Bob Perelman Feature

Andrew Klobucar

Bad Dreams

Sense as Censorship in Bob Perelman’s
«The Future of Memory»

As a clinical tool, psychoanalysis no longer dominates fields of consciousness study. Contemporary approaches to the nether-reaches of the unconscious tend to follow practices more akin to the work on dreams being developed at Maimonides Sleep Arts and Sciences in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, patients who suffer regularly from nightmares and sleep anxieties are literally being “trained” to convert their night-time angst into more positive and pleasant experiences. [1] Before bedding down for the night, patients receive formal instruction from the clinic’s specialists in how to control better the range of imagery and emotions their minds are able to produce. Medical attempts such as these to address the problem of nightmares directly seem somehow highly appropriate to our current psycho-social moment, where self-improvement remains less an etho-ontological question than a new level of physical work-out to be included with weight-loss, muscle toning and general athleticism. That said, Freud’s concept of the “dream-work” continues to afford specific insights into the relationship of language to subjectivity when most modern philosophical critiques still have difficulty defining either concept. The philosopher Robert P. Pippen, one of America’s pre-eminent writers on German idealism, has decided that even today, the prevailing “tone of post-Hegelian European thought and culture” remains one of “profound suspicion” concerning the one “notion central to the self-understanding and legitimation of the bourgeois form of life: the free, rational independent, reflective, self-determining subject.” [2] Pippen continues,

Nowadays, one has to get in the back of a rather long queue of European complainants to register an objection about any faith in such a conception or ideal. Moreover, although much of European modernism was inspired by a revolutionary consciousness and a hope for a rapid acceleration of the modern trajectory itself, such aspirations were often overshadowed by something darker, not just a critical reaction to the aspirations of modern subjectivity but something like a growing high culture of “bourgeois self-hatred.” [3]

As we can see, Pippen is not long into his analysis of modern philosophy and subjectivity before he finds it necessary to consult the language of psycho-analysis in order to frame better certain ideological and social contradictions germane to early 20th century European thought. It’s almost as if philosophical critique in and of itself is insufficient to capture the arguments completely, and, just as physicists need to posit the existence of dark matter in the universe to account for discrepancies in the measurement of cosmological mass and matter, philosophers and cultural theorists have at their disposal the even darker mysteries of the subjective unconscious to help deal with the discontinuities of modern thought. Psychoanalysis, of course, is not the only discipline to explore the value of absence or negation in analysis. Philosopher Galen Strawson’s uniquely materialist-derived metaphysics of the self exemplifies a similar approach to the problem, arguing that the very limits of empiricism concerning human subjectivity logically posits a much broader, far more expansive structure of the self than is currently visible via the light of the physical sciences. For Strawson, another level of matter and experience is clearly at work here, and its lack of definition in language constitutes no real barrier to its conception. In fact, it may be one of its core attributes. “Philosophy, like science, Strawson notes, “aims to say how things are in reality, and conflict with ordinary thought and language is no more an objection to a philosophical theory than a scientific one.” [4]

Pippen certainly agrees; for him, however, a psychologised “culture of bourgeois self-hatred” is not especially enabling with respect to problems in modern subjectivity. More likely, it tends to hinder philosophy’s discursive attempts to focus on these issues. Yet, it is precisely this attitude of profound suspicion against rationalised self-determination and its attendant interest in aesthetic forms that makes Freudian perspectives on interpretation and analysis of consistent use when confronted with some of modernity’s more complex and textually challenging literary works. Freud made it clear to his readers from the outset of his work on dreams that their inherent resistance to verbal interpretation is valuable, in part, because it demonstrates alternative modes of reasoning independent from what might be considered a traditional or rhetorical framework of logical expression. Few cognitive attributes, Freud argued, could better demonstrate the importance of interpretation as a dynamic process of interpersonal engagement, where the very notion of a polysemantic challenge to intelligibility appears wholly methodological. Accordingly, that which is left out, erased, or censored by the cognizant subject inevitably reveals a determinant will of its own. Here, Freud quickly cautions the reader not to take the concept of dream censorship “too anthropomorphically, … pictur[ing] the ‘censor of dreams’ as a severe little manikin or a spirit living in a closet in the brain and there discharging his office; … for the time being it is nothing more than a serviceable term for describing a dynamic relation. The word does not prevent our asking by what purposes this influence is exercised and against what purposes it is directed.” [5] There is thus in the dream-work, despite or perhaps because of its semantic ambiguity, a kind of logic in play, to which the practice of interpretation can be usefully applied. In fact, faced with any particularly opaque imaginative construct, such as we might find in an experimental work of art, one would do well to consider closely Freud’s arguments over a century ago that dreams, neuroses, etc. have a certain “sense” — that the very concept of sense is much more variable than we tend to allow.

