place’s central interests. In contrast to other, less morally charged issues and practices, the problematization of the legal discourse within rape cases casts Place’s writing as utterly oblivious to risk, and therefore as highly contested. The Guilt Project can be seen as the hypothetical conceptual background against which the author’s appropriation of appellate briefs for the literary sphere is set. The trilogy suggestively titled Tragodía is based on a Neo-Conceptualist plagiarist strategy that follows the structure and protocol of a legal appeal, the appellate brief in court: I: Statement of Facts (2010), II: Statement of the Case, and III: Argument (both 2011). Before examining the first tragic act’s relocation of the text to the literary sphere and what elements constitute the actual appropriation, an assessment of the legal pre-text is indispensable. The textual type of the pre-text is an appellate brief, i. e. the official plea for a new hearing and retrial of an already closed case, settled in court during the initial trial. It is a joint document that consists of the respective documentation of the case by the prosecutor representing the state (‘Prosecution Case’) and the offender’s defense (‘Defense Case’), the legal references derived from the first trial – official charges against the offender – and the concluding arguments of both sides, reinforcing or contesting the preceding verdict. The readership of the cumulative document includes the opposing party in trial, the assisting clerks, as well as the judge assigned responsible for the trial. These addressees await a concise account of the case, the content and structure of which follows the prescribed rules issued either by the state (for Tragodía: California Rules of Court) or the conventions evolving from long-time practice.²¹⁵ The brief thus attends to a narrow scope of description, using a reduced vocabulary to recount the deed, judicial procedure, and the first instance’s protocol as objectively as possible. Yet despite the neutrality demanded in reporting these specifics, the phrasing is noticeably informed by the respective parties’ interest in implicitly steering the facts to one end or the other. In consequence, the legal brief, as pre-text to the literary negotiation, in itself already bears discernible rhetorical nuances that permeate the brief’s linguistic signifiers.

 The following remarks on the foundation, structure, and application of the legal text type of the appellate brief are oriented towards the legislative context of California criminal law, where the presented rape cases went on trial and in which the defense attorney Place has been a participating agent. The majority of sources thus refers to statutes and legislation issued by The Judicial Branch of California that orders all state courts and their corresponding rules for trial. The notion of verdicts resulting from previous cases is subject to the criminal law jurisdiction of precedent cases.

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As with the literary product Tragodía, the preceding legal brief consists of three parts. With respect to its conventions and the expectations of its readers, first the statement of facts is asked to provide the trial’s participants with factual information in plain, simple language with as little embellishment as possible – a directive that the translocation of the legal material to the literary environment will contest. The statement of facts is comprised of an account of pre-trial events leading to the initial lawsuit, and thus provides a chronological account of the facts of one or more sexual assaults. This information is derived from crime scene investigation, as well as victim, suspect, and witness reports presenting evidence in court. Although the legal discourse certainly acknowledges the unreliability of victims who may lie or contradict themselves for reasons of trauma and/or self-protection, equally corrupted deponents, and the fallible inquiry of executive authorities, the statement of facts is nevertheless considered the most sober, neutral part, “the most objective and most narrative part of the brief” (Goldsmith 2011: 102; my emphasis). The mode of presenting the numerous forms, versions, and qualities of testifying to the case is therefore likened to literary conventions (“narrative”) and conditions from the very beginning. The statement of facts invokes interpretive categories that suggest a close association of legal conduct and literary communication: one or more narrative instances – at least prosecutor and defender – spawn the course of action, the focalizers – victim and suspected offender, first-hand witness and criminologist – enable the reader to examine, judge, and assign value to the contrasting and often inconsistent testimonies, as well as relate the statements to the equally questionable findings of crime scene investigation and forensics. The appellate attorney and the state prosecutor thus already assume the role of orchestrating and directing the action to align with their particular interest. As Chicago attorney David L. Lee confirms in his professional advice “Writing the Statement of Facts”: “In the Statement of Facts […] we are not allowed to argue explicitly. So what do we do? We argue implicitly. […] [A]n implicit argument arranges and emphasizes the facts to lead the recipient of the argument to the desired conclusion” (1994: n.pag.). Lee emphasizes the competencies of the legal writers to implicitly select and foreground certain aspects that work to direct the reader towards deciding in favor of the writer’s position. Therefore, the composer’s work is already recognized as manipulative writing disguised as neutral, objective, and matter-of-fact. Following the assessment of the chronological progression of events and post-crime discoveries, the statement of the case assumes the task of recounting the legal procedure and attending results collected. Here, the abstracted nature of the punishable act, for which “relief [is] sought in the trial court, and the judgment or order [is] appealed from” (Judicial Council of California 2011 [2006]:

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8.204[a][2][A]), forms the center of attention. It presents the charges thus far as well as relevant rulings derived diachronically, the type of proceeding, the verdict and sentence in the first trial, and provides information on the timely notice of the appeal’s filing (see Judicial Council of California 2011 [2002]: 8.212[a]). The purpose of the statement of the case lies, moreover, in reproducing the legal embeddedness of the facts presented in terms of their historicity: what individual laws and statutes have been established in the past to negotiate this selection of facts? What is the suspect’s own historical legal record? And how was the initial case decided that forms the basis for the appeal trial at hand? In short, the statement of the case is comprised of a summary of charges and the pending state of the case to be appealed, prohibiting excessive details that would prevent the case from being quickly described and contextualized. Third, the appellate brief closes with a concluding argument by the prosecuting and the defending side, respectively. The latter presents the defendant’s claims that an error has been made in the prior sentencing, as well as evidence to appeal for a reversal of this sentence. The argument therefore openly engages in taking sides and persuading the deciding party – the state jury followed by an assessment of penalty by the presiding judge –²¹⁶ with rhetorical means, pointing out the strengths, weaknesses, or overall absence of evidence, while emotionally addressing the jury. Like the preceding written elements of the appellate brief, the delivered argument in trial is preserved and published in writing, and made accessible to all participants, as well as the general public. When discussing the textual translocation via appropriation of these three legal documents, and, more specifically, of the statement of facts, we ought to take the pretext’s accessibility and the attending policies regarding intellectual property and the freedom of information into account. In the strict sense of property jurisdiction and its infringement, the republication of the legal records is not explicitly prohibited, since these pre-texts are freely accessible and not individually authorized or signed. In the federal state of California, legal documents can be openly inspected by citizens either online or at several state institutions, such as the LA Law Library where the majority of documents produced in and around court are archived and made searchable for the public.²¹⁷ This right to access has been grant-

 On the format of the trial in criminal law, with respect to decision-making through a body of citizens, laymen sworn to the law, arriving at unanimous, ‘impartial’ verdicts and the authoritative instance of the judge who usually adjudges the final penalty, see the state’s Trial Jury Selection and Management Act by the Judicial Council of California (2011 [n.d.]: sec. 190 – 237).  Online access, both from the courts’ main pages and the participating law libraries (see Judicial Council of California 2011b; LA Law Library 2011 [2009]), is usually provided by search-

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ed in the California Public Records Act (CPRA; government code sections 6250 – 6270) since 1968: “In enacting this chapter, the Legislature, mindful of the right of individuals to privacy, finds and declares that access to information concerning the conduct of the people’s business is a fundamental and necessary right of every person in this state” (Office of the Attorney General 2011 [1968]: sec. 6250).²¹⁸ This kind of open government practice applies to identifiable public records written by members of the state or local government, as well as all authors involved in the writerly process of composing these files.²¹⁹ Unimpeded access, echoing the shared Neo-Conceptualist claim of network neutrality, is thus understood as a fundamental right of citizens, to be used against arbitrary enforcement of the law and potentially corrupt state legislative and executive power. Furthermore, those composing the legal drafts within this environment do so with an understanding of anonymous composition, that is the deliberate separation of an individual authorial instance and a directly relatable textual entity through ad personam authorization and authentication. Not signed by any party – neither prosecution, nor defense, nor jury, nor judge – and with its content and form repeatedly revised by its authors, the appellate brief and its three distinct parts require collaborative composition. In this process, not only are authorial subjects visible in trial, such as the prosecutor or the defense attorney involved, but also an invisible force of anonymous writers, such as clerks, case workers, and secretaries who – in order to protect the supposed objectivity of legal code – may not assert their respective rights to individual authorial creation and ownership. In the legislative context, the individuality and identifiable provenance of the writerly source are thus suspended in favor of cultivating the highest possible sense of detachment and objectivity in the case presented and argued. Now the translocation of these legal drafts to the literary sphere in their entirety does not necessarily elicit serious accusations of copyright infringement. Tragodía’s contested appropriative act in the Neo-Conceptualist sense arises rather with the textual reproduction of Place’s drafts, in so far as they reveal a number of able databases such as PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) or agencies commissioned to take over the service for the state.  The CPRA was based upon the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA; see US Constitution 1996 [1966]: sec. 552 et passim), which has allowed citizens to access documents of the federal executive branch of the United States since 1966. Exempt from this right is information relating to national defense, trade secrets, medical files, lives which could be endangered, financial institutions, certain geophysical data, or pending investigations. See also Birkinshaw (2010: 118 – 144, 155 – 180); C. Henry (2003: 1– 14).  For regulations concerning unimpeded access to public records within the CPRA itself, see California Department of Justice (2004) where the right to public access, the scope of coverage, and the modalities for requests are clarified.

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levels on which authorial, narrative and textual identities are corrupted. These include the brief itself, the double bind of the document’s authorial instance(s), the (paratextual) clues for assigning the text a fair degree of poeticity and literaricity, and the resulting heavy involvement of the reader, who must reconsider the borders previously drawn between factual jurisdiction and ‘lying’ literature. First, the reader is confronted with the detached, yet revealing quality of the translocated appellate briefs compiled within the environment of Place’s daytime profession, i. e. the allegedly matter-of-fact accounts of rape cases and their respective inconsistencies – paradoxes the appellate attorney uses in his or her defense strategy to exonerate the “most loathed of the loathsome.” In the “Prosecution Case” of the first account of pre-trial events in Statement of Facts (see SoF 9 – 11), for example, 13-year-old Ben is depicted as the victim of forced sexual intercourse with the appellant, who remains unnamed. The reader learns of the different versions of Ben’s testimony in the course of investigation, versions that are promptly aggravated by forensic findings of “more than one person’s DNA in the anal and rectal samples” (SoF 11). Initially, the minor Ben is believed to be the victim of sexual assault and is thus the focus of the sympathies of the literary reader, while the nameless appellant, one of these so-called “most despised citizens,” can be read as the aggressive force insidiously penetrating innocent children in dark alleyways. Yet the brief, disconnected from its functional purpose in the legal narrative – providing a factual basis for establishing the truth – and issued as a literary document, leaves the reader with the detached quality of the appropriated material. The brief must not resolve Ben’s contradictory statements, i. e. must not endeavor to say what is ‘right’ and lawful by weighing further evidence, a full confession, or the concluding verdict. Yet in the fragmentary incompleteness of Statement of Facts, Ben, formerly conceived as victim, loses his innocence and becomes exposed as more involved in, or even complicit with, the perpetrator. Second, the reader is aware of the two-fold agency of the authorial subject, which includes Place’s defensive ‘siding’ with the appellant seeking retrial and a role, as his participating attorney, in potentially mitigating punishment.²²⁰ In both her professional capacities – as lawyer and poet – she could be criticized

 All appellants in Statement of Facts are almost exclusively pronominally referenced as male (‘he,’ ‘his,’ ‘him’) with biologically determined women only mentioned as accomplices – see the appellants’ respective mothers (e. g. SoF 24, 28, 32, 34, 53, 71) or assaulted and disciplined women such as “sisters in law” (SoF 42), i. e. fellow sex workers (e. g. SoF 27– 28, 30, 38 – 40, 344). This proportion is in line with numbers published by the United States Bureau of Justice, in which 96 % of all reported cases of sexual assault are said to be committed by males (1991– 1996; see US Bureau of Justice Statistics 2004; Patriot News 2004: B01).

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for utilizing and exploiting the collected data, with respect to the testimony of the wronged parties and abuse suffered, for artistic ends. As child rape qualifies as one of the most delicate and emotionally charged topics in society, the literary appropriation of the hardly edited material throws the graveness of the issue into question, and consequently Place’s professional competency in assessing right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, righteousness and false integrity. This criticism often arises when the author reads excerpts of Statement of Facts to an audience, “very flatly, with great pauses post-preposition” (qtd. in Wagner 2010: n.pag.), provoking strong emotional reactions and open resentment (see examples in Lemon Hound 2010; Mansfield 2010).²²¹ Thirdly, an effect that arises with the appropriative translocation from the legal to the literary environment is the assignment of introducing poetic and literary qualities. Although the main body of the respective volumes reproduces the pre-textual content and form almost verbatim,²²² the paratextual details framing this reproduction charge it with literary qualities that are at odds with its expressed purpose. These framing paratexts include, for example: the trilogy’s title, Tragodía, clearly referring to an obligation to a genre with a traceable literary history and an anticipated tradition; the back-cover blurbs and reviews by literary critics (see back cover; SoF 2) that identify the volume as “the most challenging, complex and controversial literature […] written today” (SoF 2); and the five lines in the colophon contextualizing the main body to come: All quotations and accounts in this book were taken directly from the trial transcripts of cases that Vanessa Place handled on appeal. All these transcripts, and the appellate briefs filed in each case, are matters of public record. However, the names of the people herein, as

 Susan Mansfield and Place report “a wide range of reactions. People burst into tears, walk out. Some say they feel like throwing up. Some wait afterwards to chastise her. ‘There was a woman in London this past summer who became quite upset, she was sobbing in the bathroom for some time. Afterwards she confronted me about how I felt about having done that to her. I told her I hadn’t done anything to her, she had had a reaction to a piece of writing’” (Mansfield 2010: n.pag.). Further scandal surrounding Statement of Facts arose with a critical reading by Marjorie Perloff at the Rethinking Poetics Conference, at Columbia University in 2010, where she provocatively put rape offenders and their victims on the same level – “at least as bad as or worse than the rapists” – causing a heated post-conference debate on the value and purpose of Place’s appropriative practice. For an account of these events and the ensuing online argument see Perloff (2010b); S. Young (2010a, 2010b).  As stated in several interviews (see e. g. Lemon Hound 2010; Mansfield 2010) and in the first part’s colophon, the only modifications performed concern the altering of some names for privacy protection.

