1 W.H.Auden, “The Word and the Machine,” Encounter 2, no.4 (April 1954): 3.
2 William S.Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk (London: John Calder, 1963), 68.
3 See Warren Burt, “Zurbrugg’s Complaint,” in this volume. All references to Burt in this preface refer to this essay.
4 Germaine Dulac, “The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea” (1925), trans. Robert Lamberton, in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P.Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), 36.
5 Germaine Dulac, “The Avant-Garde Cinema” (1932), trans. Robert Lamberton, in Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film, 43.
6 Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning” (1970), in his Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Collins, 1977), 67.
7 William S.Burroughs, “William Burroughs: Grandpa From Hell,” interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg (1993), World Art 1, no.2 (1994), 73.
8 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992), trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995), 132.
9 Ibid., 106.
10 Félix Guattari, “Postmodernism and Ethical Abdication,” Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg (1993), trans. Nicholas Zurbrugg, in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 16.
11 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), xiv, and 208.
12 Ibid., xiv. Félix Guattari, “The Postmodern Dead End,” trans. Nancy Blake, Flash Art 128 (May/June 1986): 41.
13 Foster, The Return of the Real xiv.
14 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 51, 53, Jacques Derrida, “Ja, or the faux-bond II,” Interview with D.Kambouchner, J.Ristat, and D.Sallenave (1977), in Points…: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 48–49.
15 Foster, The Return of the Real, 14–15.
16 Dulac, “The Essence,” 36.
17 Charles Baudelaire, “The Universal Exhibition of 1855” (1855), in his Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E.Charvet (London: Penguin, 1992), 117–18.
18 Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1845” (1845), and “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) in his Selected Writings, 35 and 402, respectively.
19 Baudelaire, “The Universal Exhibition,” 118.
20 Foster, The Return of the Real, xiv.
21 Fredric Jameson, “Reading without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Videotext,” in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between language and literature eds. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 200.
22 Ibid., 208, 221.
23 See chapter two of this volume.
24 Brion Gysin, to Nicholas Zurbrugg 24 September, 1984.
25 Jameson, Reading without Interpretation, 200, 208, 200.
26 Ibid., 200.
27 William S.Burroughs, “On Coincidence,” in his The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Seaver Books, 1986), 103.
28 William S.Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (Paris: Olympia, 1962), 172–74.
29 “Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Photography,” interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, trans. Nicholas Zurbrugg (1993), Jean Baudrillard:Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg (London: Sage, 1997), 38.Guattari, Chaosmosis, 90–91.
30 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 70–71.
31 F.T.Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without Strings—Words-inFreedom”(1913), trans. R.W.Flint, in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 97.
32 William S.Burroughs, “Remembering Jack Kerouac” (1979), in his The Adding Machine, 176.
1 D.J.Enright, Introduction to The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945–1980, edited by D.J.Enright (Oxford, 1980), xix-xxii and xxv-xxvi. Henceforth cited in the text by page number.
2 See for example: Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity (Bloomington, 1977); Christopher Butler, After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-garde (Oxford, 1981); Allan Rodway, “The Prospects of Postmodernism,” London Magazine 20, nos. 11 and 12 (February/March 1981): 52–61.
3 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London, 1970), 239. Henceforth cited in the text by page number.
4 Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, 1947), 351. Henceforth cited in the text by page number.
5 Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York, 1971), 3. Henceforth cited in the text by page number.
6 See such journals as The Drama Review, Performing Arts Journal, and Live.
7 Arrigo Lora-Totino, Futura: poesia sonora (Milan, 1978); Henri Chopin, Poésie sonore internationale (Paris, 1979).
8 Umberto Boccioni et al., “Prefazione al catalogo delle esposizioni di Parigi, Loudra, Berlino, Bruxelles, Monaco, Amburgo, Vienna, ecc. (1912)” in Umberto Apollonio, Futurismo (Milan, 1970), 95, trans. Robert Brain et al. As Futurist Manifestos (London, 1973), 49. With the single exception of Marinetti’s “La Radia,” of 1933, all subsequent quotations from Futurist manifestos, and from their translations, are followed in the text by page references to these books.
9 As might be expected, Dadaist manifestos are ambiguous in their response to technology. Raoul Hausmann envisioned “la peinture électrique” (electric painting) in his “PREsentisme” manifesto of 1921, collected in Courier Dada (Paris 1958), 98. But other Dadaists such as Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara appear to have imitated the “archaic” primitivism of African poetry, as Jerome Rothenberg emphasizes in “Changing the Present, Changing the Past: A New Poetics,” in Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute (Annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics), vol. 2, ed. Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb (Boulder, 1979), 279–82.
10 Jerome Rothenberg, “A Dialogue on Oral Poetry with William Spanos,” Boundary 2 3, no. 3 (Spring, 1975), 528.
11 Jerome Rothenberg, ed., Technicians of the Sacred (New York, 1968).
12 Jerome Rothenberg, “Changing the Present” 277, 259.
13 Jerome Rothenberg, “New Models, New Visions: Some Notes Toward a Poetics of Performance,” in Performance in Postmodern Culture, ed. Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello (Madison, 1977), 11.
14 Jerome Rothenberg, “Old Man Beaver’s Blessing Song: Notations for a Chant,” Panjandrum 4 (Fall, 1975): 85.
15 Rothenberg discusses the way in which texts form a “simplification” of his reading in “Changing the Present” 286
16 F.T.Marinetti, “Distruzione della sintassi Immaginazione senza fili PAROLE IN LIBERTA’La sensibilitaà futurista” (1913), 142–53.
17 Henri Chopin, “Lettre ouverte aux musiciens aphones,” OU 33 (1968): 24; trans, Jean Ratcliffe-Chopin as “Open Letter to Aphonic Musicians,” Ibid., II.
18 Henri Chopin, “Machine Poem” OU 20/21 (1964): n.p. My translation, as are all other translations unless otherwise specified.
19 Chopin’s later works, such as “Le Temps Aujourd’hui,” of 1976, employ the semantic values of language quite explicitly. A record of this work is in Stereo Headphones, 8–9–10 (Spring, 1982).
20 Henri Chopin, Poésie sonore internationale, 173.
21 Bengt-Emil Johnson, “Fylkingen’s Group for Linguistic Arts and Text-Sound Compositions,” Fylkingen International Bulletin 2 (1969): 15.
22 Marinetti’s “La Radia,” of October 1933, is reprinted from the Gazzetta del popolo, in Sintesi del FUTURISMO storia e documenti, ed. Luigi Scrivo (Rome, 1968). Printed between pages 204 and 205, this text is inexplicably unpaginated. Accordingly, references to this text remain unpaginated. Though briefly mentioned by Kirby, “La Radia,” is neither collected nor printed in full in his Futurist Performance; nor indeed does it appear in Apollino’s Futurismo and Futurist Manifestos, or in Marinetti: Selected Writings, edited by R.W.Flint (London, 1972). (Objection over-ruled! Stephen Sartarelli’s translation of “La Radia” appears in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 265–8.
23 Translations of “La Radia,” by Joseph Gioscio and Nicholas Zurbrugg.
24 Bengt-Emil Johnson, “Fylkingen’s Group,” 15.
25 Bernard Heidsieck, “La Poinçonneuse,” Stereo Headphones 7 (Spring, 1976): 20–24; recorded on “Troi biopsies” & “Un passe-partout” (Multi-Techniques L.P.: Paris, 1971).
26 Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, “Bernard Heidsieck: Notes et Contresens,” Opus International 40–41 (January 1973): 66.
27 Bernard Heidsieck, Gérard-Georges Lemaire, and Philippe Mikriammos, “Quatrième entretien,” in William S.Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Le Colloque de Tanger (Paris, 1976), 364. Henceforth cited in the text by page number.
28 Ulrich Weisstein, “Collage, Montage, and Related Terms: Their Literal and Figurative Use in and Application to Techniques and Forms in Various Arts,” Comparative Literature Studies 15, no. 1 (March 1978): 131.
29 Larry Wendt, quoted by Ellen Zweig, in Zweig, “Performance Poetry: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Intermedia,” doctoral dissertation presented to the University of Michigan, 1980, 54. Larry Wendt’s work is discussed later in this article.