In a poem published originally as part of a miniature compilation entitled “Fake Dreams,” Bob Perelman explores similar issues with respect to language and its capacity to inspire a dynamic relation in meaning, as opposed to a more stable sense of fixed verbal references or discursive genres. It is not just an interest, however parodic, in surrealist imagery and sci-fi B movie plots that informs the work, but also a clear intent to demonstrate some of the more complex and inherently political characteristics of the relationship between writing formats and the interpretative practices they help generate. Working in this particular example (“The Game”) in dialogue with a close contemporary, the San Francisco writer Lyn Hejinian, Perelman well conveys the distinct historico-ideological urgency particular to the contemporary poet’s social and cultural position in the current era through the following narrative:

Soon I’m standing on the grass
near home, which is set amid
an array of terraced gardens. Other
people are there, including T. Three
times in quick succession a terrific
thunderous roar fills the air and
the ground rumbles and shakes. We
all know then that hundreds of
miles away great monsters have emerged
from the ground. They are reptilian
but insect-like, giant ants with nimble
alligator limbs. It is comforting to
know they are “hundreds, maybe thousands”
of miles away, but eventually they
will come; it’s common knowledge that
they particularly hate poets. Their most
fearsome posture is when they arrange
themselves into words. They can get
us at a distance that way.
We talk nervously, trying to inhabit
our seconds with the timbres of
our voices; we make long sentences;
we gesture and laugh as accurately
as we can. Timing is crucial. [6]

Indeed, “timing is crucial,” for the slightest pause or break in verbal logic may provoke in the narrator the much feared cultural label of poet. To prevent this identification, the narrator is forced to simulate the semantic patterns of verbal prose. “Long sentences” in tandem with transparent gestures become politically useful; anything remotely ambiguous or suggesting associative, semantically obscure meanings — what Freud might describe as the use of language in service to the process of interpretation — is to be avoided for fear of contesting what proscribed ideological aims and values the monsters may represent. This oral performance of language in Perelman’s dream narration at first seems to follow a kind of Romantic inversion of conventional communication categories, reversing the usual social roles of art and speech by assigning the latter a kind of theatrical opacity in everyday use and poetry a heightened level of symbolic exchange. We assume, for example, that the poets, left to their own devices, were speaking more openly and with greater meaning, if in code, anticipating prose as a kind of cloaking device to be used only when communication is suddenly threatened or endangered.

Perelman’s ironically poised fearful mimicry, published in print in his 1998 collection The Future of Memory (Roof Books), follows a long, surprisingly consistent genealogy in poetic experimentation that has at least since the late 19th century continued to explore how meaning in writing might be augmented aesthetically through formal constraints, for example vocabulary, sentence mechanics, visual representation, etc. In fact, as poets commonly associated with the Language Movement, Perelman and Hejinian carry forward many earlier constructive experiments in language by poets like Stephan Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, where the material elements of grammar, syntax, and typographical presentation are similarly invoked to question the overall capacity of language to operate instrumentally in service to the ideas or concepts inspiring its use. Barrett Watten makes explicit the historical relationship between these different poetry lineages, identifying Williams, for example, as “an important precursor of Language School Aesthetics.” [7] In Spring and All (1923), Watten locates what he calls a particularly “generative … moment of self-negating self-disclosure,” where the technique of Williams’s language uniquely foregrounds “the gaps and fissures that make transparent communication both impossible and deeply desirable.” [8] The specific semantic relationships that Williams builds seem thus on one level firmly enmeshed in many of the same philosophical contradictions associated with modern subjectivity. If there are ideologico-historical objectives informing the development of the poet’s thoughts and ideas, their transcendental distinction from the methods and techniques employed to render them remains unviable. As Watten notes, “[s]omething is turning him away from his instrumental purposes, drawing him back to himself; he insists on finding this gap or fissure in the texture of his thinking.” [9]