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well as other direct modes of identification, have been changed to protect their privacy. (SoF 4)²²³

Fourth and finally, the contested appropriative act arises in prompting (self‐)reflection on the part of the reader: “I am asking the reader to bear witness, or to choose not to. Either way, they become complicit. There’s no such thing as an unbiased witness” (Place qtd. in Goldsmith 2011: 105). The reader’s expectations are consequently highly conflicting: he or she wants to assess the presented facts of the statements and arrive at a satisfying result – usually the comforting resolution that arrives with the perpetrator’s conviction – while on the other hand expecting a poetical mastery of language communicated in a particular style, suggesting structural complexity. This complexity invites an examination of possible themes (rape), a plot (e. g. forcibly enacted sexual intercourse with a minor and the ensuing investigations that have led to the initial sentence), and a story (e. g. the chronological sequence of the violent act described by the victim, the assumed perpetrator, in-situ witnesses, and investigators). Because of the para- as well as metatextual cues accompanying Statement of Facts, the literary reader is made aware that the text was initially part of the judicial environment and therefore must examine his or her own assumptions as supposed facts are suddenly charged with literary qualities of possibility, shifting probability, or an obvious forgery of facts. The appropriative act, after all, enables the literary handling, which suggests a detached referential relation as opposed to the functional facticity of the appellate brief, to break open the axiomatic reliability of the pre-text. This means that in revealing an unreliable witness, biased or incomplete investigation, technical inaccuracies that invalidate the prosecutor’s line of argument, and, most of all, the partisanship of the ‘narrators’ in opposing the prosecution case and its attending fallibilities, the reader’s expectations of both textual frameworks – law and literature – are fundamentally disappointed. With these four ethical points of contention arising from appropriative practice, the following remarks will further explore the modes and effects of displacement and translocation in Statement of Facts, phenomena that again relate back to the Situationist paradigm of détourning textual material. As already suggested above, the reader witnesses, or becomes ‘complicit’ with the practice of, a displacing of the known mode of writing from the fixed legal protocol of assessing an ap The paratextual elements will be investigated more closely when focusing on aspects of détournement in Statement of Facts. At this point, the list of features satisfies the purpose of situating the initial reception of the case study in a context beyond the simple controversy of illegitimate appropriation as literary plagiarism.

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pellate case of rape within the entirety of the appellate brief. From this integrated whole, three volumes of conceptual poetry were published separately, i.e. temporally and spatially distinct from each other. For the case study at hand, the pre-textual ‘statements of facts’ are extracted from the tripartite legal document. The textual entities – 33 statements in the volume – become reframed within a literary structure that the reader attempts to identify according to the additional paratexts. As proposed above, the superior title, Tragodía, works here as the genre frame for and relocation of what is to follow: the reader recalls the classic Greek or Roman configurations, the Renaissance dramatic form or bourgeois and domestic tragedy, with ordinary citizens acting as protagonists. The stage on which a variant of these forms will be enacted with each and every new rape case and legal action is the everyday context of the court room, and this consequently invites the literary reader to compare the trilogy’s structure, plot, course of action, characters, motifs, etc. to the genre. Tragedy, as a variant of drama, involves the fateful conflict and decline of the hero that takes place from the turning point of the action to the inevitable catastrophe. This results in the hero’s failure due to the action’s fateful chain of events and the hero’s unfortunate disposition. The traditional audience is thus meant to derive pleasure from the hero’s suffering, since “through pity and fear it [tragedy] effects relief [katharsis] to such emotions” (Aristotle 1996: VI 1449b). In relocating the legal text to the literary sphere, the tragic, i. e. literary, elements – the hero’s failure, the fateful configuration of the action, and the onlookers’ consolation²²⁴ – are retained in the legal text: as Place already argued in The Guilt Project, the assumed perpetrator’s guilt is presented as utterly predetermined and the allegations against him are irreversible, with rape offenders “demonized by society before they reach the dock” (Mansfield 2010: n.pag.).²²⁵ Through defamiliarization and displacement, the appropriated material unmasks the constructed staging of an already tainted judicial apparatus in a pre-informed environment. The reader identifies the alleged rapist as the pre-determined hero who necessarily fails due to the culture’s sweeping master narrative of guilt and preemptive scapegoating. The next aspect of détournement brought about in the appropriative process in Statement of Facts arises with the paratextual element of in-book reviews, usu-

 Rather than being grounded in ‘pity,’ I would identify the relief experienced by the rape trial’s participants and the general public as arising from the desired assessment of guilt, a corresponding prosecution, and a convincing line of judicial argument.  The appellate cases handled in Statement of Facts are usually not overturned, although the documentation of witness and victim reports often prevents the reader from assessing clear-cut cases. See Place (2010: 13 – 30); J. Wagner (2010).

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ally included to promote a volume’s sales and verify that a book’s content is communicated well. The short reviews in Place’s three volumes are, first of all, largely composed by fellow poets and critic-friends, including Marjorie Perloff, Kenneth Goldsmith, John Welchman, and Kim Rosenfield (see back cover; SotC/SoF/A 2). These four are also acknowledged and thanked in the colophon (see SoF 4). Apart from these short reviews being full of praise, of course, these marketing elements also testify to an additional conceptual intrusion by functional text types: while the digital version of Statement of Facts displays them without modification, the print editions of all three parts show that a good deal of words have been crossed out:

Figure 12: Crossed-out reviews from Statement of the Case

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In this manner, the critics’ wording is preserved, while another writerly instance – either the book’s authorial subject, the editor, or the publisher’s marketing division – obviously takes charge in amending the positive judgments. As is evident from Fig. 12, most alterations involve removing decorative attributes and overwrought subordinate clauses, thereby foresaking excessive hypotaxes in favor of the clear, sober idiom of legal writing. The defense attorney, similarly, must operate under linguistic constraint, producing plain, reduced and paratactic descriptions of events. This reduction and simulated impartiality in the literary account becomes thoroughly, i. e. conceptually, extended to the negligible margins of the publication.²²⁶ Not only is the legal text appropriated, translocalized, and defamiliarized from its original surroundings; other traditional elements, such as the short reviews, must also follow suit again suggesting the desired standard of leveled code across genres, text types, and textual hierarchies, reminiscent of the over-writing of textual borders in Goldsmith’s Day (see chapter 3.3.1). In sum, the détournement of the legal briefs is effected mainly through the shift in context and institutional frames. The trilogy Tragodía, and Statement of Facts in particular, exhibits the translation of allegedly neutral and exclusively functional language into a discourse that values both the dramatic and narrative quality of description. This translation can be observed on at least three levels: first, from the legal to the literary; the code employed in the pre-text and its claim to clarity, reduction, and matter-of-factness changes along the paratextual lines that re-contextualize the witness reports and the scientific evidence to narrow down the possible courses of action that constitute the criminal case. Therefore, the literary is, first of all, initiated by means of ‘marginal’ details (paratexts) that format the pre-text and facilitate its embedding in the new literary context of a narrativized tragedy. Second, and following from the first observation, the text can be seen as transformed from utilitarian to ‘useless’ as it becomes institutionally detached from the functional context of rhetorical jurisdiction. Designed to provide the basic facts of the case for the involved parties of the legal process, the reader of Place’s volume is not necessarily interested in quickly collecting facts and proceeding with the lawsuit. Reading Statement of Facts involves receiving the appropriated factual accounts simultaneously as ‘based on true events’ and as fictional, decidedly ‘untrue,’ or, at most, merely possible.

 I presume, furthermore, that this paratextual digression references the Neo-Conceptual variant of erasure poetry, which appropriates material by means of blotting out crucial parts of an underlying pre-text. For this form of appropriative practice, see the concluding analysis of Yedda Morrison’s Darkness (chapter 1) in chapter 3.3.3.

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The third and final level concerns the transition from method to morale. While the form and content of the first part of the appellate brief provides us with the utterly impersonal depiction of rape-crime facts and the corresponding legal background, we also witness the efforts of the respective sides to discover ways of reinforcing or reversing the former verdict and sentence: the necessarily manipulative condition of language does not spare the sovereign domain of criminal law and the reader’s corresponding faith in sober, well-tempered, disinterested jurisdiction and the possibility of justice. With Statement of Facts, this non-partisanship striving for the supreme ideal of righteousness is turned into a brutal narrative, the cool, paratactical sobriety of which confronts us both with the cruelty of rape crimes and the interference with assumed facts by the parties involved. Moving from the paratextual margins, which already manifest important aspects of the text’s conceptual translocation via appropriation, to the main body, the literary quality of the text becomes more apparent. The 33 statements of facts are initially announced in a curious table of contents: designating the volume’s chapters or acts, the reader finds no qualitative differentiation between the individual accounts, since each entry is identically labeled “STATEMENT OF FACTS” followed by the respective page number at which the account begins (see SoF 5 – 6). All in all, these 33 units are comprised of 427 pages of statements, with the shortest covering only three pages, and the longest account closing the volume at 52 pages. With the détournement outlined above, a tragic narrative arises from Place’s appropriative strategy that involves the effects of defamiliarization and translocation. These following observations will cover the content, modes of description, and the particular changes that occur with functional language use in the face of literary exploitation. The individual statement identified by the uniform title “STATEMENT OF FACTS” always begins with the “Prosecution Case” presenting a record of factual information from the legal document. Here, a set of sometimes anonymized persons-turned-legal-entities is introduced and embedded as characters focalized by a supposedly detached, third-person narrator.²²⁷ Only four statements in the

 The victims are usually referred to by first name – “Ben” (SoF 9 – 11), “Ava” (13 – 21), “Iliana” (101– 106) – or anonymously with ‘Jane/John Doe’ and a differentiating number (e. g. “Jane Doe #1,” see SoF 53). The offender is consistently addressed with the juridical term ‘appellant.’ As mentioned above, all nominal identifications have been altered for privacy protection and pseudonyms are used. The reasons for also employing ‘Jane/John Doe’ (see SoF 53 – 71, 73 – 77, 325 – 332, 375 – 427) are not explicitly given in Place’s book. Due to the severity of long-term sexual assault, rape, and domestic violence, including the use of arms or substantial prostitu-

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following “Defense Case” reveal that “[t]here was no affirmative defense presented” (see SoF 11, 106, 120, 245), and thus lack the justifying riposte. However, the majority of the Defense Case attempts to reverse the findings and verdict of the initial trial by offering new contradicting witnesses or logical inconsistencies, and by questioning the credibility of previous evidence. These objections by the defense consequently aim at nullifying the allegations by the Prosecution Case, and read like a written debate.²²⁸ The narrative perspective in these two parts is therefore brought about by means of police interrogation, by quoting initial testimony elicited by the Crown prosecutor and the ensuing questioning or cross-examination by the defense attorney. The third-person view, resulting from the various authorial subjects, is portrayed as objective as possible, since it claims to reproduce only the testimony uttered by the victim, witnesses, appellant, etc. Yet the simple replication of direct speech, via transcription from the preceding tape recordings, actually rarely occurs. The paragraphs routinely transform the taped accounts to convey a third-person subjective point of view, and this inevitably obscures the first-hand descriptions. With “STATEMENT OF FACTS” #2 (see SoF 13 – 21), for example, the reader learns of the repeated sexual assault of 8-year-old Ava by her babysitting uncle. After the first lines of the prosecution case have specified the basic details, such as the victim’s age, victim-offender relationship, and quality of contact, the second paragraph suggests that the “[a]ppellant started touching Ava that summer, sometime after school ended for the year. (RT 1303) Appellant touched Ava’s ‘private’ (genitals) on more than one occasion, both over and underneath her clothes. (RT 1272, 1274, 1278, 1303)” (SoF 13). The recounting of events is presented entirely from the third-person narrative perspective, employing simple past tense (plus infinitive: “started touching”) with an unspecific designation of time (“that summer, sometime after school ended for the year”), the assault’s quality (touching the child’s genitals), and frequency (“on more than one occasion”). The only restriction to this perspective arrives with the referenced record transcripts (“RT” plus respective num-

tion, suggesting physical as well as psychological dependency in these particular cases, I assume that anonymization has been ordered and practiced already in the pre-text original in accordance with a witness protection program.  In 14 statements the reader is, furthermore, confronted with “[r]ebuttal[s]” (see SoF 51, 71, 99, 129, 163, 192, 217, 240, 280, 310, 323, 331, 355, 372) that contain established faulty evidence or confirmed invalidation of witness reports, either during the first trial or during preparation for the appeal proceedings. The inclusion of this counterevidence further promotes the deconstruction of definite and precise victim and witness statements and affidavits, against which the investigation’s traces and proofs are pitted.

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ber) that indicate the elementary starting points, i. e. individual oral inquiries, for the crime’s investigation initiated by the directing questions of the police officer in charge. As a result, the literarization of the legal pre-text is evident in the transfer of first-hand details to the normative disinterested level of the third-person narrative. With respect to other modes of description, the reader learns, furthermore, about the different quality and severity of the acts of sexual violence concerning, for instance: the age-dilemma of victims below and above 18 regarding issues of consensual intercourse, the offender’s lack of knowledge, and misinformation given by an underage victim;²²⁹ the circumstances of forceful offense, ranging from consensual intercourse reinterpreted by legal guardians and state prosecution to out-of-control sex games to gang rape at gunpoint; the numerous acts of sexual violence against a variety of victims (male and female minors, mothers, students, infants, sex workers, and elderly people) that take place in different settings (at the aggrieved party’s or perpetrator’s home, at work, in a car, or in public spaces). All of these details build a narrative environment with characters and motifs, an exposition and conflict, and thematic, temporal and spatial coordinates – for example “[o]n October 21, 2007,” “[a]t 4:00 that Sunday morning,” “in Los Angeles,” “an alley three blocks away” (SoF 9). These elements, though varying across cases, will lead to the same ending, i. e. a verdict: the assessment of the offender’s guilt, or the successful pursuit of the action’s villain, the fateful hero. The assessment of the verdict of the initial trial, a result the judicial authorial subject Place wants to have reconsidered with the appeal trial, consequently consists of the narrativized victim and witness reports that, following Place’s findings in The Guilt Project, exhibit a bias towards the statements of the injured party at the expense of the perpetrator’s version. Only the former, in fact, are comprehensively included in the appellate brief: the descriptions provided by the Defense Case can be read as mere appendices in the briefs, since they come second, that is after the page-long account by the prosecution, and may solely serve as replies to the preceding story. Thus, the Defense Case is usually already disadvantaged by the form and chronology of the accounts. This disadvantage, moreover, becomes fully visible in the layout of the respective statements. The perspectives of the victims and witnesses exclusively constitute the building blocks that form the primary storyline: the assessments that

 According to the California statutory rape law, the legal age of consent for sexual intercourse is 18. This is also valid if the minor testifies that the contact was consensual. See California Penal Code (2007).

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the “appellant’s penis penetrate[d] his bottom, and remain[ed] there for five minutes,” “[a]fter Ben saw appellant ejaculate, Ben returned home,” “Ben’s mother Madison was on the porch;[…] she asked Ben where he had been, and he eventually told her,” and “Madison called the police” (SoF 9; original superscript) give the reader information that is only accessible from the point of view of Ben and his mother from the record transcripts prepared after the police had arrived at the home to commence their investigation. On the next level, when the legal executive has entered the narrative and a secondary narrative thread begins, the testimony remains one-sided and becomes further embellished: “[Ben] told the police the same story he told Madison, adding that appellant had initially asked him for help, and that appellant offered Ben weed, but that Ben did not smoke. Ben said he screamed […]” (SoF 9; my emphasis). The prosecution, in bringing forth these specifics, here utilize the appellant’s guile in luring the minor away from his house (“asked for help”), the boy’s refusal of narcotics, which proclaims him capable of discerning illegal and legal behavior, and as sober at the time of the assault. Most importantly, the account testifies that Ben had undeniably indicated his refusal of sexual intercourse by screaming. These details substantiate the minor’s statements and set him up as the believable and innocent victim on which the prosecution builds its charges against the villainous perpetrator.²³⁰ The demand for objectivity and detachment in the statement of facts, i. e. to supposedly establish the factual ground for the ensuing protocol of legal action in the statement of the case and the argument, is unmasked with Place’s appropriative translocation as a narrativized directive. This directive already affects the binary oppositions of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ innocence and evil, and virtue and vice acted out in the tragic setting of the courtroom. Apart from the testimony given by the victim him- or herself that predominantly informs the reader of the proceedings of the crime, the statements entail secondary narrative strands unfolding from the perspective of the investigating party and the adjacent personnel, such as the inquiring detective, the nurses on duty examining victim and perpetrator, the serologist, and the criminalist delivering expert witness reports that further substantiate evidence. Although the accounts are given from the subjectively individual point of view via drafted re-

 Other details utilized in Ben’s characterization (third-person limited) bolster this claim of implicit direction, despite invoking supposedly minor details before the eventual crime: the fact that Ben was “reading the Bible” (SoF 9) on the front porch in the early hours of that Sunday morning, and randomly inserting that “Ben knew it was a sin to lie and to bear false witness” (SoF 10), strengthen the reader’s impression of a righteous, innocent minor who unwillingly became the target of a hideous deed.