30 See Boundary 2, 3, no. 3 (Spring, 1975). New Literary History 8, no. 3 (Spring, 1977) discusses similar issues.
31 Michael Benamou, “Presense and Play,” in Benamou and Caramello, eds. Performance in Postmodern Culture, 5.
32 Charles Amirkhanian, letter of 1971 to Nicholas Zurbrugg, published as untitled statement in Stereo Headphones, 5 (Winter, 1972), 35.
33 Charles Amirkhanian, “dutiful ducks,” published with inserted notes to Amirkhanian’s LP Lexical Music, Record S-1779, 1750 Arch Records, 1979.
34 Charles Amirkhanian, quotations from statement about “dutiful ducks” in unpaginated booklet accompanying the tape cassette Variety Theater: An Anthology of Sound Poetry (San José, 1977).
35 See, for example, the now-defunct French review Musique en jeu; the late Gregory Battcock’s anthologies entitled: New Artists Video (New York, 1978) and Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Critical Anthology of the New Music (New York, 1981).
36 Michel Chion, “Vingt années de musique électroacoustique ou une quête d’identité,” Musique en jeu 8 (September, 1972): 19–28. Henceforth cited in the text by page number.
37 For recorded examples of authorial readings by Hausmann, Schwitters, Cobbing, Jandl and Dufrêne, see—or hear—the LP Phonetische Poesie, Luchterhand Schallplatte F 60 379, Germany.
38 A recording of Schwitters reading the “scherzo” of this poem appears on the LP Phonetische Poesie. Pierre Henry’s “Le Voyage,” incorporating Dufrêne’s “crirythmes,” appears in the Philips Perspective xxie siècle series, on LP 936/899 DSY. Paul de Vree’s “Vertigo Gli” appears on a record in the review OU 28/29 (1966).
39 Example of Chopin’s “purist” work appear on his record Audiopoems, TCS 106 (Tangent LP: London, 1971); on Phonetische Poesie; and on several of the records issued with his review OU.
40 While work like that of Heidsieck and Amirkhanian moves from relatively “purist” modes to a final hybrid phase at the end of an evolutionary pattern roughly following Chion’s outline, it must also be acknowledged that certain poets have almost continuously worked within a hybrid phase. Jackson MacLow exemplifies this permanent hybrid approach in his interview in The Craft of Poetry, ed. William Packard (New York, 1974), 225–63.
41 Sten Hanson, “Henri Chopin, the Sound Poet,” in Stereo Headphones, 8–9–10 (Spring 1982); quoted from French translation by Jean Ratcliffe-Chopin, in Henri Chopin, Poésie sonore international, 124.
42 Larry Wendt, interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, San José, 15 May 1981. This interview has been edited without attempting to alter its conversational style. John Giorno’s “reel-time” work appears on several of his Giorno Poetry Systems Institute LPs, including: William S.Burroughs—John Giorno (GPS 006–007); and the anthology Big Ego (GPS 012–013). This LP not only collects work by Giorno, Wendt, and Heidsieck, but additionally contains related work by musicians like Philip Glass, rock groups like The Fugs, and punk singers like Patti Smith, demonstrating the strange convergences between the avant-garde and popular arts.
43 Typical of this group are Wendt and Stephen Ruppenthal, who both have work on the aforementioned tape, anthology Variety Theater (see note 34) significantly, both work at West Coast universities and have access to electronic music studios,
44 The Swedish Fylkingen radio station is particularly important in this respect, having organized sound poetry festivals, opened its studios to poets, and issued LP anthologies of resultant works. By comparison, the BBC’s few collaborations with poets leave much to be desired.
45 Eugene Jolas, “From ‘Jabberwocky’” to ‘Lettrism’,” Transition Forty-Eight I (January 1948); 104. “The Revolution of the Word” was the war cry of Jolas’ magnificent review, Transition.
46 This phrase appears anonymously in an advertisement for Philippe Lejeune’s Je est un autre, on the back cover of Poétique 42 (April 1980).
1 William S.Burroughs, The Book of Breeething (1974), in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts (London: John Calder, 1979), 102.
2 Brion Gysin, interviewed by Terry Wilson, in Wilson et al, Here to Go: Planet R-101 (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1982), 65. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Gysin in this article are from this collection of interviews, and page references will hereafter appear in the text.
3 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), esp. 142–48. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Barthes are from this collection of essays, and page references will hereafter appear in the text.
4 See chapter one, note 36
5 Burroughs, The Naked Lunch (NewYork: Grove Press, 1959), 150. All page references hereafter are to this edition and will appear in the text.
6 Burroughs, Exterminator! (London: Calder and Boyars, 1974), 106.
7 Burroughs, “Statement on the Final Academy,” in The Final Academy: Statements of a Kind, ed. Roger Ely (London: The Final Academy, 1982), 1. Catalog to accompany Burroughs’s “Final Academy” readings in London, 29 Sept-2 Oct. 1982.
8 Burroughs reads from The Naked Lunch and Nova Express on the record Call Me Burroughs, published in Paris by Gaît Frogé’s English Bookshop (1965). A more accessible example of his readings is the record William S.Burroughs/John Giorno, GPS 006–007, published by Giorno Poetry Systems, 222 Bowery, New York (1975); subsequent Giorno Poetry Systems anthologies provide other examples. Such records illustrate the ways in which technology reveals and records the “grain” of the authorial voice.
9 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (London: Routledgc and Kegan Paul, 1975), 139. All page references are to this edition and will hereafter appear in the text.
10 Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 38. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Culler are from this book, and page references will hereafter appear in the text.
11 Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974), 59; my translation, as are all subsequent translations unless otherwise indicated.
12 Laurent Jenny, “La Stratégie de la forme,” Poétique 27 (1976): 265. Page references will hereafter appear in the text.
13 Jenny, “Sémiotique du collage intertextual, ou la littérature a coups de ciseaux,” Revue d’Esthétique nos. 3–4 (1978): 168 (issue subtitled Collages). Page references will here-after appear in the text.
14 Dieter Freundlieb “Understanding Poe’s Tales: A Schema-Theoretic View,” Poetics 11 (1982): 25–44.
15 Barthes, S/Z. trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), 28–30. Page references will hereafter appear in the text.
16 See Ellen Zweig, Performance Poetry: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Intermedia, Ph.D. diss., Michigan, 1980. A number of new journals (such as Alive, ArtCom, High Performance, Performing Arts Journal and Performance Magazine) now document and analyze performance art and its analogue, performance poetry. These new genres are usefully exemplified in High Performance 4, no. 4 (1981–82); this includes scores for performance and an article by Lewis MacAdam, “Nightclubbing with William S.Burroughs, John Giorno and Laurie Anderson” (38–42), which discusses Burroughs’s readings with the performance poet John Giorno and the performance artist Laurie Anderson.
17 Samuel Beckett, “Proust in Pieces,” The Spectator, 22 June 1934, 975.
18 Beckett, Watt (1953; rpt. London: John Calder, 1963), 73.
19 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), I, 553.
20 For discussions of these technological modes of creativity, see my articles “Beyond Beckett: Reckless Writing and the Concept of the Avant-Garde within Post-Modern Literature,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 30 (1981): 37–56, and “Marinetti, Boccioni, and Electroacoustic Poetry: Futurism and After,” reprinted in this volume.
21 Burroughs, in Daniel Odier, The Job: Interview with William Burroughs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 46, 48. Page references will hereafter appear in the text.
22 Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 61.
23 Brion Gysin, “Statement on the Cut-Up Method and Permutated Poems” (1958), published as “Cut-Ups Self-Explained,” in Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind (London: John Calder, 1979), 34.
24 In order to demonstrate that poets do not “own” their words, Gysin’s permutated poem “no poets don’t own words” systematically liberated the semantic and sonic potential the words “no/know,” “poets,” “don’t,” “own” and “words” by mixing them in a sequence of some 120 permutations. Yet far from constituting an anonymous and mechanical text, Gysin’s first recording of the poem in 1960 (an abbreviated version consisting of twenty permutations and published on a record in Revue-Disque OU, nos. 23–24 [1965]) is informed by the rich “grain” of Gysin’s highly individual reading, a quality less evident in the 1981 recording Brion Gysin: Orgy Boys (New York: Hat Haut Records, 1982).
25 Gysin, “Statement on the Cut-Up Method,” 34.
26 The term “intermedia” was coined and defined by the American poet and Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in an article of the same title (1965), collected in his A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts (New York: Printed Editions, 1978), 12–17. The article begins: “Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media.”
