Flarf & Tag Clouds

Dale Smith:

And also, and this is the part some won’t like, I’d like to know if flarf is not engaged in the production of tag clouds? Is not the stated purpose of flarf just this, to create tag clouds through “combination and remixing” outside of the contexts of discourse that provided meaningful space for the words in the first place? Flarf poems resist criticism because they resist meaning by voiding words of the contexts of their origin. If Google is the archive through which Flarfists meet with their own good minds to create a poetic vocabulary of “intensity” perhaps in order to “incite a feeling or a response” we need, certainly, “to invite the interrogation of that response or what induced it” to the table. As far as I can tell, it’s not that critics are just mean ole nasty cusses who want to dismiss flarf outright, but flarf builds into its practice resistance to the kind of argumentation necessary to produce meaningful commentary.

Comments

[Symbolic Efficiency « Op]

[...] at 12:01 am · Filed under Alex Davies (Blog Posts) Dale Smith, following up on a post of his I previously linked to: First of all, any misunderstandings in the “Tag Clouds” post result from a rapid-fire [...]