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ports, police interrogation, and the eventual court hearing, in the statement of facts they become rewritten to match the matter-of-factness of the (though naturally limited) third-person perspective: “police took Ben to the hospital, where he was examined and a sexual assault kit collected” (SoF 9); “[t]he detective arrested appellant the day after Ben’s identification; appellant was subsequently examined at a different hospital, and biological samples collected” (SoF 10); “[a]ccording to Rinehart’s report, there was more than one person’s DNA in the anal and rectal samples” (SoF 11), and that “did not match appellant’s DNA” (ibid.). These pieces of information are predominantly denotative; set against the findings concerning the narrative quality of the statements so far, however, their chronological sequence and cold representation suggest that the protocol of investigation was not infringed upon and the prosecution’s conduct could not be faulted. As demonstrated above, the “Prosecution Case” in Statement of Facts implicitly argues in favor of the victim and thereby emphasizes the personal characteristics of the minor Ben as well as the severity of the crime, since the appellant is shown to have lured the boy away from the safe space of his home in order to forcefully perform anal intercourse. Yet the appropriated statement also includes pieces of information that cast Ben’s innocence and credibility very much into doubt: after being lured away from the protected space of the front porch, certain phrases point towards inconsistencies with regard to Ben’s statements, as he may have smoked marijuana with the appellant after all: “the two walked to an alley three blocks away, talking and smoking” (SoF 9).²³¹ Ben was possibly intoxicated and he exceedingly comes across as unreliable as a witness and character. The protocol continues listing further details that complicate the testimony: all of a sudden, Ben “had sex with appellant ‘out of curiosity’” (ibid.), with the inverted commas and italics suggesting a direct quote from the record transcript; he “wrote a statement about what happened, saying he had been forced, which wasn’t true”; and that he obviously “did not care about the consequences of his lies to appellant” (ibid.; my emphases). Ben’s credibility, as a victim who may have even invited, or at least consented to, intercourse and as a witness who gives three different versions of the crime in three record transcripts, is ultimately damaged, and the reader’s loyalty to him as the tragedy’s casualty increasingly diminishes. The case of the offender who assaults an innocent, Bible-reading minor, seized from his home and raped in a dark alleyway, takes a dubious turn with the unmasking and reconsideration of

 The preceding text suggests that ‘smoking’ refers to cannabis instead of tobacco, as the appellant “asked Ben about smoking. Ben understood this to mean marijuana” (SoF 9).

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the predetermined victim-siding. Although the very real sex act – reported and confirmed by the forensics carried out by the attending criminologist (Dr. Rineheart) – has taken place and is therefore legally indictable as ‘completed drug or alcohol facilitated penetration’²³² of a minor, the severity of the crime has lessened considerably. The original verdict is thus challenged by the defense, who ask for it to be reconsidered in the appeal proceedings under way. In appropriating and détourning the legal appellate brief for the literary environment, the previous notion of ‘hideous perpetrator vs. innocent victim’ is rendered overly simplistic. The reader is faced with, on the one hand, sexual assault as a deed considered one of the most dreadful, and one that is exceedingly emotionally charged. The actions described in the statement of facts build a narrativized tragedy, with the victims and witnesses as this story’s characters to empathize or even identify with (by first-name address and further characterization), and, together with the extensive outline provided by the siding prosecution, make it easy for the reader to determine his or her sympathies and loyalty. On the other side, however, we encounter obvious inconsistencies within the reports on these instances, an unsteadiness and unreliability in narration and character that cast doubt on formerly coherent situations and motivate a reversal of the verdict, or at least considerable mitigation of the punishment. Therefore, the translocation of the material to the literary environment unmasks two central points: first, the display of the case’s incompatibility with several competing and internally inconsistent statements reveals the grey zone that lies between the realms of right and wrong, guilt and innocence, and perpetration and victimization; second, the aesthetic operation exposes the manipulative potential of the statement of facts, the allegedly most plain and straightforward presentation of the case’s particulars. The Prosecution Case here guides the understanding and response of the recipients – namely of judge, jury, and literary readers, respectively – towards their desired end.²³³ It is these findings, additionally, which exhibit the fraudulent utilization of language within the statements. At first sight the grammar and style, including syntax, lexis, and semantics, can be considered plain, merely descriptive, and

 The United States National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) defines three types of sexual violence with rape: “completed forced penetration,” “attempted forced penetration,” and the “completed alcohol or drug facilitated penetration” mentioned above (see National Center for Injury Prevention 2010: 17).  The quality of implicit argument can of course be considered equally valid for the Defense Case that, for example, seeks to question the prosecution’s crown witness or cast a shadow on the victim’s credibility and integrity, which is usually the case with sex worker victims (see e. g. SoF 70, 146 – 148, 183 – 191, 195, 359 – 360).

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pointedly objectified. The reader encounters paratactic formations and infrequent relative clauses, as well as events that unfold chronologically, with infrequent analepses to clarify, for instance, the characters’ relationship or quickly outline an important detail’s back-story.²³⁴ Yet, as shown, the purported objectivity loses its validity with the use of non-verifiable hints, suggestions, and inconsistencies, requiring the reader’s extensive interpretative skills and hence a good deal of analysis and judgment. The unreliability of the professed victim and reporting witnesses determined here directs and redirects, informs and misinforms the investigation, as well as the appellate brief, just as the attorneys guide and manipulate the hypothetically factual and impartial document and its supposed neutral quality in the endeavor for truth, right, and/or justice. With its appropriative translocation uncovering the legal pre-text’s underlying narrative, the literary quality of which implicitly assists in directing the verdict of the decision makers, Tragodía refers to another literary predecessor. Statement of Facts, in particular, echoes a volume of verse by Jewish-American writer Charles Reznikoff (1894 – 1976), who, along with Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Basil Bunting, formed the Objectivist poetry movement in the 1930s. With its interest in sincerity, clarity, and the poem as object, in the tradition of Ezra Pound’s and William Carlos Williams’ reduced Modernist Imagism, they adhered to the ideal of a writer “who is restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law” (qtd. in Dembo 1969: 194) and who finds a persuasive “analogy between testimony in the courts and the testimony of a poet” (ibid. 195).²³⁵ Reznikoff, experienced in both legal and literary testimony,²³⁶ turned court records of criminal trials into so-called court poetry with, for instance, Testimony, The United States 1885 – 1890 (Recitative) in 1965 and the poem “Holocaust”

 Regarding analepses, consider as examples the mode of conduct – babysitting uncle (see SoF 13, 143 – 144, 149), pimp (see e. g. SoF 27, 34, 357), stepfather (see SoF 131, 311, 325), etc. –, the duration of contact (see e. g. SoF 13, 19, 53, 304), or the living conditions of the victims and witnesses (see e. g. SoF 53n1, 73, 101, 107, 281, 318, 319).  Zukofsky famously discussed the Objectivists’ paradigms and motivations, as well as attempts at self-definition in a special issue of Poetry magazine in 1931: “Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody” (Zukofsky 1931b: 273). See also DuPlessis (1999); Horn (forthcoming b); Perloff (1995); Zukofsky (1931a).  Reznikoff earned a degree from New York University’s Law School in 1916, yet was only briefly employed in the profession. He later wrote summaries of legal court reports for legal reference books with a legal publishing house and encountered the textual and/or literary dimension of the records rather than the professional, pragmatic one.

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(1975), resulting in amalgamations of the plain explicitness of legal protocol and poetic effect: Now, in reading law, if the cases state any facts, they’re just a sentence or two; but, occasionally, you’ll find the facts gone into in detail, sometimes to explain or defend the judge’s position. Still the facts have a function of their own – psychological, sociological, and perhaps even poetical. (Qtd. in Dembo 1969: 202)

Testimony, in 500 pages over two volumes, is exclusively interested in the ‘statements of facts,’ omitting, as opposed to Place, the legal treatment that follows, i. e. the assessment of violated laws and the argument. These poems directly rely on court records that Reznikoff transcribed himself for the reference books by the legal publishing house for which he worked. As closely conforming to and confirming Objectivist paradigms of reduction and clarity devoid of any clear authorial perspective, Testimony matter-of-factly reproduces historical processes, and thereby establishes an archive of US legal discourse which sometimes strays from its suggested documentary function (see e. g. Davidson 1997: 135 – 169) to play out the tension between functional explicitness and poetical obscurity. In further codifying the volume as a “recitative,” the pre-text is translocated from the legal to the musical,²³⁷ just as Statement of Facts transitions from the legal to the lyrical/literary. Because the text faithfully reproduces court material as the dynamic depiction of events, excluding emotional tones, pathos, and emphatic illustration, the reader witnesses the technocratic ideal of law as it structures social chaos and channels impassioned narrative. While Testimony shares with Place’s text the element of personal involvement in the writing, rewriting, and editing of the pre-text, in “Holocaust” it is the translocation of ‘found’ material as well as the strategy’s ethical bent that echoes Statement of Facts. Responding to Adorno’s assessment that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, “Holocaust” lets the procedures and consequences of the genocide compose their own artistic product: the long poem derives from the US government’s records of the Nazi trials before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (1945 – 1949) and the Eichmann trial transcripts in Jerusalem (1961). These  The recitative as a singing style adopts rhythm and structure from ordinary discourse and declaims text in free verse. It is mainly employed in opera to advance the work’s narrative and dialogic elements, alternating with closed, thoroughly composed forms such as the overture or aria (see Sadie 2002: 1– 6). The recitative as a declaiming form, in contrast to the mimetic quality of the others may also hark back to the oral workings of ancient dramatic forms, such as tragedy, and to the educational device of practicing speech in rhetoric classes (see e. g. Fuhrmann 2003: 79 – 96; Sandstede 1994). It therefore simultaneously stresses the qualities of theatrical exaggeration, directive persuasion, and entertainment via narration within the legal document.

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include ‘objectified’ survivor testimony from the court proceedings, devoid of metaphorical language and a concluding judgment or commentary, neither on behalf of the victims nor the prosecutors. As with the similarly unspeakable deeds involved in the rape cases, “Holocaust” presents a narrative stripped of the protagonist’s emotions and external interpretation, since it lacks any authorial framing or attendant explication. In this line, Dan Featherston stated that there is no need “to speak over the testimony, but to listen” (1997/98: n.pag.). The Nazi perpetrators are mirrored in Place’s depiction of sexual offenders in Statement of Facts, in that the preceding framing of the textual material must be presented in as detached a manner as possible, and both texts – despite their focus on form – depict the readerly visceral horror on either a historic communal (the Shoah) or an acutely individual (sexual violence) level. Both voice the ineffable, the gruesome reality of human violence and its unintelligibility, and they contest the corresponding taboo regarding outspoken accusation and jurisdiction (‘speaking right’) by appropriating and translocating the form and content of legal writing in literature. Despite these shared concerns and conceptual approach, the primary difference between Reznikoff’s “Holocaust” and Statement of Facts lies in the fact that Place appropriates a variety of authorial subjects that also involves herself as a defense attorney who leaks the collected information into the literary environment, creating the potential for resignification and détournement. The exhibition of rape cases through appropriation triggers another quality of indecency: with Reznikoff, the ethical entitlement of the concentration camp survivors outweighs both a glorification of the offenders and a humiliation of the crown witnesses; the integrity of Place’s cast of characters – injured party, family, the delinquent appealing at court, witnesses, police investigators as executive organ, judicial prosecutors, criminologists, and, not the least, the defense attorney engaged in filing the appeal herself – is questionable. All are revealed as or strongly suggested to be potential liars and unreliable participants in the process; the testimonies are consistently contradictory, discrepancies in protocol and process become obvious in the records, and the scientific assessment via forensics fails more than once to meet the set parameters, or proves inconclusive (see e. g. SoF 10 – 11; 158; 238 – 239; 419 – 426); the integrity of the cases comes under scrutiny when victims – children as well as sex workers – withdraw their testimonies, in fear of the perpetrator or as they are themselves accused of taking part in consensual sex. The assessment of guilt and victimhood in Testimony thus builds up to a poetic translocation of historical legal fragments that reveals the emotive aspect of legal writing; in “Holocaust,” that translocation engages in communicating the survivors’ accounts of a gruesome genocide, thereby lending a voice, i. e. medium, to their experiences. Statement of Facts, and, on the whole, Tragodía, how-

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ever, passing through, maintaining, and actualizing the postmodern parameters of questioning metanarratives and ‘natural’ self-containment (of History, Reality, the Rule of Law), voids any assessment presumably rooted in the “self-evident meaning of the factual” (Leung 2011: n.pag.). The process of appropriative translocation uncovers the grey zones of writing that also infiltrate the law; as the linguistic signifiers move from one functional environment to the other, the “selfevident meaning” of witness reports and the assembled evidence of the rape cases are compromised. Finally, the translocation takes the argument Place already made in The Guilt Project even further, as it unmasks the desire to punish and the corresponding cultural bias of legal jurisdiction and public judgment that from the outset sees the perpetrator exclusively responsible and indictable for the crime. Or, as Goldsmith states: “[Statement of Facts] subjugates its own moral impulses to preinscribed ethical DNA that comes embedded in appropriated language” (2011: 12). The appropriation of an impenetrable collective of authorial subjects and voices, as occurs with the seizing of legal documents, produces two distinct consequences: first, Statement of Facts highlights the text type of the appellate brief as allegedly unauthored, unauthorized, and unauthenticated, qualities that are only put into argumentative perspective with the headings “Prosecution Case,” “Defense Case,” “Rebuttal,” etc. This authorial anonymity, and absence of individual authentication in the legal document, leaves the reader with the impression of objectivity and balance. Yet as the preceding observations on implicit steering and argumentation by means of narrativizing the statements available have shown, this balance and matter-of-factness is downright deceiving. The adopted vantage point, now unmasked, is also a guiding narrative perspective that the reader neither expects nor wishes in an ‘objective’ account of factual information. In the literary framework suggested by Statement of Facts as a work of poetry, the guiding interests of the respective elements of the collective authorial agency become more obvious. Despite the first effect’s emphasis of surreptitiously steering and therefore actively authoring the respective text, the second consequence associated with Statement of Facts nevertheless ‘kills’ the necessity for individual authentication of the issued material once again. This becomes evident in the authorial subject Vanessa Place, that is somehow involved in the composition of the pre-text, vanishing into the compositional mass of contributors and hiding behind the institutional screen of the defense, and that then reappears with the literary translocation of the parts of the brief in Tragodía. As a paratextual cue on the book’s front and back covers, the reader accepts ‘Vanessa Place’ as the authorial institution providing him or her with the material at hand, and he or she learns of the biological person’s dual allegiances as lawyer and poet (see again SoF’s back cover). Yet what remains of the

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compositional originality the reader may expect from a work of poetry is not the individual authorial subject, held fully accountable for the material and the form in which it is presented, but the abstract instance that realizes a mainly constructive principle, a programmatic constraint that puts the uncreative template of NeoConceptualist appropriation into practice. As with Goldsmith’s appropriation of the newspaper material to question journalistic working methods and codes of honor, the ethical dimension of radical appropriation – stealing text from an identifiable individual source – has, in Place’s work, shifted from questions of authorship (as ownership) to those concerning what is appropriate to be appropriated. Confronted with the factual cases of violent sexual assault and the straightforward presentation of barely edited material from the appellate brief, the reader is constantly torn between this cold matter-of-factness and a tempting narrative. The appropriated legal documents can, in the end, neither be identically related to the creative source of an individual authorial subject nor unambiguously disconnected from the presented cases and details of rape in an LA courtroom with ‘real’ victims, witnesses, and perpetrators. After Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘uncreative’ appropriation of journalist material, the détournement in Statement of Facts unmasks yet another domain of writerly exercise: legal protocols, and, more specifically, appellate briefs. The formal material, on the one hand, is meant to provide the ruling agents in court with plain, easy, neutral, and sober language with which to determine what is susceptible to proof, true or at least most probable, and just. The seized material, on the other hand, casts complex doubt on the sincerity and validity of this language, since it is revealed as subject to manipulation by jurisdictional parties with specific interests. Therefore, this Neo-Conceptualist specimen reveals the forced direction of opinion in the pre-text’s functional environment of law – i. e. the passing of judgment on good and evil, right and wrong, guilt and innocence. The literary phenomenon of strategic plagiarism, in this way, is charged with an additional level of negotiating writerly ethics way beyond authorship and literary theft.