27 Burroughs, Nova Express (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), 52.
28 Few Anglo-American intertextual critics have attempted to relate literary and artistic variants of montage, or the new literary and extraliterary occupants of technological discursive spaces (such as that of recorded creativity). The Collages Revue d’Esthétique 3–4 (1978) documents the efforts of French and Italian critics to relate literary and extraliterary variants of collage.
29 Mihai Nadin vainly attempts to analyze Pierre Garnier’s poem “cinema” in terms of prior poetic discourse (“Sur le sens de la poésie concrete,” Poétique, No, 42 [1980], 253), although Garnier’s play with the optical effects peculiar to the typeface of the typewriter are best explicated in the context of “op art” works by Bridget Riley and Jesus Rafael Soto.
30 Burroughs, “The Art of Fiction xxxvi,” interview with Conrad Knickerbocker, The Paris Review 35 (Fall 1965): 24.
31 Burroughs, Electronic Revolution (1971), in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts, 125–26.
32 Burroughs, “An Introductory Text for Henri Chopin’s book on ‘Poésie sonore,’” in Chopin, Poésie sonore internationale (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1979), 9.
33 The term “interNONtextuality” was coined by the editors of New York Literary Forum no 2 (1978: viii (issue subtitled Inter-textuality: New Perspectives in Criticism). I use the term “intercontextuality” to denote the attempt to explicate literary texts (particularly, radical contemporary literary texts) by analogy with extraliterary discursive practices.
34 Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, 80–118, summarizes Riffaterre’s, Jenny’s, and Bloom’s intertextual systems, with particular reference to Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), Jenny, “La Stratégie de la forme,” and Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), and Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). See also Ann Jefferson, “Intertextuality and the Poetics of Fiction,” Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook 2 (1980): 235–50.
35 See Claus Clüver, “Brazilian Concrete: Painting Poetry, Time, and Space” in Literature and the Other Arts, Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. Zoran Konstantinovi’c et al. (Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 1981), III, 207–13. See also my article, “Dada and the Poetry of the Contemporary Avant-Garde,” in Dada: Studies of a Movement, ed. Richard Sheppard (Chalfont St Giles: Alpha Academic, 1980) 121–43.
36 Burroughs, “Forward Note” to Nova Express, 5.
37 Starting in the late fifties, Burroughs conducted a number of tape-recorder experiments during his years in Paris at the “Beat Hotel.” Gysin recalls: “Burroughs was busy punching to death a series of cheap Japanese tape recorders, to which he applied himself with such force that he could punch one of them to death inside a matter of weeks, days even” (195). A selection of these experiments appears on Burroughs’s record entitled Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, IR 0016 Industrial Records (1981; distributed by Rough Trade, 137 Blenheim Crescent, London). Burroughs’s experiments with projections are discussed in “How to Be Humphrey Bogart,” in The Job, 179–84. He describes some that led to the film Bill and Tony (1966), made in collaboration with the film-maker Antony Balch, in an interview with Robert Palmer in Rolling Stone no. 108 (11 May 1972): 48–53. Balch’s account of the experiments and collaboration is in his interview “Breakthrough in Grey Room…Towers Open Fire,” Cinema Rising no. 1 (April 1972), 10–13. Burroughs, Gysin, Batch and Ian Somerville also collaborated on the films Towers Open Fire (1963) and The Cut-Ups (1968).
38 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol’60s (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 280.
39 Jean Ricardou, “Claude Simon,” Textuellement,” in Claude Simon: Colloque de Cerisy, ed. Jean Ricardou (Paris: Union Général d’Editions, 1975), 11.
40 Burroughs, “An Introductory Text,” 9.
41 Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Electronic and Instrumental Music,” in Postwar German Culture: An Anthology, ed. Charles E.McClelland and Steven P.Scher (New York: Dutton, 1974), 361. (Translated by Ruth Hein from Stockhausen’s Texte zur Elektronischen und Instrumentalen Musik, 1 [Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1963].)
42 Gysin, “Statement on the Cut-Up Method,” 34.
43 John Weightman, “High Priest of Modernism,” The Observer (Review Section), 24 Oct. 1982, 34.
44 Burroughs, quoted in Alan Ansen, “Anyone Who Can Pick up a Frying Pan Owns Death,” in Burroughs, White Subway (London: Aloes, n.d. [1965?]), 71.
1 For further discussion of this periodization of modernism (1880–1930) and postmodernism (1930–1980), see my article “Beyond Beckett: Reckless Writing and the Concept of the Avant-Garde within Post-Modern Literature,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature no. 30 (1981): 37–56.
2 This term is formulated by Laurent Jenny in his article “La Stratégie de la Forme.” Poétique no. 27 (1976): 259.
3 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Theobald, 1947), 10.
4 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” trans. John Johnston, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 132. Page references will hereafter appear in the text.
5 Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, in Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York Semiotext(e), Foreign Agents Series, 1983), 4. Page references will hereafter appear in the text.
6. Ross Gibson, “Customs and Excise,” in Seduced and Abandoned: The Baudrillard Scene, ed. André Frankovits (Glebe, Australia: Stonemoss, 1984), 50.
7 Michel Chion, “Vingt années de musique électro-acoustique, ou une quête d’identité,” Musique en jeu no. 8 (1972): 19–28.
8 For further discussion of these experiments, see my article “Marinetti, Boccioni and Electroacoustic Poetry: Futurism and After,” reprinted in this volume.
9 Jean Baudrillard, “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media and the Implosion of the Social in the Masses,” trans. Mary Lydon, in The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1980), 142; emphasis mine. Page references will hereafter appear in the text
10 Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. George L.Mosse (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), 42, 27, and 31, respectively. Page references will hereafter appear in the text.
11 Marinetti, “Manifesto del teatro sintetico” (Synthesist Theatre Manifesto), trans. R.W. Flint, in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umberto Appollonio, trans, Robert Brain et al. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 194.
12 William S.Burroughs, interview of 1978, quoted by Victor Bockris in With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (NewYork: Seaver Books, 1981), 127.
13 William S.Burroughs, quoted by Daniel Odier in The Job: Interview with William Burroughs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 19. Page references will hereafter appear in the text.
14 For further discussion of Burroughs’s technological experiments, see my article “The Limits of Intertextuality” reprinted in this volume.
15 See William S.Burroughs, Electronic Revolution (1971)in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts (London: John Calder, 1971). Burroughs discusses Electronic Revolution in this quotation from an interview with Dan Georgakas in London, summer 1970, in Something Else Yearbook, 1974, ed. Jan Herman (Barton: Something Else Press, 1973), 22.
16 William S.Burroughs, “An Introductory Text for Henri Chopin’s Book on ‘Poésie Sonore,’” in Henri Chopin, Poésie sonore internationale (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1979), 9.
17 William S.Burroughs, interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, 22 November 1983, Lawrence, Kansas.
18 William S.Burroughs, interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, 6 October 1983, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
19 William S.Burroughs, interview with Robert Palmer, Rolling Stone no. 108, 11 May 1972, 49.
20 James Joyce, “The Dead,” Dubliners (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971), 220.
21 Marcel Proust, “Les nuages” (Clouds), ca. 1885–86, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, precédé de Pastiches et mélanges, et Suivi de Essais et articles (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 329; translation mine.
22 Fredric Jameson, “Post-Modernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 119.
23 Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992), 241.
24 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, (Paris: Gallimard, 1968–69), 838; translation mine.
25 William S.Burroughs, interview with Conrad Knickerbocker, Paris Review no. 35 (Fall 1965): 23.
26 William S.Burroughs, Dead Fingers Talk (London: John Calder, 1963), 169.
27 See Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), 206–07; and Raoul Hausmann, “Dadaism and the Avant-Garde,” Times Literary Supplement, 3 September 1964,800–801.
28 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), 239. Page references will hereafter appear in the text.
29 For further discussion of these conceptual shifts, see my article “Towards the End of the Line: Dada and Experimental Poetry Today,” in Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, ed. Stephen Foster and Rudolf Kuenzli (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979), 226–48.
30 Jean Baudrillard, “On Nihilism,” extract translated and quoted by Paul Foss in “Despero Ergo Sum,” in Seduced and Abandoned: The Baudrillard Scene, ed. André Frankovits (Glebe, Australia: Stonemoss, 1984), 10.
