Queer cryptograms, anarchist cyphers: decoding Dennis Cooper's The marbled swarm: a novel

Concentrating on Dennis Cooper’s latest work, The Marbled Swarm: A Novel, a fiendishly complex, experimental tale of murder and cannibalism in Cooper’s adopted home city of Paris, I show that both the subject of the text and its formal architecture are suspended between twin principles of secrecy and concealment. I argue that a consideration of these secret strategies allows us to perceive the implicit connections between Cooper’s writing and communities of queer dissidents and anarchist dissenters who used similar covert techniques in earlier centuries in order to persist in the face of public prosecution. Following an in-depth historical appraisal of these modes of communication, and their provenance in the back-streets of Paris, London and New York, I conclude by considering the contemporary significance of Cooper’s most recent nove

Diagramming Irréversible

Diagrammatically plots spatiality and the conjunction of time and space in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002) and contrasts his post-modern vision of twisted masculinity with W.B. Yeats' high modernist project

Somatic geometry: Jacques Tati's anarchist aesthetics

Often misunderstood as a byword for chaos, social disorder and the violent destruction of civilisation, perhaps the least bad description of anarchism might rather be an insistent demand for the liberation of the individual from artificially-imposed forms of authority. Critiques advanced by William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Prudhon, Mikael Bakunin and other leading lights of the anarchist movement, while no doubt disparate in nuance, are all erected upon the fundamental sovereignty of individual will: anarchism thus traditionally perceives systems of authority (the most pernicious of which is the state) as just so many regimes of control, hampering at every turn the expression of this will. Though this vision of anarchy has often surfaced in various art forms (Leo Tolstoy’s work, for instance, emphatically endorses the brand of anarchism espoused by Peter Kropotkin), few artists have proceeded beyond the mere thematic representation of anarchism and sought to introduce these principal currents of anarchistic thought into the very fundaments of the art work itself. Few anarchist artists use the formal composition of their work to proffer a critique of contemporary systems of control and the condition of human life under such systems. It is our contention here, however, that French auteur and comedian Jacques Tati (1907 – 1982) is one such artist. (i) In what follows we will elucidate his anarchist’s vision of the fate of man under authority

Passionate destruction, passionate creation: art and anarchy in the work of Dennis Cooper

The subject of this thesis is the life and work of the American writer Dennis Cooper. It is the first book-length appraisal of his career, which regards his poetry, prose, and innovative employment of new media from the perspective of his avowed anarchism. Situating his work within the context of American and French literary history and traditions of anarchist thought, I identify and pursue a dialectic that recurs in his work between, on the one hand, a commitment to subjective experience and individuality and, on the other, a desire for community and communion with others. Comprising five chapters, the work is roughly chronological in organization. I begin with an examination of Cooper’s early poetry collection Idols, in order to establish the basic features of an outlook that is hospitable to anarchist thought. I next consider Cooper’s attempts at microcommunity-building in Los Angeles and show that his efforts brought together a vibrant community of young poets off the Venice Beach boardwalk in the late 1970s. Staying on the West Coast, the third chapter compares Cooper’s work with that of San Francisco New Narrativists Robert Glück and Bruce Boone, in order to examine radical and reformist approaches to writing homosexuality in the wake of Gay Liberation. The penultimate chapter is devoted to Cooper’s most famous work, the five-novel series called the George Miles cycle: I uncover the intricate systems he uses to structure the cycle and ask what his experiments might mean for anarchist writing. Finally, I turn to Cooper’s largest project to date, his blog, and argue that he uses its simple apparatus to produce ideal conditions for the ephemeral appearance of an anarchist cyber-network

"Plus d'un Georges: Dennis Cooper and the work of mourning George Miles"

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Revisiting Pierre Guyotat’s Éden, éden, éden: splanchnology, writing, matter, and the devastation of ethics

In this article I revisit French avant-gardist Pierre Guyotat’s incendiary work Éden, Éden, Éden (1970), an infamous piece of writing that drew much interest when it was released and continues to inspire new generations of experimental prose stylists. Upon publication, Éden was seized and censored by the French Ministry for the Interior, which considered its lurid depiction of carnal acts a significant threat to the moral and ethical well-being of France’s youth. The ban and the struggle for its repeal became a cause celebre for many of France’s artists and writers, who condemned what they perceived to be the unjust repression of legitimate artistic expression. I argue that this episode determined the subsequent reception of the work, thenceforth regarded as merely an exercise in transgression, propelled against the limits of bourgeois and state-sanctioned conservativism. In this article I interrogate predominant claims that Éden is primarily a work of transgressive genius which aims at the subversion of conventional morality in the mode of the Marquis de Sade or Georges Bataille. Excoriating previous readings for their indolence and lack of attentiveness to the text, I contend that the text’s radical heart lies not in the inconsequential frisson of an occasional transgression but in Guyotat’s attempt to produce a coldly scientific, non-sentimentalised vision of the world as it is, devoid of anthropocentric ethics and morality

Missives from the fortress of uncertainty: an interview with Graham Harman

Placing the cross-hair of analysis over the postmodern notion that everything is language, Speculative Realism is a philosophy that instead considers the relations between objects. Here Graham Harman, one of the school's key proponents, discusses what such a non-anthropocentric description of reality allows

THE ANARCHO-QUEER COMMONS OF DENNIS COOPER'S BLOG, THE WEAKLINGS: A Brief History

On June 27, 2016 the gay poet and novelist, Dennis Cooper, tried to log into his popular blog The Weaklings as he had almost every day for the previous decade only to find that his account had been shut down and his blog removed. An automated message informed him that Google had revoked his access because he had violated Blogger’s “terms of service.” Cooper and his lawyer repeatedly asked Google for more information but for over a month no response was forthcoming. The incident quickly caught the attention of the international media, with articles appearing in venues such as the New Yorker, The Guardian, Le Figaro, Vox, and the New York Times. An online petition was also launched, demanding that Google reinstate the blog, and was ultimately signed by over four and a half thousand people

"The Sluts: Of Community on-the-line"

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Highway to Hell? Images of the American Road in Kelly Reichardt's<i>Old Joy</i>,<i>Wendy and Lucy</i>, and<i>Meek's Cutoff</i>

This article examines representations of the road in the work of independent Florida-born film director Kelly Reichardt. Reading Reichardt's so-called Oregon trilogy,Old Joy(2006),Wendy and Lucy(2008), andMeek's Cutoff(2010), alongside radical anti-freeway and anti-automobile movements from the Pacific Northwest, I argue that Reichardt's films offer critical engagements with the subject of the American road, interrogating the freedom and emancipation from social constraint it purportedly offers.</jats:p