Fifty years ago, feminist critic and conceptualist Lucy Lippard argued that, sometime between 1966 and 1972, the art object dematerialized. Practices like conceptualism, minimalism, process art, land art, and performance, she suggested, offered the possibility of moving beyond the art object as commodity: “it seemed [emphasis ours] in 1969 that no one, not even a public greedy for novelty, would actually pay money… for a xerox sheet referring to an event past or never directly perceived… It seemed these artists would therefore be forcibly freed from the tyranny of a commodity status and market-orientation.”1 This dematerialization was not limited to the realm of visual art. Rather, the shift to the xerox sheet or to the barely-recorded event occurred, to varying degrees and in different ways, across a range of practices. From the mid-twentieth century onward, a broad canon of visual, literary, musical, and performance practices seemed to deemphasize their own material existences as or in objects, and to move into a disembodied realm of pure concept.
But Lippard’s insistence that there is something seeming about this dematerialization prefigures an array of well-known critiques of the dematerialization narrative that come later.2 Of course, the visual, literary, and performing arts have not been freed from the tyranny of their commodity status and market orientation – in fact, it can be argued that their commoditization has escalated precipitously over the past several decades, most recently with the rise of proprietary digital artwork, or NFT art, and AI-generated visual content. In this special issue, however, we ask a different question: by paying attention to how and whether art dematerialized and moved away from its existence as object, have we ignored the ways that its relations to embodiment and environment paradoxically intensified during this same historical period?
The critical narrative of art’s mid-century dematerialization is a familiar and oft-critiqued one, but it should not be cast aside. Let’s consider Fluxus artists’ embrace of the event score as an artistic form. A good example of the kind of art that exists, in Lippard’s words, as a “xerox sheet,” whose spare text records “an event past” or only potentially existing, the event score typically offers a brief, open-ended set of performance instructions. As art historian Natilee Harren notes, it is written “in colloquial language, composed to be performable by anyone.”3 Often combining mundane, everyday activities – making food, dripping water, or listening to a sound – with whimsical or impossible elements – imagining scenarios or conditions beyond the laws of physics – event scores are generally characterized by their unusual “marriage of the abstract and the concrete” (12). Harren explains that “event scores were not regarded as master scripts,” nor were they necessarily viewed by the artists who created them as the art object, the “visible and stable” material instantiation of the artistic work; instead, event scores were “simply one of many possible realizations” (7). Fluxus artists tended to embrace the openness of the event score, the iterative and changeable qualities of its instructions or procedures. The event score’s “turn to language” enabled the creation of an artwork that would be “perpetually remade for the present,” that would “remain in-becoming, forever as-yet” (12). As Harren argues, no single actualization of the event score, no single performance of its instructions, can be “prioritized over another, as each is, in its own right, correct and singular” (12).
Thus, in the case of the event score, there is (at least in theory) no object to buy and only a spare script to follow. There are infinite and infinitely open possibilities for performance – all of which sounds very much like the dematerialization of art! Yet as we turn to the specifics of the Fluxus event scores, one of the things that consistently comes into view is their attention to the particularities of subjectivity and concrete, material circumstance, and to the ways that these shift and change with every performance. We might look to one of the best-known texts to emerge from the Fluxus milieu, Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964, 1970). As literary critic Rachel Jane Carroll recently pointed out, in the still-in-print, bestselling 1970 version of Grapefruit, subtitled A Book of Instruction and Drawings and published by Simon & Schuster,4 Ono’s hundreds of playful instruction pieces are preceded by a solicitation. 5 Readers are asked to write an undirected “synopsis” of the book within a box drawn by Ono, and then to provide below it some information about themselves:
name:
weight:
sex:
colour:6
This data serves as an informational ex libris that records the bodily details not only of the owner of each specific copy of the book, but – more relevantly – of the person who might, in their capacity as a reader, carry out some of Ono’s instructions and perform her work. It’s important that the book begins with an invitation to record this information: when people with different names, weights, sexes, or, in the parlance of the time, “colour[s]” perform Ono’s procedures, the images and effects conjured by her spare instructions necessarily shift and change. This variability obviously occurs from one reader to the next, but it also occurs between readings – as Jane Malcolm discusses in her essay for this special issue, there are considerable differences, and intriguing similarities, between the ways someone might perform these pieces in kindergarten and the ways they would perform them in a college class, for example. As discrete readers change, grow, and evolve, so do their engagements with the procedures. An individual reader’s body may undergo significant alteration from their first encounter with Grapefruit to their last – Ono’s request that we record our bodily data before we read performance instructions like
Ride bicycles anywhere you can in
the concert hall.