31 This was the title of a paper given by Jean Baudrillard at the Futur-Fall: Excursions into Post-Modernity Conference, Sydney, Australia, 28 July 1984.
32 Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” trans. Stephen Heath, in Image-Music-Text (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), 67.
33 Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?,” trans. Régis Durand, in Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities, ed. Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 340–41; emphasis mine.
34 Achille Bonita Oliva, Trans-Avantgarde International, trans. Dwight Gast and Gwen Jones (Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1982). Page references will hereafter appear in the text.
35 Reviews of this exhibition, and an interview with its organizer, Frank Popper, appear in Domus no. 646 (January 1984): 75–80.
36 Roland Barthes, “Objective Literature,” in his Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 14; emphasis mine.
37 Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, trans. Richard Howard (London: John Calder, 1959), 6.
38 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, III, 885. English translation by Samuel Beckett, in his Proust (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 57.
39 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 51. Barthes italicizes “punctum” and “studium” throughout.
40 Jean Baudrillard, interview with Sam Mele and Mark Titmarsh, 18 January 1984, Paris; quoted by Ross Gibson, “Customs and Excise,” 48.
41 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 137.
1 Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances” in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), French text with translations by R.Howard (Boston; David R.Godine. 1982), 193 (translation modified).
2 Jean Baudrillard, interviewed by Sylvère Lotringer in “Forget Baudrillard,” collected in Forget Foucault, trans. P.Beitchman, L.Hildreth and M.Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 130. Baudrillard comments: “The secret of theory is that truth doesn’t exist The only thing you can do is play with some kind of provocative logic” (129–30). This “logic” is applied to American culture in the main subject of this article: Amérique. Baudrillard’s poetic writings are exemplified by his poems in L’ange de stuc (Paris: Galilée, 1978).
3 Baudrillard, Amérique (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1986). Page numbers cited hereafter refer to this book. All translations are my own.
4 Baudelaire, “L’Invitation au voyage, op. cit., 235.
5 Baudrillard, “L’Amérique comme fiction,” interview with Jacques Henric and Guy Scaparta, Art Press 103 (May 1986): 41–42. My translation of this interview appears in eyeline 5 (June 1988): 24–25.
6 The research by Burroughs and Gysin is documented in their book The Third Mind (London: John Calder, 1979), whereas that of Frank J.Malina and his fellow artists is documented in his Kinetic Art: Theory and Practice (New York: Dover, 1974).
7 Robert Wilson has produced stage versions of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine and Quartet. Both plays appear in Müller’s Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York, Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984. For further discussion of Heiner Müller’s collaborations, see my article “Postmodernism and the Multimedia Sensibility: Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine and the Art of Robert Wilson.” Reprinted in this volume.
8 Heiner Müller quoted by Arlene Akiko Teraoka in The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Post-Modern Poetics of Heiner Müller (New York Peter Lang, 1985) 106.
9 Ibid., 100.
10 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1986), 149, and 147, respectively. Page numbers given in later quotations refer to this text.
11 Umberto Boccioni, Carl Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, “The Exhibitors to the Public” (1912) in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), 49; emphasis in the original.
12 Letter to the Village Voice (Jan. 1966), in John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (London: Allen Lane, 1974), 167.
13 Letter to Paul Henry Lang (22 May 1965), Ibid., 118.
14 John Cage comments, “Well, long live the technology to come!” at the end of his conversations with Daniel Charles, in For the Birds, (London, Marion Boyars, 1981), 238.
15 “After antiquity,” conversation with Peter Gena, in A John Cage Reader, Peter Gena and Jonathan Brent, (New York, C.F. Peters, 1982), 170–71.
16 Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, eyeline 1 (May 1987): 6–7.
17 Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (1884), trans. Robert Baldick, (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1968), 35.
18 “L’Amérique comme fiction,” 41.
19 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: Signet, 1961), 14.
20 Heiner Müller, “Reflections on Post-Modernism,” New German Critique 16 (Winter 1979): 56.
21 George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life” (185), in The Portable Victorian Reader, ed. Gordon S.Haight (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1976), 609.
22 Müller, “Reflections,” 57.
23 English modification by Baudrillard, from “L’Amérique comme fiction,” 41.
24 “Forget Baudrillard,” 135, and 134, respectively.
25 Baudrillard, “L’Amérique comme fiction,” 42.
26 William Wordsworth, “Above Tintern Abbey” (1798), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, ed. M.H.Abrams (New York: Norton, 1986), 154.
27 G.-Albert Aurier, “Symbolism in Painting: Paul Gauguin” (1891), in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B.Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 91.
28 Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), Les Chants de Maldoror, trans. Guy Wernham (New York: New Directions, 1965).
29 Baudelaire, “L’Invitation au voyage,” 235.
30 Paul Éluard, “L’amoureuse” (c. 1923), trans. Samuel Beckett in Collected Poems in English and French (London: John Calder, 1967), 67.
31 William S.Burroughs, The Western Lands (New York: Viking, 1987) 181–82. All subsequent page references to this novel appear in the text. Here as elsewhere, Burroughs’s fiction parallels (and anticipates) the general tone of much of Baudrillard’s writing.
32 Huysmans, Against Nature, 97.
33 cf. Baudrillard, “L’Amérique comme fiction,” 41.
34 Burroughs, Nova Express (London: Panther, 1968), 97.
35 Letter to Paul Henry Lang, in Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage, 116.
36 John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1955), in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 12.
37 William Carlos Williams, “A Point for American Criticism,” in Our Exagimination Round His Factification for lncamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 179.
38 Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism (1759), trans. John Butt (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985), 35.
39 This transition is nicely exemplified by the collection of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland, which has successively purchased extensive holdings of both minimal art and trans-avant-garde “spaghetti-expressionism.”
40 Interview with Catherine Francblin, Flash Art, 130 (Oct-Nov 1986): 55.
41 Raoul Hausmann, “Dadaism and Today’s Avant-Garde,” Times Literary Supplement (3 Sept. 1964), 801.
42 Interview with Catherine Francblin, 55.
43 For further discussion of video installations at Documenta 8 see my article “Adventures in Techno-Space: Documenta 8,” Praxis M 19 (May 1988): 23–27.
44 Quoted by Alan Ansen, in The Burroughs File (San Francisco: City Lights, 1984), 19.
45 From a conversation (concerning the potential of television) with Nicholas Zurbrugg in Paris, 21 December 1987.
46 Nova Express, 42; italics in original.
1 William S.Burroughs, “St Louis Return,” The Paris Review 35 (1965): 57.
2 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans., Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Collins, 1979), 239.
3 Umberto Eco, “The Multiplication of the Media” (1983) and “A Photograph” (1977), in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1987), 149, 147, and 214–15.
4 Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1987), 12.
5 Ibid., 20.
6 Jean Baudrillard, Amérique (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1986) 74, my translation.
7 Jean Baudrillard, interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, Eyeline, no. 11 (1990): 6.
8 Fredric Jameson, interviewed by Anders Stephanson, Flash Art international edition, no. 131 (1986/7): 72.
9 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Utopia,” in Utopia Post Utopia; Configurations of Nature and Culture and Recent Sculpture and Photography (Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1988), 18.
10 Fredric Jameson, “Reading without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Videotext,” in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). All references to this essay appear henceforth as unattributed page numbers in my text.
11 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” trans. Stephen Heath, in Image-Music- Text (Glasgow: Collins, 1977), 142–48. Where appropriate, all subsequent references to this essay appear in my text.
12 Jean Baudrillard, “L’Amérique comme fiction,” interview with Jacques Henric and Guy Scaparta, Art Press no. 103 (1986): 41. My translation in Eyeline no 5 (1988): 24.
13 Luis Buñuel My Last Sigh, trans Abigail Israel (NewYork: Knopf, 1983), 108, 110.
14 Luis Buñuel, “Notes on the making of Un Chien andalou” in The World of Luis Buñuel, ed. Joan Mellen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 153.
15 Jean Baudrillard, untitled interview from the French “La Sept” television channel program l’objet d’art à I’âge électronique (8 May 1987), translated by Lucy Forsyth in Block no 14 (1988): 9.
16 Roland Barthes, “Objective Literature,” in his Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 14, 16.
17 Ibid., 16–17.
18 Robbe-Grillet dismisses Barthes’s conclusions as “a simplification” of his work. “Confessions of a voyeur,” interview with Roland Caputo, Tension (September- October 1986): 10–11.