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3.3.3 Appropriate and Erase: Yedda Morrison’s Darkness (chapter 1) (2009) Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, holds tight his expressions, terminates a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. (de Lautréamont 1984 [1870]: 59; my translation)²³⁸

While Neo-Conceptualist practices of appropriation within Goldsmith’s Day and Place’s Statement of Facts aim at translocating collectively penned functional language of the everyday to literary territory, the work of US/Canadian artist Yedda Morrison marks a return to distinct, identifiable pre-texts with a presiding individual authorial agency. With respect to both her visual and textual practice, her engagement with issues of originality, second-order art, and contested authenticity deals with particular authors, works, and genres. It again addresses canonicity, literary sustainability, and the implications of both for literature as a free-market commodity. With regard to these elements, this concluding case study goes in two directions: on the one hand, it is a return to contesting individually authored and acknowledged textual entities and authorial subjects via literary poaching – as with Playgiarism and ConText; on the other hand, it shows an extension of Neo-Conceptual paradigms, accomplished with constraint and code leveling, with respect to the materiality and concreteness of the linguistic signifier. The following case study commences with a selective introduction to Morrison’s œuvre to date. This becomes especially necessary because no comprehensive (scholarly) literature or analysis is yet available.²³⁹ In this introduction, however, I am focussing on a selection from her visual and literary works relevant for situating the hybrid artwork Darkness (chapter 1) from 2009. After a comprehen-

 “Le plagiat est nécessaire. Le progrès l’implique. Il serre de près la phrase d’un auteur, se sert de ses expressions, efface une idée fausse, la remplace par l’idée juste.”  As of December 2013, the MLA listed a single scholarly essay that featured Morrison in the context of new materialist poetry in the tradition of William Carlos Williams. ‘Materialist’ refers “to poets who are emerging from the tradition of post-modern semiotic theory but who are staging, in highly variable ways, tactical returns to socio-economic realms that postmodern theory has tended to treat as unknowable or barred from representation” (Nickels 2006: 36). A short podcast by the Poetry Foundation in 2010 on “Poetry Written with an Eraser” reviewed Darkness (chapter 1) and included illustrating comments from Morrison. Her work is also featured in Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) and the crowd-funded anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (2012), edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Brown, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place. Otherwise, coverage of her work takes place with Carmody and Place’s Les Figues Press and events, for example, the project series “Not Content” (since June 2010) on language experiment in private and public spheres (see Les Figues 2011).

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sive review of the manner in which Darkness appropriates, the following remarks will discuss the work in comparison with its singular pre-text, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (2007 [1902/1899]; HoD).²⁴⁰ Morrison’s conceptual reworking of Conrad’s novella is constituted by a synthesis of appropriation and erasure that may be viewed as a concluding variety of Neo-Conceptualist plagiarist practice. Morrison’s “image-based projects,” as they are referred to on the artist’s website (see Morrison 2011), suggest a profound interest in modes and patterns of re-production and in exploring the illusory stability of the artwork’s surface, both with respect to its material and idealized integrity, and to the process preceding this supposed wholeness and perfection. The project Bioposy from 2007, for example, consists of several color scans of artificial plants with plasticized natural elements built into arranged still lifes. These pieces provoke a number of questions concerning the naturalness of simulated organisms and the forged longevity of flowers, leaves, and fruit. The images are particularly reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings, in that the arrangements depict a structural homology: against an absorbing dark background the viewer perceives a contrast between the both intimate and gloomy setting and the luminous, natural-artificial objects in the foreground. Upon closer inspection, the objects’ inorganic quality becomes fully apparent: the viewer spots an ‘unnatural’ immaculacy in the arrangement and the color of the petals, and is unable to ignore, for example, the fearful symmetry of an all-too-delicate twig. With the pre-text of Dutch still lifes in mind, one might identify in the work an interest in unmasking the pre-text’s concern in the composition of objects for the sake of a detailed observation; yet Morrison’s images simultaneously manage to subvert this composition, revealing the pre-text’s ambition to perfectly deceive human perception: the mimetic ideal of transferring a natural object (e. g. a lemon) to the cultural art discipline of still-life painting (the two-dimensional representation of a lemon) encounters a twist in the realistic portrayal of a plastic, epigonic variant, a variant that is already a simulation of the ‘real thing.’²⁴¹

 Initially written from 1898 to 1899 for Blackwood’s Magazine as “The Heart of Darkness,” the copy-text used for the ensuing analysis is based on the first English collection in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (with “Youth” and “The End of the Tether,” 1902). The text cited here was released with Penguin Classics in 2007 and contains only minor corrections to match the series’ standards of style (see Hampson 2007: xlii–xlvii).  In some scans, the display of artificial nature goes as far as the depiction of the anatomy of these fake objects with the inclusion of plastic stems, visible wires, and plug devices that guarantee the arrangements’ stability, desired proportions, and durability (see Morrison 2007: 4/10, 7/10, 9/10).

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Scanning the truly inanimate plastic lemon accentuates the natural model’s liveliness in the pre-text, thereby calling attention both to the materiality of the items portrayed and the materiality of the media portraying them.²⁴² With Bioposy, the viewer experiences both the defamiliarization of the seventeenth-century painting genre and an actualization of what can be defined as ‘natural’ and ‘artificial,’ an aspect that also informed the exhibition’s title of “nature & autres anomalies” in Montreal. As a renegotiation of this binary by means of material appropriation and tangible, i. e. replicable, erasure, Darkness (chapter 1) relates to the aspect of alienation of and from the natural world. ReGenesis, from 2010, is another example of the artist’s propensity to create ‘second-hand’ modes of conceptual art. The work consists of photographic scenes of a legal mass production of fake paintings – the originals are housed in St. Petersburg’s distinguished Hermitage Museum. These reproductions are works commissioned by collectors and painted by a collective of anonymous surrogate artists. The second-hand artists provide their customers with an – unsigned – exact replica of one of the exhibition’s masterpieces.²⁴³ Although reminiscent of Sherrie Levine’s notorious Appropriation Art work “After Walker Evans” (1980),²⁴⁴ the images of the ReGenesis series follow a different route: the viewer is, first of all, confronted only with fragments of the copies of the master paintings; second, as these fragments still contain penciled sketches of a sailing ship, for example (see Morrison 2010: 3/17), they are marked as decidedly unfinished. The photographs document the process of forging the original rather than the eventual product; third, the photographs are disrupted by the inclusion of the anonymous copyist’s hand, holding a paintbrush in action, often supported by a painting stock meant to prevent the painter from accidentally smearing wet color; and, finally, it is not the authorial subject Morrison that takes the pictures shown in her exhibition because the motifs derive from the websites of the anonymous artists or their retailers.

 Early still-life painting aims at representing the tidy arrangement of objects by means of elaborate and time-consuming handiwork, while the digital scanning method of Bioposy is a ‘truthful’ reproduction of objects in reach of the device’s visual sensor, which samples the recognized silhouettes, contours, and color scheme, and converts this information to digital form.  The exact sources for ReGenesis are not given. Similar offers can be found online with, for instance, ArtsHeaven.com, which advertises, “[o]wn a Masterpiece today… museum quality 100 % hand-painted oil painting reproductions” (see 2011: n.pag.), or Artwork Only, where prospective customers can search a database ordered by artist, movement, topic, collection, or museum (including St. Petersburg’s Hermitage).  The ‘second-hand’ artist Levine re-photographed iconic images of the Burroughs, a sharecropper family in Depression-era Alabama, from Evans’ exhibition catalog with only the paratextual reference (the title) marking the image’s context and derivative character.

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The photographs are thus instances of authentication that document the paintings’ coming-into-being, adding an additional layer to this second-hand practice, namely that of third-hand imagery: the mode of production shifts from the original painting by a famous artist, to the professional reproduction of the unnamed second-hand artist, to the equally anonymously produced photograph, to the environment of the ReGenesis exhibition, which finally constitutes the institutional frame for Morrison’s work.²⁴⁵ ReGenesis invites a thirdorder observation of the documentation of a mimetic reproduction of a portrait/landscape/history piece that is considered original, yet that is also still stuck in its own mode of mere representation and approximation. In sum, the project emphasizes and documents the processuality of art: first, by having the viewer witness not only the self-contained product of a signed painting (as accessible, for instance, in the Hermitage), but the viewer also confirms the proficiency of the brushstrokes and color schemes, the image depth and saturation, thereby appreciating the craftsmanship of meticulous forgery; secondly, this processuality is emphasized with the inclusion of this crafts(wo)man’s (anonymized) physical presence. Morrison’s approach disintegrates the pre-text’s insularity, requiring the viewer of the photographs to partake in the imitative exercise that simultaneously testifies to the non-industrial conduct (‘hand-made’). What ReGenesis reveals is a second- or even third-handedness, both with respect to the artist of the ‘pre-text’ – for example Franz Kruger with his portrait of Alexander Arkadyevich Suvorov (1851) (see St. Petersburg State Hermitage Museum 2011: n.pag.; Morrison 2010: 16/17) – who is imitated by anonymous painters on commission, and with respect to the faithful replica that allows the collector to own a copy for $3,800.²⁴⁶ Although unsigned and therein unauthenticated this copy bears the mark of skilled craftsmanship and artistic labor. The project raises issues of authenticity and authorship against the backdrop of a commodified industry of ‘fakes’ that both democratize art, in terms of facilitating access to it and ownership, and still hold on to the widespread narrative of accepted canonicity – the desire to pretend that one is in the presence of an acknowledged masterpiece or, as a collector, to feign ownership oneself. With respect to Morrison’s “text-based projects” the volume Crop, published in 2003 with Kelsey Press, is of particular interest. Four fragments, part-poetry, part-

 This last point relates as well to the fact that material may be mined more simply in a digital environment, as the digital generally employs data of a virtually identical quality to guarantee the code’s (that of language and audio-visual material alike) operation.  The cost of $3,800 is given by Morrison herself (see 2010: ‘statement’), the similar offerings listed above charge between $150 and $900 depending on the requested size, canvas quality, and general demand.

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prose, address, among other things, the crucial and burdened relationship between the natural environment and human intervention, here through the mechanized cropping business and the general functionalized exploitation of nature and human labor alike: the reader is faced with a purely utilitarian experience and discovery of nature, when “in dark wet / pickers stumble / Crop waits just ahead” (2003: 6), with “nostalgia blubbering at the freshly plucked trees” (ibid. 24), and he or she learns “how / bodies / boil / down / to / purpose” (ibid. 55). As Joel Nickels describes new materialist poetics, to which he considers Morrison’s Crop to belong: “[they] examine the realm of production, not just the realm of exchange; the realm of institutional violence, not just the realm of linguistic negotiation, the realm of bodies and work, not just the circulation of images” (2006: 36– 37). Crop concerns itself with these bodies and work’s reduction to ‘purpose,’ to the merely productive value that culture assigns to nature. In the poems, one may view, for instance, cherry orchards and corn fields or depersonalized farming, and an exploitation of resources that is unmasked as simply maintaining a system of capital lacking both purposeful object and lasting significance. Building upon Bioposy’s meditation on the artificiality of nature and the naturalness of the fake by inter alia calling upon art historical pre-texts – seventeenth-century still lifes – Crop documents the exploitation of the natural environment and human labor alike, depicting the cultivation of the former as turning ‘plants’ into ‘crops’ to be harvested. Thus the pivotal themes and motifs of Morrison’s selected works include an extensive interest in the nature-culture divide, and the materiality and texture of the respective ‘text,’ as well as a processual element that the viewer or reader is invited to trace. All three examples already bear elements of the appropriative approach, and Darkness (chapter 1) integrates these in critically challenging a single canonical literary source, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. The following analysis of Darkness (D) will answer crucial questions with respect to the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of the pre-text’s appropriation, the type and extent of alteration to the text, as well as the Neo-Conceptualist implications that both inform this case study and are informed by it. In wrapping up the investigation of sample texts exploring literary plagiarism as a form of radical appropriation and the ensuing differentiation between Critifiction/Playgiarism, ConText, and Neo-Conceptualism, I will comment on the function of the authorial subject Morrison as an agent of mediation and translation in the hybrid space between literary and visual art. What is basically plagiarized, and consequently what qualifies Darkness for inclusion in the analysis, is the first chapter, or ‘part I,’ of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the pre-text, this structural entity is comprised of a frame narrative related by an unnamed narrator who, along with the rest of the party, is

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aboard a pleasure cruise on the river Thames. The party’s members reminisce about Britain’s eminent role in the colonial enterprise. This leads the now focalized Charles Marlow to recount his journey to the Congo as a young captain for a Belgian “Company” (see HoD 9). The chapter, furthermore, covers the signing of his contract in Belgium (see HoD 11– 14), the journey down the African coast to the mouth of the Congo River (see HoD 15 – 17), the examination of the decaying and inefficient Company’s Outer Station (see HoD 17– 23), Marlow’s attempt to repair the sunken ship he was supposed to command from the Central Station (see HoD 25, 33 ff.), the gradual decline of the others’ and his own physical and mental disposition, and, finally, his increasing preoccupation with the missing ivory trader Kurtz (see HoD 30 – 37).²⁴⁷ Despite exhibiting the most concrete appropriation of the novella’s first part, the ensuing question of how this textual entity is appropriated explodes the notion that the text may have been plagiarized verbatim. Morrison’s version consists of a scan of a book edition of the pre-text’s manuscript against a black background framing the text – Darkness (chapter 1), therefore, at first instance qualifies as a literal copy of the pre-text as it (or similar editions) are available as a commodified whole. The mode of reproduction, via scanning, is, furthermore, emphasized by the surrounding black margins. These suggest a reference to the preceding process of mechanically capturing the objects to be scanned, a process that usually leaves these sorts of visual residues, of unwanted peripheries, on the desired document (see Fig. 13).²⁴⁸ This appropriation of the material surface of the preceding literary source takes not only the form and content of Conrad’s chapter into account, but also the layout of his words on the physical page. Thus the scanned manuscript has the effect of a partial facsimile. The facsimile character already refers to the pretext’s material preciousness and cultural value, as well as the implications to archive, document, and preserve it in order to facilitate access and handling. The duplicate of Darkness, which is available as a digital PDF file (for free), as a first as The appropriation of Conrad’s novella belongs to a tradition of popular adaptations, including Orson Welles’ version for radio broadcast in 1938 and, as a customized allegory of the Vietnam War in the Cambodian hinterland, the movie Apocalypse Now (1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola.  With the tail edges and the shadow fold of the book scan showing no disturbing visual marks whatsoever, the arrangement may as well be photoshopped by Morrison, thus merely creating the illusion of, or imitating, an ‘original’ copy of the novella. This disclaimer serves to highlight the ambiguity that arises with Darkness’ materiality. Yet despite the unconfirmable doubts with respect to the edition’s existence, the following remarks attend to the literary thought figure of ‘as if,’ and thereby acknowledge the scanning method (or the illusion thereof) as part of Darkness’ conceptual project.