Do not make any noise.
1962 Autumn7
suggests that she is interested in creating the potential for infinitely varied effects, in the continuous opening of additional dimensions of “formal possibilities,” of further valences and “potential meaning[s]” (Harren 12).
We note that procedural practices like the Fluxus event score are often cited as precedents for the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literary movements that sought to evacuate authorial subjectivity from the process of literary creation. Proponents of uncreative and conceptual writing saw in event scores and other instruction-based practices strategies for moving away from the models of individual poetic genius bequeathed to the present by Romanticism, and for finding new ways to write in the wake of the death of the author. Much of this work is invested in the creation of iterative, repeatable processes, and in carrying these processes to their fullest extremes – for example, by retyping, reassembling, or reframing found text.8 While such processes are often physically challenging, we observe that those who study instruction-based writing and art tend not to pay much attention to the crucial problem of where and how the instructions are carried out. As poet Divya Victor observes in her discussion of conceptual artist John Baldessari’s “punishment piece,” I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971, 2008), we are accustomed to thinking about the concept and the artist who invents it.9 But, she argues, we are less adept at thinking about who carries it out, or the conditions under which they labor. Victor points out that the students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design who were tasked by Baldessari with writing the phrase “I will not make any more boring art” all over the walls of their gallery in 1971 did so “over several days and under duress” (n.p.). “It is no surprise,” Victor writes, “that the labor which has been fetishized is that of the artist; the concept and not its executors” (n.p.).
Taking up the tantalizing suggestions offered by Ono, Victor, and many others, this special issue highlights the significance of agents or subjects executing procedures within the study of procedural writing and art. Our contention is that embodied, material circumstance is an under-examined but crucial aspect of instruction-based arts. Written in the tradition of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hasard/A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (1897), the procedural works studied here operate according to chance operations or constraints that seek to embody and perform the arbitrary by inserting randomness into the relationship between language and (self-)representation. Half a century after Mallarmé, John Cage similarly sought to defamiliarize compositional praxis through the use of procedure in order to, as Jena Osman notes, “make unpredictable discoveries apart from authorial intention.”10 In these and other works, the extra-textual world – the environmental and social contexts in which these discoveries unfold – plays a necessary role in the déroulement of the procedural. We can identify a long history of the poem-as-encounter, as a navigation of cultural space in all its unpredictability, from the figure of the flâneur in Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) or Le Spleen de Paris (1869), to the Situationists writing under the influence of psychogeography and the dérive, hoping to “emotionally disorient” themselves in their wanderings.11
This expanded procedural tradition inaugurates and celebrates unpredictable, even mechanical readerly experiences. But we note that it also remains bound to readers’ somatic realities, such that the procedural text or script necessarily exceeds itself, welcoming the body into the equation. Accordingly, the kinds of organic wandering invoked by Situationist unrest, for example, push writing toward performance and invoke the body in and as procedure. As the contributors to this special issue note, procedural texts, modes, or projects invite and produce a spectrum of physical, emotional, and intellectual outcomes. It matters who receives the calling card that calls out a racist remark, as Bellamy Mitchell argues in her essay on Adrian Piper. It matters who eats, digests, and expels the crystal, as Stephen Ross argues in his essay on CAConrad. It matters whose dreams are recorded, as Margaret Ronda argues in her essay on Suzanne Césaire, Lyn Hejinian, and Jackie Wang. In other words, it matters that the instructions land – it matters where and how the procedure is enacted, by whom and under what conditions. From and through these enactments, we can identify a spectrum of affective textures ranging from the whimsically sincere (see Keegan Cook Finberg and Jane Malcolm on Yoko Ono), to the lyrically collective (see Julia Bloch on Bernadette Mayer), to the joyful “yays” and ambivalent “okays” amid trauma (see Julie Funk on Porpentine Charity Heartscape), to the intimate (see Julia Polyk-O’Neill on Adrian Piper) and the recursively pleasurable (see Jena Osman on Cecilia Vicuña).