Deeply wary of the metaphysical “appearance” of meaning in modern writing, experimental movements in poetry have followed, albeit more tendentiously than cultural theory, the general modern aesthetic support of philosophical materialism, looking for meaning in the details of coherence rather than cosmological abstractions, in the evidence of pattern rather than unity. This shift in ontology, in other words, creates a kind of spectrum of aesthetic relationships to language. For such writers, the particular elements of writing, whether grammatical, visual or even technological, signify, not the representation of things or objects in the world, so much as a specific semantic relationship that language might have with them. For each writer, we might say that language represents a kind of framework for understanding how objects literally become objects.

Such elements are available throughout Perelman’s poetry, but they are particularly acute in his framework of the poem as dream-work, where they become key factors in the ongoing interplay between symbolic frameworks, ideology and knowledge construction that informs his writing practice. In his paper, “The New and its Reproductive Practices,” written for the 2003 annual conference of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, Perelman interestingly compares his revisionary composition of poetic forms to an “orthopractic” challenge to accepted traditions and beliefs within institutional religion. Orthopraxy, where an acolyte aims to reproduce the actual experience of sacred meaning, invokes a historically poignant antagonism to “orthodoxy,” where, by contrast, pre-established teachings and truths are ritualistically conveyed. The struggle plays remarkably well to the dualistic role language itself plays in modern poetics as both a means to invoke active processes of literary interpretation and inquiry and also the symbolic documentation of its canons and principles. “Isn’t innovative poetry permanently orthopractic, challenging prior poetic orthodoxies,” Perelman wonders, “[o]r has that orthopractic challenge become an orthodoxy?” [10]

Perelman’s question is valuable, for not only does it echo the historical resonance particular to modern literature’s revisionary lineages in aesthetic formalism, it pauses to reflect on their possible ideologico-historical fulfilment. But what does it mean to suggest that literary practices emphasizing process over generic formats or models can, in fact, evolve to evoke their own standards of interpretation and assessment? It would be reductive to interpret Perelman’s query as merely a critique of specific orthopractic movements that at some point retreat from the edges of cultural innovation and experiment to embrace a more conventional respect for tradition and history. Rather Perelman may actually be inviting us to consider the more radical possibility of an historical moment in which orthodoxy itself has become for the most part culturally unmentionable, much less measurable, as an explicit set of standards or values. Subsequently Perelman’s own practice as a poet posits a much more complex cultural role for experimental writing in general within a social milieu that is “permanently orthopractic.”

Risking further references to bourgeois self-hatred, it is tempting to classify this situation as general to contemporary western political economies, where innovation and exchange as process-based aims are heralded as infinitely more valuable than tradition and ritual. The very precepts of consumer capitalism, such as they can be defined, understand the concept of assessment first and foremost as an applied competency rather than an independent standard of measure. It was this specific consequence of capitalist ideology that Marx is addressing in his famous diagnosis of bourgeois culture as a uniquely ahistorical condition — one where, “[a]ll fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable practices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.” [11] Such are the very circumstances paraphrased by Perelman in his question concerning the “orthopractic challenge” and whether it can be considered a new form of orthodoxy. Marx would likely agree that the modern “liberal” sensibility remains by definition orthopractic in its embrace of the market as the primary framework of all social relations. It’s interesting to note, in fact, that, for both Perelman and Marx, the abandonment of orthodoxy begins with the modern subject’s “compulsion” to address the material world. For Marx, we must remember, it is not an abstract ideological aim of capital to forgo the holy for the profane, but rather the conditions of materiality itself that prevents any “real” permanence in either history or knowledge from taking shape. The threat of change, however radical or subtle, whether revolutionary or reformist, remains a constant factor embedded in all historical moments. Capitalism merely exploits this dynamic in order to maintain its economic and ideological hegemony as thoroughly and as systematically as it possibly can. It is here, accordingly, at this particular nexus between our physical compulsions as to address the world around us — our wants, our desires, etc., and capitalism’s projected values and rationalisations that the primary social contradictions of modernity are played out over the course of the everyday. We must live as if there is orthodoxy, as if our labour and social aims are rational beyond our immediate circumstances, while simultaneously embracing an orthopractic relationship to all concepts of the past as a locus of shared values and social mores.