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Figure 13: The first double page of Darkness (chapter 1)’s main body (D 11)

pect of appropriation, abducts the words and ideas of the pre-text by means of virtual text/image processing, and therein changes the pre-text’s materiality from the bound paper book to the flexible language of digital code.²⁴⁹ Conrad’s text is turned into an image and an imitation of literature’s published surface, the commodity of the purchasable book. The reader experiences a sense of irritation regarding the facsimile’s interest in faithful reproduction and conservation, initiating a playful discussion of the significance of authenticity and literary sustainability.²⁵⁰ The reproduction of an identical edition of Conrad’s ‘Part I,’ taken with the notion of facsimile and the attending qualities of ‘faithfulness,’ ‘trueness to the original,’ and ‘lasting significance,’ establish the material frame for Morrison’s appro Apart from the no-cost download, Darkness is also accessible in a print-on-demand hardcopy from Little Red Leaves/Lulu.com, in black-and-white or color, for the cost of production.  Here the text-turned-image shift echoes the effects of the plastic flower still lifes of Bioposy and the anonymous reproductions-in-progress of ReGenesis.

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priation. In a second step, and building on these qualities, Darkness makes significant alterations to the manuscript. These changes concern issues of limiting selection, paratextual framing, and the actual methodical endeavor of censoring erasure. The first interventionist step occurs with Morrison’s selection of the first two, paratextual pages of the manuscript (see D 11) and the first 50 pages of the novella’s main body that are, in Conrad’s work, identified as ‘part I.’²⁵¹ The paratext, first of all, includes a modification of the title, with ‘Heart of’ erased, and with the addition of ‘Chapter 1’ to designate the shift from Heart of Darkness’ textual identity to that of the appropriative work (see Fig. 13). Below the modified title, a new epigraph reads: “re-animating the pre-colonial wilderness: / a biocentric reading of Joseph Conrad’s / Heart of Darkness // yedda morrison / fall 2008” (D 11; my emphasis). As apparent in Fig. 13, this epigraph, on the one hand, attempts to blend in with the surrounding writing, as it imitates the sans-serif font of the manuscript’s typesetting. On the other, however, the reader perceives the insert as alien, as a woven-in cue that demonstrates Darkness’ secondary nature. This anomaly informs the reader about the quality of the following pages, and about the conceptual patterns as a whole: Darkness attempts to ‘re-animate’ an ideal “pre-colonial” state, “wilderness,” that the pretext depicts as obviously damaged by the colonial invaders’ quest for natural resources (ivory), violent subjugation (enslavement of Congolese natives), and, in Marlow’s endeavor, the discovery of Kurtz. In order to accomplish this ‘re-animation,’ the epigraph provides the reader with the desired quality of the project’s method of appropriation and erasure – “biocentric.” This includes a singling out and exposition of the bios, the organic properties of the semantic environment of the pre-text. Already prefiguring the first instances of erasure (see Fig. 13), the title’s elimination of ‘Heart of’ heralds the vast extent of code to be censored in the main body of the pre-text. The ‘heart’ thus designates both the human body’s central engine and the metaphorical impact of the ‘innermost,’ which comprises the final destination of Marlow’s journey and humanity in general. The implied practice of “reading” in the epigraph, as a last point, both emphasizes the contrast to the post-colonial stratagem of re-writing canonized Western works and the ensuing ambiguity of reading as both passive (receptive mode) and active (erasing the semantic ánthropos from the text) agency.

 The main body of Darkness’ manuscript ends with the beginning of ‘part II,’ since it is located on the same page as the last lines of ‘part I.’ To be precise, Morrison’s scan thus breaks off midway through a paragraph (see D 36). [With respect to Darkness’ missing pagination, the page numbers referenced in this case study are my decision, starting with the first black page of the printed edition and numbering all the way through to Morrison’s closing statement on page 37.]

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This erasure, already, points towards aspects of post-humanism that imply “a new emphasis on the mutual interdependence of material, bio-cultural and symbolic forces in the making of social and political practices” and that motivate “a reconsideration of the concept of subjectivity in terms of ‘life-force’” (Braidotti 2007: n.pag.). While Braidotti rejects the “gloomy and pessimistic vision” of Foucault’s bio-power and Agamben’s ‘bare life’ (see ibid.), the difference between bios and zoe is maintained. Morrison’s “biocentric” reading of Conrad’s anthropocentric text focuses on the separation of the two to “confront[…] the thinkability of a Life that may not have ‘me’ or any ‘human’ at the centre […],” declaring this to be “a sobering and instructive process” (ibid.). The epigraph as a paratextual cue prepares the reader for the “sobering and instructive” experience of the “positivity of zoe” (ibid.).²⁵² Apart from the paratextual clues provided in Darkness, and before addressing the main body’s erasure treatment, the inclusion of further visual material presents additional modifications to the pre-text. Darkness features two photographs (see D 7, 9) that precede the scanned pages of Conrad’s chapter, as well as an illustrating statement of the images (see D 37), framing the main body of the text (see D 12 – 36). These photographs are taken from Morrison’s 2009 image-based project “pre-colonial forest” (see Morrison 2009b: 1/3, 2/3) and display a before-and-after forest scene. The first image (see D 7) is a reproduction of an early black-and-white silver salt photograph by William Notman, titled “Around the Campfire, Caribou Hunting Series” (1866), and it depicts five men next to a tent in a forest clearing, with large snowshoes and smoked fish as additional decorative elements.²⁵³ The features of the photograph constitute a Canadian hunting scene that communicates the mastery of nature in general and the life-sustaining utilization (or exploitation) of the environment associated with the hunt for caribou in particular. It thus provides a visual analog to Conrad’s turn-of-the-century novella. The moment of erasure arrives with the second photograph (see D 9), which presents the authorial subject interference with Notman’s image. All human el Although Morrison’s epigraph qualifies the reading as particularly “biocentric,” here I read the use of the term ‘bios’ as Life untainted by human intervention and the exercise of sovereign power.  A rare exception to the rule, this visual appropriation demands no archaeological quest for its source. The photograph is referenced both in the project on Morrison’s website and as the photograph’s caption in Darkness (see D 7). William Notman, a Scottish-born photographer, who moved to Montreal around the middle of the nineteenth century, was awarded the title “Photographer to the Queen” for his detailed documentation of the construction of the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence River. He later became known for establishing a nation-wide network of branch studios to accommodate increasing demands for photographic images (see e. g. Triggs 1985; Triggs, Dodds, and Hall 1993).

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ements – the men themselves and their artificial tools – have disappeared. They have been virtually removed from the thus far merely ornamental surrounding of the forest through careful photomontage. In analogy to Darkness’ main body of text, we witness an erasure of the intruding force of human culture, i. e. the previously focalized individuals. It is an erasure that eliminates in equal part the cultural techniques of hunting (fish, caribou, snowshoes), fire usage (camp fire), and shelter-building (tent) as the forceful conquest and occupation of the natural environment. This obliteration of the human elements in the scene foreshadows the ensuing textual renegotiation of a work that addresses the imperial subjugation of the African continent.²⁵⁴ The framing photographs and the closing statement by the authorial subject Morrison illustrate the comprehensive amalgamation of appropriation – an image/literary text by an individual source (Notman/Conrad) – and erasure in getting rid of those intrusive elements in the scenery generally identified with the ‘human’ as disturbing “the recurrent essentializing mythology of wilderness itself” (D 37). Thus the images foreshadow the analogous exercise of the main text, and are crucial paratextual elements in the work’s interpretation and “biocentric reading.” When it comes to the erasure of human signifiers and agency from the pretext, the reader is first confronted with the preoccupation of this constraining practice with the materiality and semantics of language. An essential feature in the Neo-Conceptual variant of erasure poetry that draws heavily on the concept of constraint refined by European Oulipo (see chapter 2.2.3), it is imperative here to “admit that language may be treated as an object in itself, considered in its materiality, and thus freed from its subservience to its significatory obligation” (Benabou 1986 [1983]: 41).²⁵⁵ With this in mind, the language of Heart of

 As the deliberately arranged leaves and twigs on the ground in Notman’s photograph already suggest, and the frame-closing statement by Morrison eventually confirms, the reader learns that the setting, from the outset, is not a contemporary in-situ depiction that serves as an authentic record of trapper life in the wilderness: “the forest in the original image is itself a fabrication, completely constructed by William Notman and his assistants in studio” (D 37). With this knowledge, the simulation of an authentic scene ‘around the campfire’ and the mastery of nature is linked to the artificiality of human action with, for example, the ornamental effect of wilderness in museums of natural history.  Just as the conceptual practices of appropriation arising around the turn to the twenty-first century share certain features with mid-twentieth century movements, the variant of ‘erasure poetry’ also acknowledges its forerunners. In the 1970s, writers such as Ronald Johnson and Tom Philips used techniques of deletion, such as blacking, erasure, and strike-through, on published works and re-published these ‘remixes’ as chapbooks or photocopies. Other contemporary examples of erasure include Travis Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo (2009), using the official

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Darkness is first and foremost attended to on a material level. Before the visual reproduction of Conrad’s edition via scanning, the text is meticulously edited and physically altered. In carefully applying whiteout fluid on the paper, or at least convincingly creating the illusion of doing so, the reader is exposed to another, similar process of elimination, namely of all signifiers denoting human presence, agency, intervention, and consequence.²⁵⁶ The extensively whitened-out passages (see Fig. 13 and 14) immediately invite associations with the blacking-out procedure of censorship: what is eliminated in this manner is usually of scandalous and contestable quality and concerns classified information requiring sanitization and redaction. Its visible revisionism obscures the form and content of the linguistic signs while simultaneously retaining the mark of their prior presence. In Darkness, this absence/presence simultaneity involves the underlying notion of language that belongs to and coconstitutes the narrative structure of Heart of Darkness. The material censoring of Conrad’s chapter with the application of whiteout fluid produces four effects: first, the eliminated passages fade into the similarly colored background of the book page; this is an effect that, secondly, heightens the contrast of the remaining linguistic signifiers, in black ink, thus bringing them to the fore; concerning the instances of sanitizing and editing, the method of whitening, third, appeals to an interest in compensating, correcting, and counteracting the language and narrative in the pre-text. Finally, the whitening, which largely affects longer paragraphs (see e. g. D 17, 19, 20, 25, 28, 30, 33, 36), creates the impression of ‘white noise,’ with often only one to five words remaining on a page.²⁵⁷ With regard to the material aspect of erasure by means of account of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), Jen Bervin’s The Desert (2008) which took a sewing machine to John Van Dyke’s The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (1901), and, probably best known, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010) using The Streets of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (for the latter see H. Wagner 2010). For surveys of historical and contemporary erasure poetry see e. g. Macdonald (2009a); Ruefle (2010); Silliman (2010).  The impression of whiteout fluid arises as the white color almost, but not quite, blends with the yellowed background of the book’s paper. Furthermore, the edges of the dried marks are jagged, pointing to the uneven application of the correction fluid with a small brush. It has to be conceded, however, that just as the scanning of the pre-text’s material edition may only be imitated with the use of an image editing program, the whiteout effect may also represents a mere illusion.  In the podcast “Poetry Written With an Eraser” (see Silliman 2010), the reviewer characterizes the few remnants left by the erasure method as “one or two words floating like an island on the page” (ibid. n.pag.), evoking an image of pristine nature and emphasizing the signifiers of black ink over the surrounding ‘sea’ of whitened-out humankind. The white-noise image suggested above highlights these waves of missing ‘culture,’ depicting the background noise as peacefully absent and annoyingly present.

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whitening, the modification of the appropriated pre-text, in a first step, removes the physical presence of language. Yet it does so by leaving equally material traces of the process. The reader must wonder about the implications and interpretive consequences of these visible marks. Shifting from these material phenomena and ramifications to the semantic level, the whitening, first and foremost, breaks up the narrative consistency of Conrad’s first chapter. The progress on the story level – the unnamed narrator’s account of the Thames trip, the passengers gliding “in the august light of abiding memories […] with reverence and affection […] to evoke the great spirit of the past” (HoD 4), or, later, the journey to the Congo – is entirely obscured behind the white curtain of the censoring fluid. As a consequence, a revision, or even frustration of the readerly yearning for the symbolic story about the mendacity of imperialism and concluding madness takes place. The reader’s expectations regarding the frame story of the novella are as thwarted as his or her anticipation of Conrad’s impressionist prose, reknowned for creating a dense sense of place, for example in the opening scene on the Nellie (see HoD 1– 5). After the descriptors of human action are erased from the manuscript, we experience a variety of losses: gone, first and foremost, is the guiding unnamed narrator of the frame narrative on the river Thames; the reader, furthermore, is denied relevant information regarding time (e. g. the character’s flashback to the colonial heydays), space (on the pleasure steamer Nellie), the storyline, and characterization, all of which serves to focalize the former captain Charles Marlow, “the only man of us who still ‘followed the sea’” (HoD 5). The method of erasure in Darkness not only cancels out obvious notions of ‘culture,’ i. e. the ‘human factor’ and its transforming force, but it also disposes of narrative agency within the novella. Darkness lacks an intratextual agency that exercises control over the synchronic and diachronic progress of the linguistic signs, that configures narrative events and obtains a high degree of ‘tellability’ (see e. g. Bruner 1986: 13 – 14; Ryan 1991: ch. 8).²⁵⁸

 Bruner considers tellability (and experientiality) indispensible for the narrative: “[Narrative] strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. […] [A] story must construct two landscapes simultaneously. One is the landscape of action, where the constituents are […] agent, intention or goal, situation, instrument […]. The other landscape is the landscape of consciousness: what those involved in the action know, think, or feel, or do not know, think or feel. […] Indeed, it is an invention of modern novelists and playwrights to create a world made up entirely of the psychic realities of the protagonists, leaving knowledge of the ‘real’ world in the realm of the implicit” (1986: 13 – 14). At least on the level of Bruner’s ‘action-landscape,’ the demands for a ‘story’ realized through the narrative instance are profoundly disappointed in Darkness.

