Fourteen reflective notes on my book, Of the Subcontract (2013), written as self-contained notes or meditations. Preceded by two reflective notes on the aesthetic and political stakes of conceptualist modes of poetry in our post-digital mediascape.
The concluding note:
"14. Since Fichte, the juridico-moral complex of intellectual property has depended on an idea-expression divide, which, for example, uses two different sets of laws—those of copyright and patent respectively—to distinguish proprietary rights over an expression from proprietary rights over an idea. What if we explored forms of poetic work, performed as acts of conceptualist (self) publishing, which choreographed a stage for writers and readers to collectively problematize the relationship of complexes like this to the work of poetry? Of the Subcontract and books like it try to do so by conceptually orbiting around histories, theories and practices that philologically stem from the Latin concept of the proprius—not least ideas of properness, property, individuation, singularization and 'one’s own'—whilst trying not to betray the presupposition that, 'Art is what makes life more interesting than art.'"