For this reason, history’s ideologico-political influence, as Perelman realises, does not disappear, but becomes instead increasingly oblique, at times, even spectral, leading us neatly back to Freud’s landmark emphasis in modern criticism on symbolic communication as an inherently relational (often unconscious) framework. In Freud, for whom the symbolic real seems best understood as a kind of ongoing, post-traumatic exercise in cognitive intervention, we find the concept of orthodoxy formally subordinated at the very level of language itself. Whatever cultural learning/interpretation we may invoke subjectively as ritual or belief can only appear symptomatically as a sign of repressed determination and/or desire. Orthodoxy’s function within this context cannot be said to inspire a sense of universal value, so much as to reveal the presence of certain unconscious, and therefore unrealised, aspirations. The subject thus appears by definition only partially cognizant, while his or her orthodox tendencies continue to prohibit further steps toward self-realisation. It may be worthwhile to point out here how the primary ideological frameworks available to interpret such signs offer surprisingly consistent results: for the Right, principles of social intervention tend to conceal an intense obligation to derive order and meaning from some primordial act of violence; for the Left, value originates in a condition of ressentiment — in other words, some deep-seated obligation to avenge or retaliate for prior injustices or to return to order and stability from a state under siege. Regardless of ideological orientation, the concept of ritual finds itself resituated at best as that vaguely irritating psycho-social habit one must tolerate if a personal relationship is to endure (he’s interesting, but don’t get him started on … ). At worst, these qualities manifest themselves as forms of compulsive behaviour.

Both ends of the ideological spectrum appear throughout Perelman’s “Fake Dreams” series, invoking similar moments in language where orthodoxy emerges, if briefly, not as institution, but rather as symptom, posing a very different relationship to writing conceived as a revisionary practice. Again, this dialogue is particularly apparent in “The Game,” where the narrator’s stance — indeed, the very act of positioning oneself - constitutes one of the primary conflicts in the poem. An atmosphere of danger and threat permeates the entire narrative; sporadic acts of violence seem imminent: “a terrific / thunderous roar fills the air and / the ground rumbles and shakes.” We are invited as readers to imagine an impending catastrophe, yet the images that follow seem ultimately artificial and somehow unconvincing; cliché tropes derived from what’s left of our collective imagination at the end of the 20th century, i.e., fragments culled from half-remembered science fiction films, where the various villains quickly blend into each other.

… Monsters have emerged
from the ground; They are reptilian
but insect-like, giant ants with nimble
alligator limbs. It is comforting to
know they are “hundreds, maybe thousands”
of miles away, …

There is little consistency in the images, and the narrative is fraught with contradiction, evoking a hallucinogenic haze of vaguely defined fear. Even the creatures’ methods of attack suggest a kind of aporia in the poem, where the poets are left to fend off language, rather than use it: the monsters’ “most / fearsome posture is when they arrange / themselves into words,” the poem continues, “they can get us / at a distance that way.”

What mode of resistance is left for these poets, Perelman seems to be asking, save for carefully administered moments of temporary integration or assimilation? In this scenario, to survive, writers must learn how to disguise their language in order to keep what menaces they imagine to threaten their practices hidden or undisclosed. This is not the stance of a writer who finds his or her language diminished in power, inviting a subsequent search for a new method or practice, as one might expect to happen within more traditional engagements with revisionary or avant-garde work. Rather, just the opposite is happening; language continues to occupy a place of power in the poem, yet it is at a level where no amount of writerly expertise can completely possess it. In Perelman’s poignant lexical nightmare, the poets are running from words, not revelling in them: “the power of writing / in this particular game is starting / to feel, shall we say, illusory.” [12] The Romantic vision of the pen as sword has been effectively transposed into the blank page as a kind of shield. The poem literally begins with Perelman’s alter-ego as narrator surrounded by numerous desktop computers in his “academic office,” on which he plays a vaguely defined electronic game that involves typing random words over simulated cities to various effects, most of them destructive. The word “play,” for example, causes one part of the animated city to blow up. The word “guilt,” however, initiates the appearance of a “verdant” forest in another “neighbourhood”. Even here, the use of language appears first and foremost as puzzle, a “game” to be engaged and possibly learned as any other riddle or conundrum. Yet, despite the narrator’s supposed proficiency as an “academic,” a true competency never seems to emerge. One immediately senses while reading through the work, in fact, that the odds are in favour of the game, not the player — in other words, language will continue to afford the writer, not so much a means for achievement, as one of its more potent obstacles. There are thus no clear endpoints in this competition. Just as the menaces remain undefined, so, too, do any positive, wilful objectives. If there are desires to be met in this work, they, like all other imagined orthodox beliefs or visions, will remain effectively suppressed and unrealised.