19 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 22–27.
20 Roland Barthes “Deliberation,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 366–67.
21 Emphasis mine.
22 Emphasis mine.
23 John Cage, letter to Paul Henry Lang (22 May 1956) in John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 118.
24 Alexei Gan, “Constructivism,” trans. John Bowlt, in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 35–36.
25 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 147.
26 Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” trans. Charles Levin, in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. John G.Hanhardt (New York: Gibbs M.Smith, (1987), 128.
27 Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulations, trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 55.
28 Jean François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” trans. Régis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 81.
29 Jameson, interview with Anders Stephanson, 72.
30 Jameson, “Postmodernism and Utopia,” 16.
31 Jameson, interview with Anders Stephanson, 72.
32 John G.Hanhardt, “Video in Fluxus,” Art and Text no. 37 (1990):86.
33 Ibid., 91.
34 Marita Sturken, “Video in the United States,” in Video, ed. René Payuat (Montreal: Artextes, 1986), 57.
35 Nam June Paik, “Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television 1963, March, Galerie Parnass” in Ubi Fluxux ibi Motus, 1990–1962, ed. Achille Bonito Oliva (Milano: Mazzotta, 1990), 387.
36 John Cage, interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg. Geneva, 12 September 1990.
37 Jameson, “Postmodernism and Utopia,” 16; “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review no. 146 (1984): 57.
38 John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 16.
39 Paik, “Afterlude,” 386.
40 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism,” in New Artists Video: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1978), 45.
41 Paik’s Self-Portrait (1970) is illustrated in Battcock, 122; Acconci’s Face-Off (1972) is illustrated, 118; and Morris’s Exchange (1973) is illustrated, 19.
42 Mona da Vinci, “Video: The Art of Observable Dreams,” in Battcock, ed. New Artists Video, 17.
43 Paik’s Nam June Paik, Edited for TV (1976) is illustrated in Battcock, 22.
44 Cage, Silence, 93.
45 Kraus, “Video,” 45.
46 René Magritte’s Reproduction Prohibited(Portrait of Mr James) (1937) is illustrated on the front cover of Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974).
47 Campus’s Shadow Projection (1974) is illustrated in Battcock, 101.
48 Paik’s TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) and Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes (1971) are illustrated in Battcock, 124 and 126. Paik’s comments on TV Bra appear in his essay (coauthored with Charlotte Moorman) “TV Bra for Living Sculpture,” Battcock, 129.
49 Gregory Battcock, “Disaster in New York,” in Battcock, 133.
50 Heiner Müller, “The Walls of History,” interviewed by Sylvère Lottinger, Semiotext(e), 4, no 2. (1982): 37.
51 See Baudrillard, Amérique, 146. For further discussion of Baudrillard’s use of this concept see my “Baudrillard’s Amérique, and the ‘Abyss of Modernity’” reprinted in this volume.
52 Jameson, “Postmodernism and Utopia,” 27 and 29. Jameson’s conclusions elaborate the overstatements of the Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva. For further discussion of Oliva’s conclusions see my article “Postmodernity, Métaphore Manqué, and the myth of the Trans-avant-garde,” reprinted in this volume.
53 Louis Aragon, “Open Letter to André Breton” (2 June 1971), trans. Linda Moses, in program to Wilson’s production of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (London: Almeida Theatre, 1987), unpaginated.
54 See my “Baudrillard’s Amérique, and the Abyss of Modernity.’”
55 William S.Burroughs, “On Freud and the Unconscious,” in The Adding Machine (New York: Seaver Books, 1986), 89.
56 Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 271.
57 Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 213.
58 Cage, Letter to the Village Voice (January 1966), in Kostelanetz, ed. John Cage, 167.
59 Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1963), 33.
60 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 137.
61 Alexei Gan, “Constructivism,” in Stephen Bann, ed. The Tradition of Constructivism, 36 and 35; Kasimir Malevich, title of painting of 1917, cited by Aaron Scharf, “Suprematism,” in Tony Richardson and Nikos Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1974), 139. As Scharf comments, Malevich’s suprematist compositions appear to aspire to “the final emancipation: a state of nirvana.”
62 Robert Wilson, “Robert Wilson: Current Projects,” interview with Laurence Shyer in Robert Wilson: the Theater of Images (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 113 and 111.
63 Nam June Paik, interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, Sydney, 10 April 1990, Scan +no. 3 (November 1990): 14.
1 Publicity brochure for Hamletmachine, issued by the Almeida Theatre, London. The London season of Wilson’s production opened on 4 November 1987. Jean Jourdheuil’s world premiere of the play opened at the Théâtre Gérard Phillipe, St. Denis, near Paris, on 30 January 1979.
2 Robert Wilson, quoted by Robert Hewison, “A Pioneering Space Explorer,” The Sunday Times, 1 November 1987, 61.
3 Ibid.
4 Robert Wilson, quoted by Christopher Granlund, “Pinball Ruins,” The Guardian, 23 October 1987, 18.
5 Robert Wilson, quoted by Kevin Jackson, “Listen with Your Eyes,” The Independent, October 1987, 9. Arlene Akiko Teraoka suggests that Heiner Müller’s theater obeys a similar impulse, insofar as “the breakdown or distortion of models/orders (defined as forms of drama, literary works, literary and historical characters, or quotations) essential to the author’s project of overcoming “entropy” is not purely deconstructive, but creates a new ordering.” Teraoka argues that Müller’s use of montage or collage “takes specific meaningful elements (quotes, figures, images, etc.) from established literary works or historical events, thereby destroying the original contexts (‘entropy’), and juxtaposes these selected elements in a disharmonious way (as the ‘universal discourse’) within a new framework,” thereby “claiming a total openness to other texts and other voices.” The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller (New York, 1985), 179. I think Teraoka probably exaggerates the “openness” of Müller’s predominantly literary montages and collages. As I shall suggest, Wilson’s work generates more revolutionary modes of extraliterary collage and montage, exploring the openness of multimedia theatre.
6 Robert Wilson, quoted by Granlund, The Guardian.
7 See Harold Hobson, “Samuel Beckett: Dramatist of the Year,” International Theatre Annual 1 (London, 1956): 153, and Beckett’s letter to Alan Schneider of 21 June 1956, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London, 1983), 107.
8 Tom F.Driver quotes Beckett’s wish to “find a form that accomodates the mess” in “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum 4 (1961): 23.
9 John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1957), in Silence (Middletown, CT, 1983), 12.
10 John Cage, unpaginated notes accompanying Indeterminacy: New Aspects of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music (New York, 1959), FT 3704.
11 Janny Donker, The President of Paradise: A Traveller’s Account of Robert Wilson’s ‘the CIVIL warS’ (Amsterdam, 1985), 87.
12 Ibid.
13 Heiner Müller, quoted by Teraoka, The Silence of Entropy, 100.
14 Ibid., 106.
15 “Something Rotten in the State of Germany,” New Statesman, 6 November 1987, 24.
16 Quoted by Jackson, The Independent
17 Irving Wardle, “A Mechanistic Solution,” The Times, 5 November 1987, 18.
18 Michael Billington, “Images for an Age of Anxiety,” The Guardian, 6 November 1987, 28.
19 Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine (1977), trans. Carl Weber (1984), unpaginated text, published in the Almeida Theater’s program for Hamletmachine (London, 1987). All subsequent references to Hamletmachine refer to this text.
20 Peter Kemp, “Rude Mechanicals,” The Independent, 6 November 1987, 15.
21 Untitled statement on Hamletmachine of 30 April 1986, in the Almeida Theater program.
22 Bonnie Marranca, “Robert Wilson, Byrd Hoffman School for Byrds,” in The Theatre of Images ed., introductory essays, by Marranca (New York, 1977), 43 and 40.
23 Ibid., 48.
24 Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt, 1978), 271.
25 Ibid.
26 Robert Wilson, 1970 interview with Stefan Brecht; Ibid., 29.
27. Production Notes on The King of Spain; Ibid., 223.
28 Billington, The Guardian.
29 Eric Shorter, “Hamlet without the Bard,” The Daily Telegraph, 4 November 1987, 16.
30 Statement on Hamletmachine, Almeida program.
31 Shorter, The Daily Telegraph.
32 As Denis Calandra points out, Müller applauds Antonin Artaud’s disturbance of “business as usual” in the theatre; see New German Dramatists (London, 1983), 128.