Because embodied procedures care, in a sense, who is performing them, any sustained attention to procedural practice and readership requires us to develop a critical vocabulary that describes how we read as embodied creatures, or how the body has a role to play in the ways we apprehend and/or enact instructions. A long history of (meta)physics and phenomenology already grounds our understanding of subjectivity as relative, relational, and experiential; thus, we are quick to recognize and appreciate the heterogeneity of readerly approaches. Yet it is difficult to escape the long-held culturally inscribed impulse to talk about the physical and the metaphysical as if they are two different ways to exist, as if a life of the mind can exist separately from the body, as if concept can exist apart from its material instantiations. The procedural work addressed in this issue reminds us again and again that we must be both mind and body always-already-at-the-same-time.12 Indeed, procedural work in the tradition of Fluxus remains highly attuned to our ambivalence toward mind-body integration and encourages readerly and agential attention to any and all discomfort, embarrassment, pleasure, sensory experience, etc. and even valorizes the somatic rhythms and aberrations that frame these experiences, in much the same way that Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and other musicians interested in procedural methods ask us to understand coughing, shuffling, noise, interruption, and any other kind of dissonance or environmental sound as (part of the) music.13
On this same spectrum, the procedural challenges both reader and agent to confront experiences of whimsy, emotional excess, and embarrassment, and to consider the ways that intentionally or ironically unserious work can be understood in a scholarly context. How do we use sincere, intellectual tools to read the deliberately unserious?14 Or how does a reading of the seemingly unserious provoke us to reflect on our hard-won systems of approach and politically-committed ways of reading? Much of the procedural work addressed here aims to invest serious critical attention in that which does not seem particularly serious at first glance – to view the casual, the unpredictable, or the incidental as pillars rather than noise, to invert the positive and negative space in somatic performance and experience. The procedural tradition frequently valorizes the unserious as transgression and as transgressive, and we note the challenge in engaging these works and their sensibilities – they often flummox our standard critical responses. As Ross demonstrates in his essay, the forms of dismissal that designate a text, an artistic work, or a performance as unserious or as merely playful are profoundly linked to issues of epistemic injustice: they allow us to draw a cordon sanitaire that separates the important, the intellectual, the conceptual from the merely silly. Not wishing to adopt merely impressionistic, experiential, or uncritical postures, the essays gathered here ask how we ought to enfold or integrate procedures that play (literally) on the spectrum of the absurd. At the same time, we are asked not to take too seriously any ritual or procedure that relishes the unserious – let it be silly, let it give pleasure.
To follow the instructions given to us by an event score, a procedural poem, an artistic work, or a game is to move beyond the sanctioned disciplinary protocols in literary studies. Scholars housed in English departments – not to be confused with literary studies as a whole – have recently been engaged in debating their objects and methods. For example, the first-ever double issue of PMLA, edited by Deidre Lynch and Evelyne Ender, examines the “migration of text – from books stored on library shelves to computer screens networked into searchable electronic databases.”15 The essays collected by Lynch and Ender explore the implications of this textual migration beyond literature as such for literary scholarship and its signature practice, close reading. Alongside this discussion of what constitutes a text available for analysis is a separate but related conversation about how we read: close reading is juxtaposed against computer-assisted distant reading, and “just” or “surface” reading is pitted against the depth-plumbing of ideology critique.16 While these debates meaningfully expand the array of texts we might study, as well as the range of critical postures available, they neither address nor illuminate the unique challenges posed by procedural works, which, in their push toward performance, entail the navigation of variable conditions. Procedural texts raise a different question entirely: what is “the text”? Where does it begin or end? How ought we analyze the parts of it that are not located on the xerox page, the parts of it that exist, in Lippard’s words, as “event past or never directly perceived”?