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Due to the disruption of the narrative and for the removal of elements essential to its constitution, a profound change in the formal and functional literary genre occurs, i. e. from narrative prose to free-verse poetry. In the following passage from the pre-text, in which Marlow has left Belgium on his “French steamer” (see HoD 15 ff.), he gives an account of the passing scenery on the West African coast: The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Here and there grayish-whitish specks showed up, clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps. (HoD 15)

In Darkness, the whitening process has left behind only 19 words from a passage that at first glance depicts the ‘natural’ coastline of the colonized territory:

Figure 14: Screen shot of the corresponding passage in Darkness (D 21)

The signifiers such as “jungle,” “white surf,” and “greyish-whitish specks” remain as the narrative’s leftovers and are exposed and emphasized by the dried pools of censoring fluid. Yet they are not unaffected: their final arrangement on the page refigures them as superficially disconnected elements of a free-verse poem, calling up the pristine topography of the waves’ surge against a shoreline and adjoining tropical wilderness. It is a wilderness purged of anthropomorphization (“ran straight, like a ruled line,” “[t]he sun was fierce”),

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grammatical coherence (“glitter was blurred by the creeping mist”), or illustrative comparisons (“dark-green as to be almost black,” “land seemed to glisten and drip with steam”), and of all narrative glue and gloss. The building up of the jungle scenery through the ‘lyrical I’ is rendered associative in the unrhymed vers libre, freed of narrative patterns and attending readerly expectations.²⁵⁹ In refiguring the text as a free-verse poem, the remaining signifiers testify to the functional shift from a coherent narrative, and fictional signs that guarantee the reader a coherent storyline, to the supposedly dissociated fragments of ‘organic,’ or “biocentric” vocabulary. This new vocabulary directs the reader’s attention to the previously negligible, or at least merely ornamental, words. Altogether, the change in text type and genre quality through appropriation and erasure occurs with the manuscript’s cleansing of a ‘corrupted’ language from all human interference. From this exemplary comparison of the pre-text and its erased follow-up, a look at the form and quality of the remaining signifiers strengthens the impression of ‘clearing’ or, as already suggested by the epigraph, of “re-animating the pre-colonial wilderness.” With the whitening process following the conceptual constraint of retaining only those signs of the pre-text that are semantically associated with the natural environment, certain images emerge: color and light ranges from “luminous space,” “gloom,” “red cluster” (D 12) to “glowing white,” “dull red without rays,” “dark […] gold […] stream” (D 13) to “green flames, red flames, white flames” (D 15), representing remnants of Conrad’s impressionist diction; natural denotata such as “land,” “fire,” “river,” “earth,” “sun,” “sky,” “stars,” “sea,” “shores,” “moonshine,” “light,” “lightning,” “clouds,” “[s]andbank,” “marsh,” “fog,” “air,” “bush,” “flood” – here only extracted from two pages of Darkness (see D 14– 15) – underline the new role of the poem’s subjects; or vocabulary that heavily contrasts with the enlightened and dominating order of ‘culture’: “dark” and “darkness” (see e. g. D 12, 14– 16, 19, 21, 25, 28, 30, 33, 35),²⁶⁰ “wilderness” (see D 15, 21, 30, 36), or “shade” and “shadow” (see D 18, 22, 24, 27, 31) recall the gloomy unpredictability and unrest of the journey to

 This is not to say, however, that the lyrical quality is altogether detached from the structure: on the one hand, this organization is given with the underlying narrative structure of the pre-text (and with the particular arrangement of the words in the respective editions); on the other hand, the resulting poem’s form relies heavily on the extensive and rigid execution of erasures rooted in the conceptual rule to ‘delete all human interference.’ Thus narrative structure is broken up with this conceptual constraint.  ‘Darkness’ is, furthermore, included from pages 13 to 36 in the paratextual space of the manuscript’s header, while the title’s first two words, ‘Heart’ and ‘of,’ are whitened-out throughout.

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the ‘dark’ continent and the hubris of the colonial agents in ‘civilizing’ the ‘savage’ Africans in the pre-text.²⁶¹ A particularly conspicuous feature of Darkness is the complete absence of (inflected) verbs. Conveying a directed action or a state of being, this word class necessarily refers to a subject, a (human) agent, who ‘does something,’ who interferes with the surrounding environment, which is the subject’s to rule. The additional characteristics of (English) verbs of disclosing grammatical tense, indicating an action’s temporality, as well as the aspect of linguistic modality such as an action’s necessity or obligation, and the implication of voice (active or passive) are thus rendered obsolete.²⁶² In this absence, the movement from progressive prose to associative poetry is made more radical and the text purged of human (colonial) agency. As the preceding investigation has shown, the consequences of the appropriation-and-erasure strategy for the material aspect of Darkness reverberate on the semantic level. This is predominantly the case because the strategy operates as an interfering layer that eradicates the visual presence of language, while simultaneously highlighting its absence. As Travis Macdonald has suggested concerning another erasure poem, the whitening-out produces “a physical silence imposed upon the page” (2009a: n.pag.).²⁶³ The erasure process thus silences the disturbing noise of humans and their interventions and, more specifically, mutes the colonial endeavor communicated in the pre-text. The hubris and hypocrisy of colonialism and violent imperialism, as well as the allegorical expedi-

 Thus the censoring whiteout also returns to Marlow’s assessment when recalling the map of Africa sparking his voyage to the Congo: he had been fascinated by the idea of exploring the thus-far unsurveyed “blank spaces” (see HoD 8), undefined mysterious territory that, in Morrison’s process of erasure, is assigned to the signifiers designating the human (colonial) force in the pre-text.  Exceptions to this rule occur with inflected active and passive participles or adjectival present participles such as “brooding,” “running” (D 14), “uncoiled,” “curving” (D 16), “growing,” “rotting” (D 17), or “sprouting” (D 18). The quality of an action and its movement thus remain in the texture of Morrison’s text, and form something of an exception of the practice of constraint, while concurrently emphasizing the protean character of the conceptual practice: what counts as ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ is nonetheless subject to ever-changing conditions, coincidences, and decisions.  Macdonald, in his essay “A Brief History of Erasure Poetry” (2009a), provides selected case studies of early and contemporary erasure poems, including Jackson Mac Low’s “5.2.3.6.5, the 3rd biblical poem” (in 5 Biblical Poems, 1954– 1955; see Mac Low 1986: 17 ff.) and Ronald Johnson’s “Radi os” (1977) as an erasure project of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (1667).

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tion into the heart of the human interior,²⁶⁴ is muted, allowing the formerly marginalized or merely threatening pre-colonial nature to take center stage. By recalling Braidotti’s “vital politics,” which suggested the “positivity of zoe” within the epigraph, the “biocentric reading” promised takes full effect. Although the reader is reminded of the infamous binary opposition in Heart of Darkness (civilized colonizers vs. colonized savage), Morrison’s conceptual poetry is freed of the conflict in the pre-text: the erasure method exposes ‘darkness,’ ‘wilderness,’ and ‘shadow’ as denotata undisturbed by human agency, and therefore as detached from the human embodiment of ‘savagery’ and its primitivized natives. The reader may perceive this detachment as an emancipatory gesture that explodes the equation with indigenous people and life on the one side, and savagery and primitivism on the other. Another repercussion of this constraint emerges with respect to the uniformity of the erasures. The pre-textual residues in Darkness, namely the ‘natural signifiers,’ are present in equal measure in both halves of the text, on the Thames and in Belgium, as well as in the first descriptions of the African coast. In the beginning (see D 1– 15; HoD 3 – 15), the remaining signifiers are explicitly located in the frame narrative told from the deck of the Nellie and in Marlow’s account of his journey’s preparations; the extra-colonial aspects of the second part – the jungle, the stream, the surf – is that which Marlow takes in from the ‘dark’ continent he cooperates in ‘civilizing’ and exploiting. While the narrative of the pretext acknowledges this difference in the synchronic interrelations of ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ signifiers, the post-erasure text deletes these syntactic and semantic links. In doing this, it also levels the linguistic representation of the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ realms: despite the first part of the narrative taking place in the colonizers’ space, its natural remnants are not deemed more or less desirable than the ‘colonized’ natural elements of the second part.²⁶⁵

 For explication of the ever-popular psychoanalytic criticism on Heart of Darkness, which exposes Marlow’s psychological desire for Kurtz (the ‘Id’) and the Congo as a space of unconscious fear, see Bloom (1987); Crews (1975); Karl (1967); Murfin (1989).  This type of leveling may also be seen as ‘erasing’ the colonial experience of the Britons on British territory after being invaded by the Romans (50 BC) and, later, by Germanic tribes (500 AD). It is this analogous historical period of conquest and being conquered that Marlow refers to when he describes southern Britannia at that time as “one of the dark places of the earth” (HoD 5): “darkness was here yesterday. […] Imagine [a Roman commander] here – the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke […] going up this river with stores, or orders […]. Land in a swamp march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forests, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men” (HoD 6 – 7).

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The “biocentric reading” of Conrad’s pre-text, this combination of appropriation and erasure, results in the muting of the colonial project. It thus aligns itself with Morrison’s image-based project “pre-colonial forest,” which documents the reduction of Notman’s photograph to an unpeopled forest clearing. The glade in Darkness, for example, is evoked with the leftover signifiers “stars! / hillside, / blinding sunshine / hill, obliquely, / trees / sandpit, / hole” (D 23) and the depopulated narrative landscape of correction-fluid pools around them. Marlow’s ‘I,’ the primary agent of this passage, who, in the pre-text, surveys the portentous natural setting near the Company’s Central Station and judges a passing chain gang of black slaves as “strong, lusty, red-eyed devils” (HoD 19), has vanished, and what is left behind is only pristine nature.²⁶⁶ Yet the conceptual practice does not fully embrace its “biocentric” terms of constraint: just as Notman’s photographs depict an artificial setting that presents itself to the spectator as a natural, untouched environment (when in fact it is a man-made indoor set), the leftover scenery in Darkness likewise shows the relentless impact of human agency. The persistent human interference with the ‘natural’ signifiers may be seen in two features of the work – namely in terms of the ongoing representation of nature through language and in the work’s dependency on the decisions of an authorial subject. Nevertheless, the representation of pristine nature in Darkness occurs with the linguistic signifiers that are leftover from Heart of Darkness. In this process, the denotation of an unspoiled environment is utterly deceiving, since the perception of an ecosystem presupposes a necessarily cultural mode for fashioning these impressions, with language that always predates consciousness. Either

 At this point, the Euro-American perception of natives – both with the Canadian First Nation’s guide erased from the Notman photograph and the black chain gang erased from Conrad’s text – becomes pertinent. What is summoned in these works are the myths of the ‘noble savage’ (romanticizing indigeneity) and the ‘vanishing Indian.’ The latter especially has worked to justify the advance of the non-Native population and American progress, as well as a way to disregard the self-determination and autonomy of the indigenous population (see e. g. James Fenimore Cooper’s literary configurations of the myth in his The Last of the Mohicans [1826]; see also Ellingson [2001: 11– 20, 290 – 302]; LeBlanc [2003]; Swenson [2007: 119 – 150]). Compared to this romanticizing treatment both the erasure of the First Nation guide and of the black men held captive in the Congo show similarities in the manner in which they are edited from the image and manuscript. Yet I also see critical differences: the erasure process in Morrison’s projects abolishes the hegemonic branding of indigenous people as ‘First Nation’ and as depicted in enslaving chains, respectively; thus the attached characteristics of ‘savage’ and ‘uncivilized’ that the focalized Marlow asserts are done away with. Second, in the post-human stance taken by this erasure project, it is not only the hunters and colonizers who are eliminated, but everybody has to go.

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with the structuralist assumption of a sign constituting a meaningful entity based on linguistic convention or the deconstructionist notion of a sign as subject to the semantic dynamism of the free “play in the discourse” (see Derrida 1978 [1966]), the sign cannot evade the ideological paradigm of language. The leftover signifiers that constitute the linguistic islands in the sea of white-out noise in Darkness continue to be cultural traces, and their descriptiveness relies heavily on the conventionalized ‘tellability’ with and in language: “[W]e cannot do without the concept of the sign, for we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity” (ibid. 355). The deconstructionist claim that meaning is constantly deferred obstructs Darkness’ binary constraint to ‘preserve nature’ and ‘discard culture.’ This constraint holds on to the notion of presentability via language, the same language the pre-text employs to unravel an imperialist ideology and colonial master morality. Again, “there is no outside of the text,” nothing outside the modes of thinking and communicating in which we are embedded, nothing outside anthropocentric perception – the ‘sea,’ ‘wilderness,’ ‘coast,’ and ‘creeping mist,’ in the end, remain linguistic entities subject to convention and metaphysical determinism in language. This ‘culturality’ and linguistic overdetermination of the natural remnants in the erasure project, moreover, render the notion of what is considered ‘natural’ much more flexible, even if the reader buys into the conventionalized binary of ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ Many leftovers in Morrison’s work still denote human, or non-natural, agency: the homonymy of “weld” (D 12), “palms” (13), “lead” (14), “desert” (18) “project” (22), and “trunk” (24) raises doubts about the signifiers’ meaning, while other signifiers – “smoke” (14, 21), “wool” (18), “blind” (22), “violently” (23), or “avenging” (29) still connote human presence and ‘civilization.’ It is both the words’ own historicity and ambiguity, and their serious dependence on the individual reader’s deixis that corrupt the project.²⁶⁷

 Morrison partly accounts for these dynamisms, in that the performances of Darkness frequently embrace the individual readers’ perceptions of what counts as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’: in August 2010, for example, Les Figues Press, in their permanent series LACE, hosted a residency for Darkness, with the text of Conrad’s novella being painted on the gallery wall. Volunteers were asked to perform their own “biocentric readings” with ‘naturally’ varying results. In the context of this performance, Morrison described the project as “linguistically and formally isolating and spotlighting ‘wilderness’ on the landscape of the wall [with] volunteers […] explor[ing] the possibilities of a biocentric narrativity while participating in the construction of ‘nature’” (Les Figues 2010).