33 David E.Wellbery praises this scene as one of Müller’s “most memorable” evocations of the “link between domination and phantasms of authority,” and as a dramatic fusion of “extremes of parody and ritual seriousness”: “Postmodernism Europe: On Recent German Writing,” in The Postmodern Moment: A Handbook of Contemporary Innovation in the Arts, ed. Stanley Trachtenberg (Westport, CT: 1985), 236. Somewhat similarly, Wellbery praises the “elaborate and uncanny dance of male and female identity” in Hamletmachine (237). Considered on the page, Müller’s naked female clones of Marx, Lenin, and Mao appear a rather obvious joke. Significantly, Wilson’s production made no attempt to revive this hackneyed visual reversal, transforming it into a more striking verbal contradiction as his three women “at table” fleetingly glide from their respective intonations— elocution-exercise, Southern belle, and Minnie Mouse—into Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist diction.
34 Quoted by Jackson, The Independent.
35 Quoted by Granlund, The Guardian.
36 Speech introducing Freud, in Brecht, The Theatre of Visions, 421.
37 Cynthia Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art (NewYork, 1987), 89.
38 Quoted by Goodman, 89.
39 I am thinking in particular of European and American sound poets. See Henri Chopin, Poésie sonore internationale (Paris, 1979), for a general introduction to their work.
40 John Gill discusses the visionary quality of Wilson and Cage in “Robert Wilson” Time Out, 4–11 November 1987, 31.
41 Nicholas Zurbrugg, “A Conversation with Allan,” Praxis M 16 (1987): 11. Vizents discusses developments in sound poetry at the Soundworks Festival during the 1986 Sydney Biennale.
1 Jean Baudrillard, quoted by Mike Gane in “Ironies of Postmodernism: Fate of Baudrillard’s Fatalism,” Economy and Society, 19 (1990): 331.
2 Arthur Kroker, The Possessed Individual: Technology and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan, 1992), 62.
3 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London: Macmillan, 1991), 111.
4 Marshall Berman, “Why modernism still matters.” in Modernity and Identity, ed. Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 45.
5 Jean Baudrillard, quoted in Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, ed. Mike Gane (London: Routledge, 1993), 166.
6 Ibid., 171.
7 Christopher Norris, “Lost in the Funhouse: Baudrillard and the Politics of Postmodernism,” in Postmodernism and Society, ed. Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi (London: Macmillan, 1990), 140.
8 Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, David Cook, Panic Encyclopedia: The Guide to the Postmodern Scene (London: Macmillan, 1989), 265.
9 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 419, emphasis in the original.
10 Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 140, 143.
11 For further information, contact David Blair, PO Box 174, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276. Richard Kadrey reviews WAX in MONDO 2000, (Summer 1992): 104–5, as “a new video-based artform” in which “video cinematography blossoms from new digital image-processing tools” (105), which takes narrative compression to “a whole new level,” attaining “the effect of a novel…in 85 retina-batteringminutes” (104). Discussing the conceptual and compositional advantages of current technology, Blair comments: “Fortunately, I discovered a non-linear editing system in New York that had been made available for artist use. The other artists had no idea what the hell they could use it for, but I went to see it, and realized this was exactly what I was trying to do. You could have 2000 pairs of digitised frames available, each pair representing the first and last frames of a shot. These were all lined up, and by pushing buttons, you could rearrange their order, like rearranging a collage on paper. Then you could order the machine to play the shots represented by these virtual stills, in the order they were arranged. Editing became so fast, it really was just like composition. And I could really try out every possible combination before I chose the sequence that I really wanted” (unpublished interview with the author, Sydney, 1992).
12 I discuss my concepts of the “B-effect” and the “C-effect” in more detail in The Parameters of Postmodernism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993).
13 “Postmodernism and Ethical Abdication,” Felix Guattari interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 116.
14 Dick Higgins, unpublished interview with the author, Barrytown, NY, July 5, 1993.
15 The concept of “Extreme Phenomena” appears in the title of Jean Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993). Baudrillard’s notes on delusion appear on page 1.
16 Gene Youngblood, “The New Renaissance: Art, Science and the Universal Machine” in The Computer Revolution and the Arts, ed. Richard L.Loveless (Tampa: University of Southern Florida Press, 1989), 14.
17 Ibid.
18 Marcel Janco, “Dada at Two Speeds” (1966), trans. Margaret Lipp, in Dadas on Art. ed. Lucy R.Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 37–38.
19 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 7.
20 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 74.
21 Ibid., 64.
22 Jean Baudrillard, “The Anorexic Ruins,” trans. David Antal, in Looking Back on the End of the World, ed. Dietmar Kamper and Christopher Wulf (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 43.
23 I elaborate my reservations regarding Jameson’s accounts of postmodern culture in “Jameson’s Complaint: Video Art and the intertextual ‘time-wall,’” reprinted in this volume, and question Huyssen’s interpretation of the impact of mass-mediaculture in The Parameters of Postmodernism, 129–37.
24 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Photography,” Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg (1993), in Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg (London: Sage, 1997), 32–42.
25 See Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968). The other prime “panic” cartographers of the postmodern condition are of course Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, and David Cook, authors of the alarming Panic Encyclopedia (London: Macmillan, 1989).
26 See Stéphane Mallarmé, “‘Music and Literature” (1894), in Debussy’s “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’,” ed. William W.Austin (New York: Norton, 1970), 113.
27 Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Photography,” 37.
28 Ibid,, 39. Barthes discusses punctum in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
29 Marcel Proust, “John Ruskin,” in Mélanges (1900–1908), collected in Contre SainteBeuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 129.
30 Edward Dorn, Gúnslinger 1 & 2 (London: Fulcrum, 1970), 77.
31 Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Photography,” 41. See Baudrillard, Transparency of Evil, 174.
32 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 55.
33 Ibid., 82.
34 Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” 11 and 9.
35 Stjepan G.Mestrovic, The Coming Fin de Siècle: An Application of Durkheim’s Sociology to Modernity and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1991) 211–12.
36 Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Picador, 1986), 326.
37 Mestrovic, The Coming Fin de Siècle, 210.
38 Ibid., 212.
39 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 63.
40 Ibid., 66.
41 Ibid., 82.
42 Ibid., 75.
43 Ibid., 48.
44 Ibid., 44.
45 See Mestrovic, The Coming Fin de Siècle, 210–12; Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” trans. Régis Durand, in Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Benningon and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 82; Berman, “Why Modernism Still Matters,” 54; Linda Nicholson, “On the Barricades: Feminism, Politics, and Theory,” Postmodernism and Social Theory: The Debate over General Theory, ed. Steven Seidman and David G.Wagner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 87–91.
46 Tristan Tzara, “Lecture on Dada,” (1924) in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B.Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 386, 389.
47 Tzara, “Lecture on Dada,” (1924), 386–87.
48 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 68.
49 Ibid., 37.
50 Ibid., 34.
51 Ibid., 159.
52 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” (1971), in Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 159, emphasis in the original; Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 27; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse of Language, trans. A.M.Sheridan-Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 5; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Rhizome,” trans. John Johnson, in Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 50.
53 Walter Pater, “Conclusion” (1868), in Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 183–34.
54 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crisis in Poetry” (1880–95), trans. Bradford Cook, in Ellman and Feidelson, eds. Modern Tradition, 111.
55 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” (1919), in Ellmann and Feidelson, eds. Modern Tradition, 124 and 123.
56 Joris-Karl, Huysmans, Against Nature (1884), trans. Robert Baldick, (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1979), 198–99.
57 Jean Baudrillard, Les Stratégies Fatales (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1983).
58 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 38.
59 Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” 10, 12, 10, and 6.
60 Mestrovic, The Coming Fin de Siècle, 211.
61 William S.Burroughs, “On Freud and the Unconscious,” in Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Seaver Books, 1986), 119.
62 Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), 86.
63 See, e.g., Baudrillard’s allusions to microphysics, television screens, contact lenses, assorted networks and circuits, and the domain of Telecomputer Man in his Transparency of Evil
64 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 105.