As the essays collected in this special issue demonstrate, procedural works require that we move beyond our ready-to-hand literary critical methods, that we engage with scholarship from disciplines like art history, media theory, performance studies, and philosophy. Not only must we read the text we have in front of us – the instructions created by the author – we should also analyze actual and potential attempts at enactment. This need to focus not only on instructions but also on outcomes and on the variables that affect them is helpfully theorized by the artist and scholar micha cárdenas in her book Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art and Digital Media. In order to explain her method of “algorithmic analysis,” cárdenas turns to cooking:
A recipe has variables and steps, just as an algorithm has variables and instructions. Think of the algorithm for cooking chicken: get the chicken, oil, spices, and a pan. Preheat the oven. Oil the pan, Put the chicken in the pan. Spice the chicken. Put the pan in the oven. The ingredients in the recipe correspond to the variables, and the steps correspond to the instructions, lines of code that describe how the variables are related.17
As cárdenas’s analogy makes clear, the same recipe does not always yield the same result. Even if we follow the instructions perfectly, elements of chance are always at play. cárdenas contends that scholars in the arts and humanities need conceptual tools that help us to understand how an apparently static set of instructions interacts with variable conditions, producing unpredictable effects. She offers algorithmic analysis as one such tool, which enables us to identify “components and actions,” to study “the social dynamics embedded in artworks” (7-8). This method does not aim toward “totalizing precision,” she explains; but it can be combined with others to help us describe “operations and operators,” in other words, to identify procedures, and to describe the highly variable ways that they shape potential action (7-8).
Elements of the unknown put pressure on our existing analytical methods: how should we discuss what does, will, might, or could happen when a set of instructions is carried out? Procedural texts, we observe, invite their readers, their audience, their recipients into a speculative practice. Our analysis does not stop with the words on the page, with the shape of the instructions that appear on the xerox sheet, or in the book, or on the screen. We also perform or imagine performing the instructions, engaging in processes of enactment and continuation that either exceed or are not usually sanctioned within literary criticism. More similar to reading a play, film script, or a musical score, procedural works ask that we project some fuller realization of the text. But unlike these other kinds of scripts and scores, the procedural leaves far more to the vagaries of chance. In postcolonial theorist Julietta Singh’s terms, we are “hopefully dispossessed of mastery.”18 Rather than imagining that the literary critic is an expert explainer, a uniquely privileged authority over the finite body of the text, we contend that the interpreter of a procedural text tends to find themself on a more even footing with any other possible player of the procedural game, whether that person is a kindergarten student, a casual reader, or a fellow artist who reinterprets a peer’s concept. The procedural tradition has, for the better part of seven decades, sought to value and welcome the non-specialist, and to enfold the broadest possible spectrum of subjectivities – this is why so many musicians, including Ono and Oliveros, first turned away from musical scores and toward written instructions. They wanted their work to be, in Harren’s words, “performable by anyone.” But, we argue that this does not represent a leveling of expertise that forms a flattened common ground, nor does it buttress the vague abstraction of the “general reader” who, in being no one, represents everyone. Instead, we insist that across its history the procedural tradition tends toward a valorization of the particularity of individual embodiment and of the heterogeneity of responses that arise as a result of even the simplest, most easily iterated instructions.
The essays in this special issue, individually and collectively, argue that embodiment and emplacement are key stakes within the proceduralist tradition. They identify Cecilia Vicuña, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, and Bernadette Mayer as key practitioners of proceduralist aesthetics, and they discuss the material relationships between textualities and bodies within poetry, performance, pedagogy, and playable media.
The special issue is grounded in two pairs of essays. In the first pairing, Keegan Cook Finberg and Jane Malcolm discuss Yoko Ono’s instructions. Both agree that it is imperative to read Ono’s Grapefruit (both the original 1964 bilingual edition and the substantially altered 1970 Simon and Schuster version) as poetry, not just as a collection of playful performance scores. Grapefruit occupies a middle space between the two that makes it challenging to interpret and understand, in the same way that Ono’s artistic work has been ambivalently understood either as Asian-American or as conceptual. Finberg’s essay reads Ono in light of discussions about intermedia in the sphere of the arts, and cultural assimilation more broadly, and suggests that Ono’s early work “offers a critique of genre and a theory of difference that anticipates later approaches to coalition building in feminist and ethnic studies.” Malcolm shares this understanding of Ono’s critique of genre and argues that “Ono’s event scores in particular, and procedural poetry more generally, present useful and productive challenges to the close reading apparatus that is fundamental to both our criticism and pedagogy because the processes and lived experiences her poems require invoke a realm of unknowable somatic gestures extrinsic to textuality as such.”
