‘The dream of a suitable political work of art,’ Rancière says during an
interview, ‘is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the
visible, the sayable and thinkable’ – the three essential regimes of his
thinking – ‘without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle’; instead
producing ‘meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful
situations.’ (Rancière 2004: 63) Dissensual rupture – which I interpret, or at
least envisage, as a formal activity – is inherently meaningful. ‘Interruption’
– a word that contains rupture – ‘is one of the fundamental devices of all
structuring,’ says Benjamin, a statement that has proved its efficacy in two
chapters of this study already, in contexts as different as the multi-systemic
theorizing of Lotman and the practical multiform book-making practices of Bill
Griffiths and Allen Fisher. (Benjamin 1970: 153) [i]
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Fontana
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of
Aesthetics. Rowe, William (Walton). ‘Violence and Form in Bill Griffiths’s Cycles’, in Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, forthcoming, 2015.
For those who can buy The
Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, or order it for
libraries, here are the places
Here is some book data:
eBook ISBN
978-3-319-34045-6
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-34045-6
Hardcover ISBN
978-3-319-34044-9
[i] I use this identification in
Chapters 4 and 9 of The Meaning of Form,
but the quote from Benjamin is one of the ‘theses’ that opens my book of poets’
prose Unfinish, to be published by
Veer. William Rowe, one of the editors at Veer (and much else!) prefers the
word ‘disjunction’ to ‘interruption’, explaining: ‘The act of interruption does
not bring a new ground to meaning into the frame, but on the contrary allows
itself eventually to be subsumed.’ (Rowe forthcoming 2015) I read ‘rupture’ in
the term, as my use here emphasizes, not intermission, as a synonym for
disjunction.
