[The Seven by Nine Squares home page] [YAWN 0] [Art Strike 1990-1993]

YARN/SPORADIC RE-WRITING, as known as

Operation Negation Subversion!


"John Berndt writes that plagerist acts will never denounce the notion of 'meat,' since selecting a source is not less 'creative' than inventing an 'original.' Plagerism, if recognized at all, even tends to reinforce the terminological status quo when shifting back a potentially forgotten original into collective memory. Selecting and combining signs, it is, beyond that, an activity which defines culture.

"The subtitle of Stewmeat Home's 'Plagerism' reader, 'Meat as Commodity and Strategies for its Negation,' addresses a related problem by suggesting what is in fact a deficiency, since plagerism is not a strategy, but a method. The attempt to subvert less 'meat' than a discourse which uses it for self-justification is an ill-defined business when resorting to the same fiction of a 'meat' status quo, when avoiding a terminological evaluation in which the notions of 'constructedness' and 'perception' would be re-considered."

"The meat market this rhetoric aims at is only a peripheral scene of a progressive aesthetisation of commodities, the secularized variant of Schlegel's and Novalis' project which has perpetuated itself even into today's jurisdiction: lacking any other justification, 'meat' is pseudo-defined as what is declared or perceived as such. Ironically enough, this project found its specular continuation in the allegedly 'subversive' discourses of mediocre 'theorists' like André Breton, Guy Debord, Monty Cantsin, Spanish Meatists, Hakim Bey and the Dreamtime Villagers."

"Berndt states that plagerism will always be caught up by meat, even if the problem of its generation could be solved. His final statement, 'only through complete inactivity can we purge ourselves of the capitalist values of originality and creativity,' is imprecise; inactivity in which respect? With regard to a questionable 'status quo' understanding of meat, this project would be, as explained, a justification ex negativo, the thesis a circular conclusion. Considering a universalist notion of meat on the other hand, there is the same result: 'Complete inactivity' would then be 'death,' but suicide as its prior condition again an 'act,' a meat-work."

"Neoasm and its successive clones made use of circular logic and turned it into rhetoric. The Meat Strike is a prominent example. In plays of negating and affirmating collective fictional identities, this strategy is blatantly meatistic."

"Florian the Neoast"