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In sum, the strategy of a single pre-text’s appropriation and partial erasure can be regarded as a Neo-Conceptualist practice that takes into account the literary work’s materiality as well as its semantics. With respect to the former, Darkness (chapter 1) is even more concerned with the physicality of the linguistic signifier already documented with Kenneth Goldsmith’s appropriation of a newspaper in Day. It does so by visibly transforming all signs into poetic icons – be those language as such, the image of the whitening bars, or the manuscript background. The practice of seizing text, in this last plagiarist case study, has finally carved out a space in-between literary writing and conceptual visual art. The latter, with synthetic Cubism, Surrealism, and Appropriation Art, already stands as a domain in which practices of poaching thrived throughout the twentieth century. The authorial subject Yedda Morrison assumes two central roles: that of the mediating translator, and that of the time-honored re-writer of the post-colonial tradition. Mediating between literature and visual art does not mean that elements of the art movements mentioned above simply find their way into the structure of the literary work (in analogy to montage, collage, or combines), its historical or discursive context, or its ethics. The elements are, rather, translated and applied in the literary environment, while, at the same time, acknowledging the medium’s material and historical idiosyncrasies. With respect to the materiality of Darkness, this application broadens the scope of what is taken into account in the first place: we cannot get around looking at the main text body and the title, the colophon, back cover reviews, the paper, or the publisher’s history. We have to equally consider individual letters, words, scanned whitening liquid, and the framing photographs of “pre-colonial forest.” Yet mediating and translating takes place not only with a view to literature’s straggling behind avant-garde painting and performance art, but also with an eye to the ever-changing production modalities that have arrived with the advent of the digital, modalities that continuously alter the ways in which we deal with form and content. The notion of a text’s virtuality, its temporary visibility rendered by invisible electronic impulses, calls for an understanding of language that embraces ‘presence-through-absence’ as its central figure of thought: Darkness realizes this absence in the erasing procedure by marking the colonial and human interference with sanitizing whitening fluid. The second function acquired by the authorial subject has to do with the literary tradition of post-colonial strategies of re-writing. Relating to concepts of hybridization and creolization, the seizing of the colonial power’s language works to challenge the cultural, here literary, legacy of colonialism and imperialism as negotiated in Joseph Conrad’s canonical novella Heart of Darkness. Darkness (chapter 1) attempts to resist by focusing on the margins, the neglected,

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thus adopting Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ (see Spivak 1987: 205) or a ‘third space’ (sensu Bhabha 1994: 35 – 39) as an alternative site for creativity and empowerment. The text acts out its invisible, or repressed, elements, which constitute a subaltern existence beneath the epistemic violence of colonialism. In Darkness, the ‘colonial’ signifiers are repressed (‘whitened’) and absent, yet still lurk beneath the surface. It is this simultaneous presence that shifts the dynamics of power within Heart of Darkness toward hybridity, thereby altering the authority of the pre-text. In this manner, the authorial subject ‘writes back’ in order to challenge and balance the nature-culture discourse, for the text tries to get rid of humans after all. Despite disregarding the culturality of language as such, Morrison extends the post-colonial discourse, which ‘writes back’ to the social fantasy of Western racial superiority, to the post-human criticism of hierarchical paradigms that privilege culture over nature. As the final case of an appropriation of a commodified text, Yedda Morrison’s Darkness (chapter 1) contributes a specimen to an examination of literary plagiarism that both relates the issue of textual authority in literary plagiarism to analogous paradigms in the visual arts, and provides a selective view of the prospects for appropriation in an ever-changing medial environment.

4 Conclusion: The Present and Future of Strategic Appropriation in the Arts In this study, a selective range of salient structural, thematic, and programmatic features within postmodern and post-postmodern texts has constituted the three literary strategies of radical appropriation. This range has been examined against the backdrop of the commodification of literature and the critical paradigms of post-structuralism and deconstructionism. The five case studies have consequently served to validate aspects of appropriation that concern challenges to individual authorship, as well as the questioning of the uniformity and homogeneity of a text entity. These studies lend the strategies a historical perspective, demonstrating literary plagiarism not only as a phenomenon of a specific period, such as the ‘high’ postmodernism of the 1960s and 70s; rather, the texts studied here encompass practices of appropriation answering the relevant modes of literary production and technological paradigm shifts, as well as they realize the agendas’ attending specific strategies. All specimens have thus displayed a different programmatic quality. Double or Nothing, with its politics of (re‐)affirmation, propagates Critifiction/Playgiarism both as a text’s natural condition and an innovative way of imaginative text production. As a proto-postmodern case that displays an affinity for contemporary genres such as metafiction or New Fiction, it plays down the critical potential of writing by rather confirming philosophical thought (Nietzsche, Foucault) or operating in the tradition of literary predecessors (Beckett), while consistently blending, on both the levels of structure and content, the usually disparate categories of theory, language criticism, and fiction. In Empire of the Senseless, this plainly oppositional, avant-garde approach is replaced by an embracing of a marginality utterly conscious of the insuperability of metaphysical phallogocentrism. Despite this fatalistic predisposition, the female character Abhor acquires agency and literary subjectivity in the appropriation of canonical male texts that then become utterly exaggerated beyond conventionally acceptable limits. Acker’s ‘body writing’ corresponds to a violent sexual act in which the textual body is pierced and penetrated and in which pleasure is derived from the female protagonist’s masochist devotion to pain. The conscious suffering is thus considered indispensable for a feminist plagiarist practice, signifying a struggle for subjectivity within a framework that fundamentally impedes that signification. Following the case studies of Critifiction/Playgiarism and ConText, three samples have demonstrated and emphasized the claims made by Neo-Conceptualist appropriative writing. In Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, the reader encounters

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the method of uncreative constraint, which involves an appropriation of the entirety of linguistic signifiers and a translocation (détournement) from a non-literary pre-text – an issue of a newspaper – to a literary framework. Here, a leveling and dehierarchization of genre categories occurs, spawning both order and disorder as visually structured text entities are broken up and rearranged in chronological sequence. In line with this leveling, the vast amount of non-literary language is poeticized through a literary machine fuelled by the constraint of transcription. Through this mechanical processing of language, the authorial subject Goldsmith is instated as a melting point of previous textual entities and a multitude of known and anonymous writerly voices in The New York Times issue of September 1, 2000. With Statement of Facts, we see a détournement from the legal to the literary sphere that unmasks the narrative potential within, and structure of, a jurisdictional text type, the appellate brief. Here, appropriation exposes the absence of the culprit’s voice, thus drawing our attention to the prejudgmental quality of the briefs and the supposedly self-evident offender-victim dynamic within rape cases. Concluding these investigations, Darkness (chapter 1) marks a return to the radical appropriation of a literary pre-text, with Yedda Morrison’s approach focusing on the materiality of language and the nature-culture divide within literature. In this manner, the text continues the renegotiation of pre-texts evident in preceding case studies, while pointing towards an ongoing cross-fertilization between literary and visual art, as well. The wide range of postmodern plagiarism put into literary practice has validated the idiosyncrasies of the distinct strategies while raising several concerns, particularly with respect to a critique of linguistic representation and literary expressiveness. This critique predominantly involves the relentless appropriation and refashioning of previously contained and commodified text ascribed to an authorial subject, a subject made up of an eclectic mélange of (historical) authorial conceptions and configurations. As the case studies communicate the profound conditionality of creative production and the cooperating discourses within this production, in that “space of literary or artistic positiontakings [… and] struggles” (Bourdieu 1993 [1983]: 30; original emphases), they also reflect a systemic criticism against conventional modes of creativity, imagination, and originality. Yet these five examples have also demonstrated the fact that the voicing of this criticism and the suggestion of alternative ways for literary performance are utterly determined. Thinking post-structuralist paradigms through to the end, language and text, i. e. the building blocks of all of these specimens, never surpass the properties of their own condition. Double or Nothing, Empire of the Senseless, Day, and Statement of Facts all appropriate an inconceivable multi-

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plicity of authorial subjects from the pre-texts; the commodified texts investigated, however, bear the same or at least very similar attributes as their predecessors and the commonplace literary product on a franchise bookshelf – most of all, an author name bestowing an authorial reference on a textual entity. As these works do not, for example, do away with this monolithic center opting for a pseudonym or dropping the forms of functional reference altogether, these authorial subjects remain part and parcel of literature’s productive system and thereby draw attention to the conditionality of this system. Although this appears entirely inconsistent with the critical positions assigned to all three strategies, this mode can be regarded as immensely productive. In maintaining the authorial subject’s name in the respective literary commodity, my analysis has had to account for the authorial subject and its various functions in the first place. This ever-present parameter has proved crucial in locating and embedding the texts under scrutiny within their literary historical context, and has rendered the investigation of postmodern plagiarisms much more complex. Again, authorship as such did not disappear with the philosophical assassination of the auteur Dieu by Barthes, Derrida, and the like; and, of course, it also survived the attempts to eradicate it through appropriative practice. The criticism against the unilateral conception of a single creative and lasting authorial source, rather, has proved productive in suggesting a variety of additional and expanding author functions: the playgiarist bricoleur, the feminist avenger of marginalized subjectivity, and the Neo-Conceptualist keeper of a literary machine fuelled by constraint. As a complex sphere of interdependent developments, operations, and discourses, culture, like literary plagiarism, evades universal definition and exhibits its own non-essentialist character. Picking up on the conception of culture as a readable text in cultural anthropology (see e. g. Bachmann-Medick 1996; Geertz 1973), the complexity of culture allows for persistently competing (‘struggling’) processes over identity and meaning that are never fully accomplished, but constantly reread and reevaluated. According to de Man and other deconstructionists, we constantly mis-appropriate information, data, and knowledge to perform ‘strong readings’ of our cultural surroundings as momentary articulations of sense to which we might cling. The impact of appropriative writing at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, with respect to both multiple authorial subjects and open textures, can be assessed with several phenomena that also demonstrate the relevance of other forms of appropriation and that provide starting points for further research. In addition to the most recent examples classified as Neo-Conceptualism, contemporary developments in literature suggest the advance and refinement of alternative forms of authoring text: fan fiction, for in-

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stance, has emerged as a widespread mode of transmedia storytelling in which popular ‘texts,’ such as the Star Trek/Star Wars series, Jane Austen’s romance novels, and the Harry Potter novels are ‘continued’ in fanzines, video clips, or online forums.²⁶⁸ Ideas from pre-texts are usually adopted and adapted because readers want to prolong the canonical fictional universe, or because they are dissatisfied with certain aspects, like a character’s development or an irritating ending. Concerning the latter, a large part of these rewritings, prequels, and followups displays considerable changes to the respective pre-text or count as mildly reaffirming satires and parodies. The appropriation and alteration of these canonical texts has captured the interest of a mainstream audience with the success of Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), which reached number three on The New York Times’ bestseller list, as well as the popularity of multi-author online forums and communities where fans jointly develop and circulate their ideas. The former recipients of text, who have invested their “literature-specific human capital resources” (Tietzel 1995: 13; my translation) to realize the commodified pre-text, now assume authorial subjectivity. This shift ultimately amounts to an understanding that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes 1977 [1967]: 148). Transformative works like these hint at the creative potential of collaborative and cooperative authorship, a potential that has gained particular force in the environment of digital text management, which features net neutrality with a low access threshold and enables massive joint output. Another phenomenon that has seen considerable growth is analog text written by multiple authorial subjects. Here, a more or less equal participation and a share of expressive control in collaborative authorship beyond the established domains of academic research (especially in the natural sciences) become apparent. Q, a historical novel on sixteenth-century reformation movements and a counter-cultural parable for the protest movements during the 1960s, for example, was published under the popular pseudonym Luther Blissett in 1999.²⁶⁹ The collective succeeded for a long time in fooling the readerly public before four

 See e. g. Hellekson and Busse (2006), Pugh (2005), and the online forum Fanfiction.net, considered being the largest platform of fan fiction to date.  Since the mid-1990s, ‘Luther Blissett’ has been a popular multiple-use name or nom de plume used by artists and political activists to conceal their identities and promote a guerilla communication strategy (see Deseriis 2010). Other popular pseudonyms are Karen Eliot and Monty Cantsin.

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Italians were identified as the novel’s equal authors.²⁷⁰ They were able to defy exploitation through the literary market, refusing regular marketization in the form of author interviews, public readings, and portraits on the back cover, and thus exploded the myth of individual authorship deemed necessary for a multinational bestseller.²⁷¹ With regard to other arts, the challenge radical appropriation poses to authorial individualism and textual integrity is particularly apparent in popular music. Sampling as a technique for digitizing analog signals and manipulating them for further use, remixes that put an additional spin on already released songs, and bastard pop and mashups creating a pastiche from a minimum of two finished songs represent only the most familiar varieties of playful appropriation and manipulation of acoustic pre-texts. Drummer, composer and music critic Chris Cutler, in his essay “Plunderphonia,” points towards the naturalization of modes of appropriation in music: “plagiarism […] has today emerged both as a standard procedure and as a consciously self-reflexive activity, raising vexed debates about ownership, originality, copyright, skill and cultural exhaustion” (2004 [1994]: 138). Against the backdrop of promoted net neutrality, sound is just another form of accessible code in the public domain and therefore plunderable (see ibid.). As with theatrical production processes, music is much more based on collaboration and a blurring of inventive sources and texts than the exclusive individuality that is characteristic of the literary author and his or her commodified entity. Despite recurring allegations that shift the “vexed debates” on these modes of appropriation to the legal sphere, DJ culture and specific genres such as hip-hop have contributed to the widespread acceptance of derivative and transformative works without denying their creative and cultural value. The fast and easy processing and distribution of samples among a predominantly young audience of ‘digital natives’ in live settings or online facilitate appropriation in popular music. With these fundamental challenges to orthodox notions of creativity and authorship, economic and legal culture must also adapt accordingly. The last twenty years have seen a dramatic increase in the reinforcement of regulations concerning intellectual property. In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, since 1998), as well as the more recent attempts of the

 During this period of educated guessing, Umberto Eco was frequently named as the originator of the well-researched and elaborate novel. See e. g. Springer (2003).  After the publication of Q, the author collective re-named itself Wu Ming (‘no name’) and has continued to produce successful novels, movies, as well as social and political critical journalism.

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Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PIPA, both since 2011), criminalize the production and distribution of technologies and services that provide easy, though illegal access to code (music, movies, books). At the same time, services that promote access to and processing of free code – YouTube, Wikipedia, or Wikileaks, to name but a few – thrive and deepen the understanding of information management within a participatory culture. The increasingly divided debate has boiled down to a conflict between freedom of information and opinion, net neutrality and innovation in the digital environment on the one hand, and the enforcement and protection of intellectual property, commerce, and ultimately jobs on the other. Beyond the debates between advocates and opponents of a strict enforcement of Copyright, alternative modes for approaching intellectual property, such as Creative Commons, Copyleft, open source, etc., have formed to demonstrate that intellectual property rights may be negotiated in a number of ways. Law scholars such as Harvard professors Lawrence Lessig and Jack Goldsmith argue for basic ownership reform and the acknowledgment of an ever-changing cultural, technological, and medial environment in which producers and consumers can no longer be told apart. Lessig, in Free Culture, insists that “[t]here has never been a time in history when more of our ‘culture’ was as ‘owned’ as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now” (2004: 28). The naturalization of authorship as ownership and of plagiarism – Cutler’s “standard procedure” – further intensifies the already heated debates, especially as the ramifications of code in the digital environment become more and more visible and impossible to ignore. Although academic discourse touches upon the notion of ‘common’ plagiarism committed for personal gain or the prevention of negative consequences, textual theft in the academic sphere likewise invites discussions, especially surrounding writing processes and pedagogy. Teachers and scholars have to engage in the conversation on measures against student plagiarism, whether concerning a case of fraud or at least a deceitful attempt to earn an academic degree. This necessitates a discussion on the borders between bad writerly practice, ignorance, and cheating committed by a clientele that some media historians have identified as ‘digital natives’ (sensu Marc Prensky), i. e. as producers and consumers of text socialized with open source paradigms of free access and code flexibility.²⁷² If nothing else, the hysterical armament of educational institutions

 The term and concept ‘digital natives’ has been under attack by scholars of digital peda-

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with largely ineffective plagiarism software such as Turnitin or Ephorus shows that the solution will not lie in lopsidedly sanctioning misappropriation, but in suggesting progressive institutional and pedagogical measures that conform to a code of ethics without turning a blind eye to the ever-expanding media literacy of students (see e. g. Weber-Wulff and Wohnsdorf 2006). Kenneth Goldsmith’s uncreative writing classes, for example, start from where responsible writers to-be are, instead of expecting from them an original subjectivity with which they are mostly unfamiliar. The last suggestion for further research concerns the transnational perspective on plagiarism as both literary practice and cultural phenomenon. We may investigate developments in societies where intellectual property laws are considered to obstruct a national economy’s progress and creation of wealth. This is especially interesting and productive with newly industrialized countries, such as India and China. Another focus may lie in cultures whose (intellectual) resources have already been taken away by industrial colonizers for exploitation. Examples from patent law demonstrate that pharmaceutical agents that derive from indigenous plants and that are then licensed for medical use leave the native population with a commodified product they cannot further utilize as a development strategy. This phenomenon is also instructive when we look at cultural goods and practices. When indigenous people are deprived of artifacts or customs that are part of their cultural legacy, appropriation also raises issues of social justice and cultural self-assertion (see e. g. Binas 2004; Locher 2004; Mersmann 2004). These issues involve questions about whether appropriation can be viewed as a purely emancipatory interest and form of agency, since it can also include an exploitative seizure by a dominant culture that prevents instances of self-empowerment on the part of the inferior one. What has become crucial for the three strategies of Critifiction/Playgiarism, ConText, and Neo-Conceptualism, as well as for the examples above, are the consequences of radical appropriation for the receiving end of the communicative model, the reader: what are his or her attending roles in processing, interpreting, and evaluating a mass of code, the origins of which grow ever more opaque? How do the requirements for ‘reading’ change in seemingly borderless environments with respect to media literacy or other forms of “literature-specific human-capital resources”? And, from a global perspective, who can effectively participate in this brave new world as a potent ‘prosumer’ or ‘wreader,’ as George

gogy in that it suggests that media literacy comes natural, i. e. is a native quality to a global youth termed as the Millenials. See Brabazon (2009).