The second grounding pair of essays is comprised of Bellamy Mitchell’s and Julia Polyck-O’Neill’s discussions of Adrian Piper. These essays examine how Piper’s iterable procedures draw her audiences “into what she calls the indexical present,” with its collective and structural framework of white supremacy, which forms a matrix for first-person responsibility (Mitchell). Mitchell puts Piper’s (Calling) Card into conversation with its remediation by the performance/drag artist Vaginal (Crème) Davis, arguing that in highlighting the formulaic, iterative, and procedural character of the apology as genre, Piper and Davis do a kind of work that is “explosive or expository” because it reveals how whiteness structures social space. Similarly, Polyck-O’Neill examines how Piper presents “herself as the object for interpretation,” such that “her presence and her body itself become a source and kind of information.” Reading Piper’s Catalysis performances and her My Calling (Card) series within the milieu of linguistic conceptualism, Polyck-O’Neill suggests that Piper’s work is significantly material in the ways it connects embodied performances, audiences’ reactions and responses to them, and the archival documentation that these performances generate.
In the spirit of somatic procedure, this special issue does not offer a comprehensive bibliography of practitioners, but an idiosyncratic selection that highlights the tradition’s unpredictability and contingency. The other five essays here discuss a range of procedural projects and practices that move between the spaces of the gallery, the print book, and the online game.
Jena Osman’s experimental essay draws on poet-artist Cecilia Vicuña’s five-decade, multi-modal investigation of the khipu (or, following the Spanish spelling that Vicuña uses, quipu), an Indigenous communication technology from the Andean region of South America, in order to devise a non-linear reading procedure appropriate to (and adapted for) Amodern’s capacities for linking and scrolling. Her essay discusses the relationships between inscription and the body: from a single paragraph of printed text, Osman weaves a series of threads connecting the as-yet-undeciphered narrative khipus with contemporary imaging technologies: “Can you feel your fingers pushing the scroll wheel, tracing on the track pad, clicking on numbers, moving the text up and down the tablet?,” Osman asks. “Do you sense your eyes shifting back and forth as they take in word and image? Are you processing the data, waiting for it to click into place in a seamless flow? Are you following the thread as it’s been laid out for you? Or can you pull the thread and do something else with it?”
The next two essays are strictly concerned with the correlation between text and action: they discuss internal, bodily processes and functions, showing how particular procedural texts connect these somatic, involuntary processes to issues of justice. Stephen Ross’s essay offers a fascinating discussion of CAConrad’s recent experiments, focusing specifically on texts that result from following an elaborate procedure involving the consumption and expulsion of a healing crystal. Exploring the philosophical problem of epistemic injustice, Ross contends that Conrad’s poetry invites us to “escape the constraints of the neutral conception of reason,” and invest as heavily as possible in an ethically-coded perspective. Ross suggests that we approach Conrad’s poetry as a crystallized offering of what we do not know. In a related way, Julie Funk’s essay examines Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s interactive fiction With Those We Love Alive (2014), a Twine narrative. Funk shows how the procedural animates narrative practices in gaming, and how in this particular game, hormones function as a code that links the material textualities of the game and of our bodies. Building on cárdenas’s theorization of algorithmic analysis, and on critical code studies’ broader insistence that “coded text holds meaning beyond its immediate function,” Funk explores how the actions that we take within the game enable a “reparative encoding and decoding of hormone messages: the telling of new stories that readily attend to kinship as a product of hormone relations and resist the myth of progress as a product of labor by creating tactical inefficiencies.”
The final two essays examine procedural work attuned to biorhythms and rituals of daily living as functions of relationality and sociality. Julia Bloch’s essay on Bernadette Mayer raises the question of what lyric means in the context of the procedural. Discussing Mayer’s gallery installations alongside her poetry, Bloch takes on the truism that Mayer’s work consists in recording dailiness – she focuses on the social qualities of lyric expression and prosody in order to argue that Mayer’s projects register social, collective subjectivities, not merely personal ones. Finally, Margaret Ronda’s discussion of Jackie Wang and Lyn Hejinian’s procedural writing about sleep invites us to attend to the daily rhythms of wakefulness and slumber. Ronda shows that while a great deal of poetry – and much criticism – has turned to procedural techniques as means of cultivating attention and alertness to waking life, the more-or-less predictable ways in which we fall asleep have also garnered the attention of writers across a long tradition. Ronda turns to surrealists such as Suzanne Césaire, and to the contemporary poets Lyn Hejinian and Jackie Wang to argue for the significance of sleep and dreaming as embodied practices, colonized sites for unremunerated labor, and sources of poetic and political insight.
