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Divestiture - A
Bruce Andrews



33 Pages



The choice: to be a catalog, or a cataloguer. Such examples can be multiplied. I only collect money, America is more astonishing. Husk. Cataloging phrasal fragments and reconfiguring verbal shells, Divestiture—A continues Andrews' method of anasemantic editorial composition begun in the mid-eighties: a montage of heterogeneous constellations of words culled from vast collections of textual material jotted down over time. We see only the feet of the dancers, the de-socializing of language, never their whole bodies. As editing is the reading moment: the multimplication of material in Divestiture—A yields a thresholding surplus, a hyper-trophy of enjoyments: its post-personalizing thrill bursting from an energizing strangeness of interferences, interruptions, and diastrophic collisions. Now, even the lacunae are eloquent—plausible verbal models are quite easy to formulate. The unlikely pairing of radically disjunctive contexts and syntactically coherent prose (preminiscent of spambot computational processing) is formed precisely in the affirmation of rupture & divestiture. To understand too much is to destroy: the containers are distorters inevitably. The horizon-value of Divestiture—A emphasizes a political economy of full textual dissemination: Andrews cedes the original contexts of the collected material and relinquishes authorial control over illusory semantic value—in its place: the ecstatic pleasures of egalitarian exchange and productive reader-editor dialogue. The sounds are not enough—'no address,' 'in distress.' Language speaks for itself. … I hate dealing with messages that may not have been intentionally transmitted delicacies of randomness.