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1. What Spam Means to Network Situationism

   In this essay we describe and theorize upon a spam data set hidden in the source code of HTML pages at the Bureau of Public Secrets, a website housing English translations of the Situationist manifestos and communiqués.

   We attempt to build upon a fruitful coincidence: what happens when internet interventionists, “code taggers” on a lucrative Spam mission, meet interventionists of the analog era, Situationist "wall taggers”? The textuality of both groups is aimed at reaching efficiency in a networked structure, be it socially or algorithmically coded; both engage a material and performative inscription so as to activate their discourse (i.e. to make it more efficient).

   We witness the action of a mode of writing modeled on graffiti and following the Situationist axiom: “Slogans To Be Spread Now By Every Means.” By focusing on the comparable gesture of verbal propagation (slogans and spam lexicon as social viruses) and the instructional performativity of these texts, we trace a set of theories based on the fiction that Spammers and Situationists have appropriated one another’s tactics.

   (Source: Authors' introduction)

   Scott Rettberg - 30.01.2013 - 21:06

2. The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability

   In a series of comparative essays on a range of texts embracing both high and popular culture from the early modern era to the contemporary period, The Ideology of Genrecounters both formalists and advocates of the "death of genre," arguing instead for the inevitability of genre as discursive mediation. At the same time, Beebee demonstrates that genres are inherently unstable because they are produced intertextually, by a system of differences without positive terms. In short, genre is the way texts get used. To deny that genres exist is to deny, in a sense, the possibility of reading; if genres exist, on the other hand, then they exist not as essences but as differences, and thus those places within and between texts where genres "collide" reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy, ideology, and the use-value of language.

   (Source: Penn State University Press catalog copy)

   Ana Castello - 02.10.2018 - 17:57