In the work that follows, our contributors carve out a space to theorize and expand the procedural tradition. Read together, we believe that the essays and interventions in this special issue offer the following polemical claims:
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1. Embodiment and emplacement are key stakes within the proceduralist tradition, which is attuned to the particularities of subjectivity and concrete, material circumstance.
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2. Readings of procedural work often ignore the significance of the agents or subjects executing procedures, to their detriment.
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3. The work of foundational practitioners such as Ono, Mayer, Piper, and Vicuña invokes the body in and as procedure.
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4. Procedural texts remind us that mind and body are inseparable.
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5. Critical engagement with procedural work encourages us to ask: What is “the text”? Where does it begin or end?
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6. The unfixed nature of procedural texts requires uncomfortable but necessary shifts in critical methods to accommodate their variability.
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7. Our systems of approach should place significance not only on instructions but on their infinitely diverse iterations and outcomes.
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8. Procedural texts invite their readers, their audience, and their recipients into a (pleasurable) speculative practice.
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9. This speculative practice values and welcomes the non-specialist.
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10. Procedural work invites reflection on what counts as serious and non-serious in a literary-critical and political context.
In the spirit of procedural iterativity, we hope this list of prompts will be taken up, tested out, scrutinized, and enjoyed in unpredictable and endlessly variable ways. We conclude with our own Ono-esque instructions:
Click on an article from the left-hand column.
Read it and consider its claims. Enact one of the procedures
quoted therein. Read another and do the same. Pause
occasionally to look out the window.
Stop when you are tired or bored.
Summer, 2023.
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966-1972. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xxi. ↩
See Terry Atkinson, ‘Concerning the Article “The Dematerialization of Art”’ (1968), in: Alexander Alberro & Blake Stimson (eds.), Conceptual Art. A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, MA & London 1999, 52-58; Owen J. Duffy, “The Politics of Immateriality and ‘The Dematerialization of Art.’” Dissertation https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4641/; Karen Pinkus, “Dematerialization: From Arte Povera to Cybermoney through Italian Thought.” diacritics 39.3 (2009) 63-75. ↩
Natilee Harren, Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020) 10. ↩
This version differs substantially from the bilingual version Ono self-published six years earlier in Japan, which was simply titled Grapefruit. ↩
Rachel Jane Carroll, “Whimsy as a Minoritarian Aesthetic.” (Presentation, Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, New Orleans, LA, November 3-6, 2022). ↩
Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instruction and Drawings. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.) n.p. ↩
Yoko Ono, “BICYCLE PIECE FOR ORCHESTRA,” in Grapefruit, n.p. ↩
See Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Judith Goldman, “Re-thinking ‘Non-retinal Literature’: Citation, ‘Radical Mimesis,’ and Phenomenologies of Reading in Conceptual Writing.” Postmodern Culture 22.1 (2011) n.p.; Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place, Notes on Conceptualisms (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). ↩
Divya Victor, Goodbye, John! (Brooklyn: Gauss PDF, 2012) n.p. ↩
Jena Osman, “Playing the World,” Jacket2, August 31, 2012 https://jacket2.org/article/playing-world. ↩
Guy Debord, “Situationist Manifesto 17 May 1960,” Internationale Situationiste No. 4, June (1960), Trans. Fabian Thompsett, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto.html. ↩
We are informed in our thinking by the work of disability studies scholars who use the term bodymind to critique the commonsense notion that the body and the mind are separate entities, and that the mind is superior to the body. See Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2017); Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018). ↩
See Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). ↩
See Gregory Laynor, The Making of Intermedia: John Cage to Yoko Ono, 1952-1972. (PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 2016). ↩
Deidre Lynch and Evelyne Ender, “Introduction: Time for Reading,” PMLA 133.5 (2018) 1073-1082. 1075. See also Deidre Lynch and Evelyne Ender, “Introduction: Reading Spaces,” PMLA 134.1 (2019) 9-17. ↩
For a helpful summary of these debates, see Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically.” Criticism 55.2 (2013) 233-277. ↩
micha cárdenas, Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2022) 7. ↩
Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018) 6. ↩
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