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P. Landow and others have called the productive blending of ‘writer’ and ‘reader,’ after all? Emerging genres such as fan fiction, the mainstream acceptance of sampling, and the far-reaching impact of Western patent law have shown that the technological paradigm shift we continue to experience affects national, legal, and philosophical cultures, as well as a multitude of participating discourses. This investigation of postmodern plagiarism in US literature from 1970 to 2010 has contributed a small share to this ongoing debate on the past, present, and future of cultural production, the value of originality, creativity, and valid authorship, and, as Lessig terms it, that “concentration of power to control the uses of culture.”

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Index Acker, Kathy 7, 14, 18, 76, 78–82, 84, 86 f., 89, 134 f., 139–141, 146 f., 150 f., 153, 159–163, 240 – Blood and Guts in High School 78, 84, 135 – Don Quixote – Which Was a Dream 135 – Empire of the Senseless 7, 18, 84, 134– 160, 162-164, 240 f. – Great Expectations 135 – Hello, I’m Erica Jong 135 – My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini 135 allegory of reading 17, 51 f., 54 appropriation 1, 4 f., 6–10, 13 f., 16–19, 20 f., 22, 27, 29 f., 33, 35–37, 41 f., 47, 49–54, 57, 66 f., 70-72, 75, 77, 82, 84, 87, 91, 93, 97, 101, 105–108, 110 f., 114– 116, 119, 125 f., 129–131, 133, 135 f., 149 f., 163, 165, 167, 169–176, 180–182, 185–187, 189–191, 194–197, 199, 201, 204, 209, 217–222, 224–227, 229, 233, 236, 238 f., 240-244, 246 Appropriation Art 18, 75, 222, 238 Arendt, Hannah 81 f. authorial subject 3, 8, 16, 19, 20-22, 25– 33, 35, 38–41, 43–52, 65 f., 70, 72 f., 75, 78 f., 81, 85–90, 96 f., 108, 110 f., 116 f., 119, 121 f., 126–133, 136, 139–141, 146 f., 149, 151, 153, 157, 159, 161 f., 164, 168, 170 f., 174, 181, 185, 187, 191– 195, 197, 202 f., 208, 210 f., 217–220, 222, 224, 228, 236, 238 f., 241–243 Authorship 10–13, 38, 41, 93, 106 – as authority 10, 27, 29, 35, 42 f., 46, 51, 60, 78, 93, 121, 239 – as ownership 3, 8, 16, 20, 23 f., 38, 79, 81, 105, 111, 147, 219, 223, 245 – collective 15, 91, 108, 202, 218, 220, 222, 243 f. – female 11, 76, 79–90, 134–138, 140-162, 240 – historical models of 11, 28 f., 34 f., 64, 67, 106, 158

– individual 2 f., 20-55, 60, 65 f., 71–74, 78, 80, 89, 98, 104–107, 130–134, 139, 161 f., 164, 187, 191 f., 202, 218 f., 220, 240, 244 – male 75, 80, 82, 86, 96, 112, 134, 142– 145, 148–151, 154, 156–161, 163, 240 Ball, Hugo 17, 100 f. Barth, John 56, 60, 71, 82, 128 Beckett, Samuel 52, 56, 70, 116 f., 124– 127, 130, 132 f., 140, 240 – The Unnamable 52, 54, 70, 124–127 Bergvall, Caroline 92, 220 Bernstein, Charles 103, 165 f. Bloom, Harold 52, 132 f. body writing 78, 83–89, 112, 146–161, 164, 169, 240 Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 9 f., 16, 26 f., 29 f., 39, 241 Burroughs, William Seward 9, 144, 179 Cixous, Hélène 80–85, 139, 141, 143, 145, 149, 153, 161 code 41, 92–99, 102, 104, 107–109, 111 f., 138, 141, 146 f., 153, 163, 166, 174, 177 f., 181, 183, 185 f., 190–192, 194 f., 202, 208, 220, 223, 226 f., 244–246 commodification of literature 21, 24, 40 f., 89, 108, 134, 163, 195, 240 Concrete Poetry 63, 96, 100 f., 103 f., 106, 109, 166, 181 f. Conrad, Joseph 18, 52, 92, 221, 224–231, 233, 236–238 constraint 102–104, 109, 111, 117, 167, 169, 171, 174, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185 f., 195, 219 f., 229, 233–237, 241 f. ConText 8–10, 17, 21, 55, 75–90, 96–99, 105, 112, 114, 131, 134–136, 140 f., 145– 146, 149–151, 153 f., 159–164, 171, 220, 224, 240, 246 Copyleft 108, 245 Copyright 4, 7, 10, 12, 20, 23, 31–39, 45, 79, 82, 95, 108, 134, 141, 161, 164, 171, 173, 182, 202, 244 f.

284

Index

court poetry 215 Creative Commons 108, 161, 245 creativity 3 f., 9, 13, 15 f., 18, 23, 27 f., 32, 37, 41 f., 80 f., 84, 90, 96 f., 104, 106, 109, 111 f., 128, 131, 151, 154, 160, 165, 182, 239, 241, 244 f., 247 Critifiction 8 f., 17, 21, 47, 55–57, 59–75, 79, 85, 88–90, 93, 96–99, 102, 105, 112, 114–120, 124, 126 f., 129–134, 147, 164, 224, 240, 246 cut-up 9, 144, 179 Dadaism 17, 63, 75, 96, 100–103, 109, 140 Darkness (chapter 1) 18, 52, 92, 111, 208, 220–239, 241 Day 18, 92, 111, 164 f., 169–196, 208, 220, 238, 240 f. de Man, Paul 17, 21, 49, 51 f., 54, 242 Death of the Author 8, 11, 21, 48, 51, 65, 93, 97, 140, 242 Debord, Guy 61, 96, 102, 107, 187 Derrida, Jacques 8, 41–52, 77 f., 80, 83, 115, 124, 129 f., 139, 150, 178, 181, 237, 242 détournement 102, 107 f., 112, 174, 186– 191, 193, 205–209, 217, 219, 241 différance 8, 51, 74, 77 f., 87 f., 134, 181 Double or Nothing 18, 47 f., 52, 54, 56 f., 65, 70 f., 115–133, 136, 138, 140, 160, 181 f., 194, 240 f. écriture 17, 60, 69, 72, 74, 77 f., 80, 83, 85–87, 89, 97, 109 f., 128, 141, 145, 153, 155, 163, 177 Eliot, T.S. 88 Eliot, Karen 243 Empire of the Senseless 1, 7, 18, 48, 51 f., 76, 84, 88, 134–164, 181, 194, 240 f. fan fiction 242 f., 247 Federman, Raymond 7, 13 f., 18, 47–75, 89, 105, 114–122, 124, 126–129, 131–134, 140 – Verweis auf Registerbegriff Double or Nothing – Surfiction 127 – The Sam Book 117

– The Twofold Vibration 71, 73, 118, 120 field of production (Bourdieu) 4, 9 f., 15– 17, 26 f., 29–33, 38–40, 46, 91, 133 Fitterman, Robert 35, 92, 100 f., 103, 105, 107 f., 169 – “Directory” 100, 103, 108, 169 Foucault, Michel 3, 8, 38, 48, 65 f., 72, 124–126, 130 f., 228, 240 Gass, William H. 56, 60, 71, 74 – The World Within the Word. 74 Gibson, William 58, 137 f., 147, 150 f. – Neuromancer 137 f., 147, 150 f. – Pattern Recognition 58 Ginsberg, Allen 1, 7, 51, 143–145 Goldsmith, Kenneth 7, 18, 90, 92–95, 97– 99, 102 f., 105 f., 108–112, 114, 164–174, 177 f., 180, 182 f., 188, 190–197, 200, 205, 207 f., 218–220, 238, 240 f., 246 – Verweis auf Registerbegriff Day – Fidget 168–170, 178 – Soliloquy 102, 111, 169, 178 – The Weather 102, 108, 111, 164, 169, 178 – Uncreative Writing 14, 106 Groom, Nick 3 f., 30, 32 f., 35, 54, 106 GuttenPlag Wiki 5, 34 Heart of Darkness 18, 52, 221, 224, 227, 230, 235 f., 238 f. Hegemann, Helene 5–8, 34 “Howl” 1, 7, 51, 143–145 intellectual property 2, 6, 12, 21–24, 27, 30–34, 36–42, 67, 72, 99, 146 f., 161, 201, 244–246 Journalist ethics 187–189 Joyce, Michael 92, 117 Landow, George P. 91 f., 98, 181, 247 language poetry 103 f., 108 f., 165 Les Figues 14, 111, 163, 196, 220, 237 Lessig, Lawrence 31, 37, 94 f., 112, 164, 245, 247 literary machine 105, 109–111, 174, 181, 185, 191 f., 194 f., 241 f.

Index

literary marketplace 2, 11, 15, 19, 36, 45, 55, 62, 66, 78, 86, 114, 162, 178, 187 literary scandal 2, 36, 50, 164 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 58, 62 f., 65, 74 Martial 1 f., 4, 33, 35, 71, 167 McCaffery, Larry 13 f., 80, 89, 117, 119, 129, 135 Morrison, Yedda 7, 14, 18, 52, 92, 97, 111, 114, 208, 220–229, 234–239, 241 – Bioposy 221 f., 224, 226 – Crop 14, 111, 223 f. – Girl Scout Nation 113 – “pre-colonial forest” 228, 236, 238 – ReGenesis 222 f., 226 Moulthrop, Stuart 91 f. Nelson, Theodor H. 110 net neutrality 94, 99, 111 f., 166, 181, 191, 243–245 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 44, 124, 130, 240 – Thus Spoke Zarathustra 124 originality 1–3, 7, 9, 13, 16–20, 29, 31–35, 38, 40–42, 45, 50, 54, 65 f., 73, 90 f., 104–111, 114, 130 f., 146, 162, 165 f., 195, 219 f., 241, 244, 247 Oulipo 96, 100–103, 109, 229 Perec, George 101 f. Perloff, Marjorie 14, 102–104, 106–108, 167–169, 193, 204, 207, 215 phallogocentrism 80, 82–84, 86, 89, 141– 143, 145, 148–150, 153–155, 159, 161, 240 Place, Vanessa 7, 14, 18, 35, 92, 97, 101, 103 f., 107, 111 f., 114, 163, 196–199, 202–209, 211 f., 216–220 – Dies: A Sentence 111 – La Medusa 111, 197 f. – The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law 111, 198 f., 206, 211, 218 Plagiarism, concepts of 1–55 – as corrective 20, 40 f., 54 – as deconstructionist practice 47–55 – as litmus test 20, 54, 113

285

– as narrative 2–7, 13, 20, 30, 39, 54, 71, 108 – as pathogen 3, 30 f., 40, 54, 91 Playgiarism 8 f., 17, 21, 47, 55–57, 62, 66, 68 f., 70–75, 79, 88–90, 96, 112, 115 f., 119 f., 129–131, 133, 140, 160, 162, 164, 171, 220, 224, 240, 246 post-structuralist literary theory 8, 10, 15– 19, 41– 55, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 77, 80, 87 f., 90, 96, 98, 99, 109, 111, 115 f., 118, 123–130, 139–141, 147, 159, 161, 163, 181, 240 f. postmodern literature 10, 19, 50, 53, 57, 60–63, 75, 89, 93, 114 f., 118, 120, 124, 127 f., 130, 136, 138, 141, 144, 150, 164, 179, 188, 218, 240 pre-text 1, 6, 9 f., 17, 30, 37, 42, 49–52, 54, 70 f., 73 f., 84 f., 89, 97, 101, 108, 115, 124, 127, 130 f., 133, 135 f., 139, 141, 144, 153 f., 156 f., 159 f., 162 f., 168, 170– 175, 179–182, 184–195, 199, 201, 204 f., 208, 210 f., 215 f., 218–239, 241–244 remix 95, 98, 112, 229, 244 Reznikoff, Charles 196, 215–217 – Testimony, The United States 1885 – 1890 (Recitative) 215–217 sample 18, 244 Schmidt, S.J. 20, 22, 24 Shirinyan, Ara 92, 101, 107, 111 Silliman, Ron 103, 230 Situationism 96, 100, 102 f., 107, 178, 186, 195, 205 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 49, 75, 163, 239 statement of facts 197, 200 f., 212–214 Sukenick, Ronald 56 f., 63 f., 69 f., 74 f. – 98.6 57 – Out 63 f., 69 f. symbolic capital 27, 39 f., 45, 49, 115 The New York Times 18, 92, 143, 170–174, 176, 178–180, 182 f., 185–187, 189–192, 194 f., 241, 243 Theisohn, Philipp 2, 5, 13, 29 f., 54

286

Index

Tragodía I: Statement of Facts 18, 101, 112, 196–219 Twain, Mark 52, 147, 154–157, 159 f. – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 52, 147, 154, 159 Tzara, Tristan 17, 100, 110 uncreative writing 8, 90 f., 104 f., 108, 110 f., 164 f., 179, 191–196, 246 unoriginal genius 106 f.

Urheberrecht

4, 12, 38

Viswanathan, Kaavya

4–7

Warhol, Andy 18, 168 – a, a novel 168 wreader 246 zu Guttenberg, Karl Theodor Zukofsky, Louis 215

5 f., 34