This is not to suggest that Perelman’s work in this volume betrays a scepticism concerning poetry’s ultimate historico-political value. Far from it. The scenes, taken either individually or collectively, continue to remind us that such forays into alternative forms of communication and reasoning are never undertaken without some kind of social risk — that the very foundation of ideological hegemonies depend to a large extent on maintaining strict parameters, not just of history’s content (the objects of enquiry), but also the various methods of scrutiny used to identify them. For this reason, silence is not an option — especially if one’s survival(whether social or historical) is to include any key attributes of modern subjectivity like self-reflection and self-determination. Abandoning the conflicts endemic to language use may deter the “monsters” from overtly attacking with their own words and whatever ideological narratives such words may imply, but repressed anxieties due to self-censorship have a tendency to return eventually to the surface. Thus we see, perhaps, the clearest rendering of some of the more important limits informing Perelman’s work. Throughout The Future of Memory, Perelman presents his narrators (and readers) constantly tarrying between language’s unspoken meanings/objectives and its fundamental incapacity to signify beyond its own formal (and material) constraints as a symbolic medium. “We were eager,” Perelman writes in another dream,

to prove syntax was not mere
vanity and that bodies could use
it to resist the tyranny of

elemental words. And wouldn’t it be
nice to get knowledge and pleasure

on the same page. [13]

In fact, one might say the self is challenged continuously in this context to embody language as a mode of evading designation, rather than facilitating it — much in the same way that O.J. Simpson attempted to embody both verdicts in his double murder case by publishing his own (ghost-written) hypothetical history of the homicide entitled If I Did It: Confessions of a Killer (Beaufort Press, 2007). Under the often paradoxical letter of the law, he was acquitted of the charge of murder, but found liable for the death of one victim, Ron Goldman, and the unlawful battery of both (Goldman and Simpson’s ex-spouse Nicole Brown Simpson). When subjectivity constitutes, at least on the material level, a kind of effect or symptom of language, the self can only respond with one hypothetical situation after another: If I could talk, this is what I would say or If I were this person you were expecting, I’d do this… .In a similar fashion, the poetics behind Perelman’s The Future of Memory seem most poignant when they successfully belie his own self-identification as a poet — usually by re-casting such aspirations as just one set of imaginary roles among the myriad language is able to dream up for him. Specific lines from “To the Future,” the piece most aptly considered the title poem of the volume, capture this vulnerability particularly well:

Last night I caught a fragile
glimpse of the writing surface of
dreams: it was like a sheet
of water I could feel as
an edge my body interrupted; I
was in a pool, sticking out,
and when I wanted anything, felt
desire as the words say then
the edge would disappear — it would
be the same temperature as me and
I’d find myself back in the
story. Which was? Something about getting
published. … [14]

What better way to understand the relationship of the material world to the symbolic order than here metaphorically as a physical body “interrupting” language, “the writing surface of dreams.” Half submerged, half exposed, as if in a pool of water, the body not only remains distinct from language, but actively disrupts it, as if the two elements of the self (its physicality and imaginative faculties) somehow cancel each other out. At the same time, subjectivity itself is dependent upon both components being fully integrated, a factor most apparent at the level of personal desire. It is especially significant in this text that, just as the body interrupts language as a kind of mediating plane, the image of a water-pool’s surface calls to mind language’s comparable tendency to bisect the body, hiding the self from the self: specifically here the lower body and its association with desire from the upper body’s field of vision and capacity to reason. Desire signifies in this context both subjective yearnings and also the return of the repressed; yet, it plays an essential role in building an integrity of sorts, however impermanent, where the “edge” between the self and language literally disappears, allowing one’s aims and objectives to reappear — become less hypothetical and more expressible. The poet finds himself in this case, “back in the story. Which was?” he asks himself, “Something about getting published.”