65 Raoul Hausmann, “Dadaism and Today’s Avant-garde” The Times Literary Supplement (Sept. 3, 1964), 801.
66 Michel Foucault, “Preface” to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.Lane (NewYork: Viking, 1977), xii.
67 The term “astronauts of inner space” derives from Alexander Trocchi’s formulation “cosmonaut of inner space,” first used at the 1962 Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh, William S.Burroughs refers to this occasion in “Alex Trocchi, Cosmonaut of Inner Space,” his introduction to Trocchi’s Man at Leisure (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972), 9; emphasis in the original. Jeff Berner, ed., consequently titled a collection of avant-garde texts and manifestos Astronauts of Inner Space (San Francisco: Stolen Paper Review Editions, 1966).
68 Foucault, “Preface” to Anti-Oedipus, xii.
69 Henri Chopin, interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, in Henri Chopin, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg and Marlene Hall (Brisbane: Queensland College of Art Gallery, 1992), 41.
70 Bernard Heidsieck, “Poésure et Peintrie,” interview with Nathalie de Saint Phalle, Galeries Magazine 53 (Feb.-Mar. 1993): 54. See the encyclopedic catalog accompanying the exhibition “Poésure et Peintrie” (Marseilles: Musées de Marseilles-Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1993). Henry M.Sayre’s The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Jean-Yves Bosseur’s Sound and the Visual Arts: Intersections between Music and Plastic Arts Today, trans. Brian Holmes and Peter Carrier (Paris: Dis Voir, 1993) both similarly emphasize what Sayre terms “a modernism that might be said to be founded in dada and futurism” (xi), and what Bosseur associates with “experiments carried out by Futurists and Dadaists or, more recently, by John Cage” (5).
71 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 168.
72 Baudrillard further discusses his photography in “Cover Story Baudrillard,” interview with Serge Bramly, Galeries Magazine 53 (Feb.-Mar. 1993) 78–87, 125. See also Corrina Ferrari, “L’occhio esclusivo,” in the catalog La Biennale di Venezia: XLV Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte—Punti cardinali dell’arte (Venice: Marsilio, 1993), 574.
73 Jean Baudrillard, “Xerox and infinity,” trans. Agitac (London: Touchepas, 1988), unpaginated.
74 Diamanda Galas, “I Dominate my Electronics,” interview with Carl Heyward, Art Com 22 (1983): 23. Galas comments: “There is a stupid concept that electronics have us evolving to this unfeeling inhuman state. I dominate my electronics.”
75 Baudrillard, “Xerox and Infinity,” n.p.
76 The conclusion to this essay (first published as “Le Xerox et l’Infini,” in Traverses 44–5 [Sept. 1988]: 18–22) is modified in the version in Jean Baudrillard’s La Transparence du Mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 58–66 and in the version translated as Transparency of Evil, 51–59. An abbreviated variant of the essay’s original final lines (significantly lacking the affirmation, “Again this is interesting”), serves as conclusion to the essay “Superconductive Events,” Ibid., 36–43.
77 John Cage, letter to the Village Voice (Jan. 20, 1966), in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 167.
78 John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1958), in Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 198 3), 12. While Best and Kellner claim that Baudrillard’s scientific metaphors are often “not appropriate or particularly illuminating” (Postmodern Theory, 138) I would argue that the particularly illuminating qualities of Baudrillard’s thought is its poetic impetus and its heuristic momentum as thought self-consciously looking beyond the precise analysis that Best and Kellner would prefer.
79 Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” 6.
80 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 189.
81 Ibid., 202.
82 Nicholson, “On the Barricades” 89.
83 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 56.
84 Ibid., 38.
85 Ibid., 39.
86 Ibid., 125.
87 Ibid., 75.
88 Kathy Acker, interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, quoted in Zurbrugg, The Parameters of Postmodernism, 148.
89 Nicholson, “On the Barricades,” 89.
90 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 66.
91 Ibid., 45.
92 Ibid., 24.
93 Ibid., 14.
94 Ibid., 168.
95 Nicholson, “On the Barricades,” 89.
96 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 32.
97 Ibid., 137.
98 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 168.
99 Jean Baudrillard, interview with Catherine Francblin, Flash Art 130.
100 See “Baudrillard’s Amérique and the ‘Abyss of Modernity,’” reprinted in this volume.
101 Baudrillard, America, 5, 103.
102 See Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (1926), trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: Picador, 1980).
103 Acker, interview with Zurbrugg, Parameters of Postmodernism, 146.
104 Baudrillard, America, 36–37.
105 Ibid., 13.
106 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 63.
107 Ibid., 135.
108 Ibid., 187.
109 Baudrillard, America, 63.
110 Huysmans, Against Nature, 142.
111 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 182.
112 Berman, “Why Modernism Still Matters,” 54.
113 Ibid., 55; emphasis in the original.
114 Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” 81.
115 Ibid.
116 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 125.
117 Ibid., 22.
118 Burroughs, “On Coincidence,” The Adding Machine, 102; emphasis in the original.
119 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 61.
120 Ibid., 56.
121 Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” Image-Music-Text, 67.
122 Henri Chopin, “Open Letter to Aphonic Musicians,” trans. Jean Ratcliffe-Chopin, OU 33 (1968): 11.
123 Henri Chopin, Reply of July 17, 1979 to a questionnaire on “‘Advances’ and the Contemporary Avant-garde” Stereo Headphones 8–9-10 (1982). See Chopin’s more detailed consideration of the specific qualities of sound poetry in his history of the genre, Poésie Sonore Internationale (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1979). For more recent studies of the genre see Vincent Barras and Nicholas Zurbrugg, eds., Poésies Sonores (Geneva: Contrechamps, 1993).
124 Achille Bonito Oliva, unpaginated Press Release for the 45th Venice Biennale, 1993.
125 William S.Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (London: John Calder, 1981), 332.
126 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 39.
127 Ibid., 25.
128 Ibid., 81.
129 Ibid., 170.
130 Ibid., 135.
131 Baudrillard, “Xerox and Infinity” n.p.
132 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 37.
133 Ibid., 44.
134 Baudrillard, “The Anorexic Ruins,” 40.
135 Huysmans, Against Nature, 220.
136 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 80.
137 Michel Foucault, “The Birth of a World” (1969), interview with Jean-Michel Palmier, in Sylvère Lotringer, ed., Foucault Live: (Interviews, 1966–84), trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 60.
138 For further discussion of Situationism as an early postmodern movement see my article “‘Within a Budding Grove’: Pubescent Postmodernism and the Early Evergreen Review,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 no. 10 (Fall 1990): 150–61.
139 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo D.Carri, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, “The Exhibitors to the Public” (1912), in Chipp, Theories of a Modern Art, 297. Here, as in other Futurist manifestos, these artists claim to be “primitives” of the machine age.
140 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn(Glasgow: Collins, 1979), 239.
141 Chopin, Reply of July 17, 1979, 74.
142 Howard Rheingold, “New Tools for Thought: Mind-Extending Technology and Virtual Communities,” in Loveless, The Computer Revolution and the Arts, 23; emphasis in the original.
143 Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night, footnote 49; Rheingold, New Tools for Thought,” 23.
144 Baudrillard, “Xerox and Infinity,” n.p.
145 Youngblood, “The New Renaissance: Art, Science, and the Universal Machine,” 15; Morris Berman, “The Cybernetic Dream of the Twenty-first Century,” in Richard L. Loveless, ed., The Computer Revolution and the Arts (Tampa: University of Southern Florida Press, 1989), 94; emphasis in the original.
146 Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 28.