The specific gestures and grammatical constraints Perelman addresses throughout the poem, the composition patterns he uses, in short, his objective approach to language begets his own anxiety concerning just what is and what is not acceptable beyond the hypotheses of sense we regularly inhabit throughout the day-to-day. In this way, The Future of Memory recalls the historically radical nature of dreams in general as both objects of knowledge and modes of interpretation, reminding us how, post-Freud, the structure of the “dream-work” continues to provide a startlingly poignant approach to conceptualising the relationship of the self to subjectivity via language. Perelman’s “Fake Dreams” series specifically places the reader in the interpretative position of the analyst, who, as with Freud and his patients, has limited access to any ontological substance behind the words being shared. Instead, we have only the evidence language affords us, which, in turn, speaks first to the poem as a powerful, yet imaginary, work — one that does that not decipher, so much as deceive with respect to the myriad psycho-social spheres that constitute a single life experience.

Such parallels between the dream-work and the “dream series” are not merely conceptual; the two works reveal remarkably similar structural relationships as well. Consequently, as with Freud’s dream-work, we must similarly be wary of interpreting Perelman’s writing “too anthropomorphically,” of seeing the author as our own “severe little manikin or . . . spirit” hiding behind the work’s various narrators. Rather, each poem seems best interpreted objectively, as data to be integrated into a new case study, invoking meaning through constraint and where possible whatever symbolism can be assigned to the images that subsequently emerge. As with the “pretence” to dialogue invoked in “The Game,” timing here is also crucial if interpretation is to proceed. Proper analysis depends upon close attention to what the poem-as-dream does not tell us, with an especial focus on what its imagery is unable to convey. “The page is no one’s” Perelman tells us in his humorous extension of The Illiad (“The Illiad, Continued”). Any expectations of somehow capturing and transcribing our “ideas” must be jettisoned in favour of a much more complex interactive approach to understanding the object in question. The meaning behind the dream remains valuable primarily by staying latent; what the dreamer offers is a much more indirect, procedural strategy of interpretation, part composition, part communication, part recreated, part forever hidden.

---

Works Cited

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. (1848). Trans. Samuel Moore from Marx/Engels Selected Works. Vol. One. Moscow: Progress Publishers,1969. Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1987, 2000. Web.

Perelman, Bob. The Future of Memory. New York: Roof Books, 1998. Print.

———. “The New and its Reproductive Practices.” Journal of Writing and Writing Courses. Vol.8.1 (April 2004). N. pag. Web.

Pippen, Robert P. The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.

Strawson, Galen. Selves: An essay in Revisionary Metaphysics.” New York: OUP, 2009. Print.

Talbot, Margaret. “Nightmare Scenario,” The New Yorker (16 Nov. 2009). Print.

Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2005. Print.

---

Notes

[1] Margaret Talbot, “Nightmare Scenario,” The New Yorker (16 Nov. 2009), p.43. Print.

[2] Robert P. Pippen, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, New York: Cambridge UP, 2005, p.5.

[3] Pippen, p.5.

[4] Galen Strawson, Selves: An essay in Revisionary Metaphysics,” Oxford: OUP, 2009. Print.

[5] Bob Perelman, “The New and its Reproductive Practices,” Journal of Writing and Writing Courses. Vol.8.1 (April 2004). N. pag. Web.

[6] Bob Perelman and Lyn Hejinian, “The Game,” The Future of Memory, New York: Roof Books, 1998, p. 53. Print.

[7] Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2005, p.xvi.

[8] Watten, p. xvi.

[9] Watten, p. xvi.

[10] Perelman, “The New and its Reproductive Practices.”

[11] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), trans. Samuel Moore, Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, pp. 98–137, Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1987, 2000.

[12] Perelman, p.51.

[13] Perelman, pp. 49–50.

[14] Perelman, p.39.

Andrew Klobucar is an assistant professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology where he teaches media arts and electronic literature. His work continues to traverse disciplinary borders between humanities and the information sciences, publishing new research on automated assessment technology and datamining in the literary arts. He is working on a book on lexicography, information aesthetics and modern poetics.