147 Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 67. I am thinking here of various kinds of experimental technological postmodern creativity which overtheorized analysis frequently marginalizes out of existence (refusing to recognize that which it cannot categorize) and which overfictionalized theory frequently exaggerates out of existence (as discourse supposedly beyond all “real” and “genuine” exchange). Qualitative recognition seems to offer the first step toward subsequent theoretical definition of such innovative practices. Discussing the sound poet Henri Chopin’s semi-abstract composition “La Peur” (collected on Chopin’s LP Audiopoems, TCS 106 [London: Tangent Records, 1971]) the composer Sten Hanson emphasizes its thematic validity and its technological intensity as a “40- minute poem about how man mobilises all his inner resources to analyse and fight his fear—of destruction, of living, of dying,” in which “The combination of the exactness of literature and the time manipulation of music makes it possible to penetrate and influence the listener more deeply and more strongly than any other artistic method” (Hanson, “Henri Chopin, the sound poet,” Stereo Headphones, 8–9-10 (1982): 16) In much the same way, the medievalist Paul Zumthor’s discussion of “La Peur” concludes: “Chopin’s sonic variations on the word ‘fear’ constitute, to my mind, one of the most powerful poems of our time” (Zumthor, “Une poésie de l’espace,” in Barras and Zurbrugg, Poésies Sonores, 12). My point here is that Hanson’s and Zumthor’s identification of qualitatively significant postmodern technological creativity both oversteps the reserva tions of cautious orthodox theory, and avoids the apocalyptic overstatement of speculative fictional assertion, laying tentative claim—as it were—to new discursive fields requiring further analysis. Without such initial sensitivity to emergent practices arising within—and making reference to—what Morris Berman terms “real situations” the terms of cultural analysis seem fated to become indistinguishable from the kind of self-contained simulacra that too many critics mistake for the substance of the postmodern condition, and the objects of cultural analysis—as Jameson discovers—“all turn out to be ‘the same’ in a peculiarly unhelpful way” (Jameson, “Reading without interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-text,” in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb et al. [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987], 222).
148 Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher” (1980), interview with Christian Delacampagne, in Lotringer, Foucault Live, 198.
149 Gane, Baudrillard Live, 125.
Aragon Louis, 1987. “Open Letter to André Breton (2 June 1971),” trans. Linda Moses with Jean-Paul Lavergné and George Ashley. Program for Robert Wilson’s production of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, Almeida Theatre, London.
Barthes Roland, 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Baudrillard Jean, 1990. Cool Memories, trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso.
——, 1993(a). Baudrillard Live, ed. Mike Gane. London: Routledge.
——, 1993(b). The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict. London: Verso.
——, 1993(c). “Cover Story: Jean Baudrillard,” interview with Serge Brainly, trans. Brian Holmes. Galeries Magazine no.53, February-March 1993.
——, 1997(a). “The Ecstasy of Photography,” interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg (1993), in Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact, ed. Zurbrugg. London: Sage.
——, 1994(a). The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner. Oxford: Polity Press.
——, 1997(b). “The Art of Disappearance,” trans. Nicholas Zurbrugg, in Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact, ed. Zurbrugg. London: Sage.
Benjamin Walter, 1974. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn. Glasgow: Collins.
Breton André, 1971. “What is Surrealism?” trans. David Gascoyne, in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B.Chipp. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Burroughs William S., 1983. Unpublished interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, Minneapolis, 6 October 1983.
——, 1985. “Robert Walker’s Spliced NewYork,” Aperture no. 101, Winter 1985.
——, 1986. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: Seaver Books.
——, 1991. “Robert Wilson,” in Robert Wilson’s Vision, ed, Trevor Fairbrother. New York Abrams.
——, 1992. Painting and Guns. New York: Hanuman.
Callas Peter, 1994. “Peter Callas Interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg,” Continuum 8, no.1, 1994.
Dorment Richard, 1994, “Towards the Unknown Realm,” review of Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych, The Daily Telegraph, 30 November 1994, 16.
Eluard Paul, 1984. Lady Love, trans. Samuel Beckett, in Beckett’s Collected Poems 1930– 1978, ed. Samuel Beckett. London: John Calder.
Guattari Félix, 1996. “Postmodernism and Ethical Abdication,” interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gysin Brion, 1973. “Cut-Ups Self-Explained,” in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, ed. Jan Herman. West Clover, VT: Something Else Press.
Stein Gertrude, 1939. Picasso. London: B.T.Batsford.
Virilio Paul, 1991. The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e).
——, 1996. “A Century of hyper-violence,” interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, Economy and Society 25, no. 1, 111–260.
Wilson Robert, 1991. Unpublished interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, Boston, 5 February 1991.
Youngblood Gene, 1989. “The New Renaissance: Art, Science and the Universal Machine,” in The Computer Revolution and the Arts, ed. Richard L.Loveless. Tampa: The University of South Florida Press.
1 Bill Viola, “Between How and Why,” in his Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings 1973–1994 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Ptress, 1995), 257.
2 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996), 103. All subsequent page references to this book appear as numbers within the text.
3 Bill Viola, interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, 1996. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent statements by Viola are taken from this interview.
4 Umberto Boccioni (with Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini), “The Exhibitors to the Public” (1912), trans. R.W.Flint, in Futurist Manifesotos, ed. Umberto Apollonio (London:Thames and Hudson, 1973), 49; emphasis mine, F.T.Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without Strings—Words-in-Freedom,” trans. R.W.Flint, in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 97.
5 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardeering (1937), (London:John Calder, 1982), 35.
6 William S.Burroughs, Nova Express (London:Panther, 1968), 62.
7 Walter Pater, Conclusion, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), in The Portable Victorian Reader, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Harmondsworth, England:Penguin, 1981), 631–32.
8 William S.Burroughs, “On Coincidence,” in his The Adding Machine:Collected Essays (London:john Calder, 1985), 135–37, 102; emphasis in the original.
9 Jean Baudrillard, “Fractal Theory” Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg (1990), in Baudrillard Live:Selected Interviews, ed. Mike Gane (London:Routledge, 1993), 168.
10. John Giorno, Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, 1996. All subsequent statements by Giorno are taken from this interview.
11 Viola, “In Response to Questions from Jörg Zutter,” in his Reasons, 251.
12 Viola, “The Porcupine and the Car,” and “Between How and Why,” in Reasons, pages 65, and 257, respectively.
13 Viola, “Between How and Why,” 257.
14 Dick Higgins, interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, 1993.
15 Viola, “Statement 1989,” in Reasons, 174.
16 Viola, “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?,” in Reasons, 106.
1 Warren Burt, ed., “Post-Modernism” issue, Sounds Australian 33 (1992).
2 Warren Burt, “Australian Experimental Music 1963–1990,” Leonardo Music Journal 1, 1(1991): 5–10.
3 Kenneth Gaburo, The Beauty of Irrelevant Music (unpaginated pamphlet) (La Jolla, CA: Lingua, 1976). Now available from Frog Peak Music, P.O.Box 1052, Lebanon, NH 03766, USA.
4 Warren Burt, “Do We Really Need More Arts Coverage?”, Sounds Australian 26 (1990):10–11.
5 Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination (London: Picador, 1984). Suzi Gablik, The Re-Enchantment of Art, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993). Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
6 Nicholas Zurbrugg, “Some Further Thoughts on Post-Modernism,” Sounds Australian 33 (1992): 25–27. All other Zurbrugg essays cited in this commentary are reprinted in this volume.
7 D.J.Enright, ed., The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945–1980 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1980).
8 Herbert Brun, Compositions, 3 LPs and unpaginated booklet (Champaign, IL: Non- Sequitur, 1983).
9 Denis Smalley, “The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic Era,” in The Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, ed., J.Paxuter et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 514–54.
10 Benjamin Boretz, “Interface, Part 2,” in Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics, ed. John Rahn (New York:Norton, 1994), 121–24.
11 Pi O, 24 Hours (Melbourne: Collective Effort Press, 1996).
12 Michel Chion, Credo Mambo, CD (Fontaine, France: Metamkine, 1992).
13 Roland Barthes, cited in Zurbrugg’s “The Limits of Intertextuality,” reprinted in this volume.
14 William Sethares, “Local Consonance and the Relationship Between Timbre and Scale,” Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 94, 3 (1993): 1218–28.
15 Mabel Todd, The Thinking Body (New York:Dance Horizons, 1972).
16 Kenneth Gaburo, The Beauty of Irrelevant Music, n.p.
17 Herbert Brun, Compositions, n.p.
18 Dave Sim, “Comics and the Mass Medium,” Cerebus Comics (Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1996–1997) issues 213–16.
19 Warren Burt, 39 Dissonant Etudes, CD (Sydney: Tall Poppies, 1996).
20 Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
21 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996), 13, 84.
22 John Cage, Roaratorio, CD (Mainz, Germany: Wergo, 1994).
23 John Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin, Audiotape (San Rafael, CA: Esalen Institute Tapes, 1971).
24 For an excellent analysis of the structure of Variations II, see Thomas DeLio, Circumscribing the Open Universe, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984).
25 John Cage, Silence (London: Marion Boyars, 1961).
26 Charles Seeger, Tractatus Esthetico-Semioticus in Current Thought in Musicology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976).