What do you think?
Rate this book
On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless
Steven Zultanski's On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless is an irregular essay, or perhaps a prose poem, on the qualities of literature that absorb the attentions of readers and, in so doing, momentarily destabilize the psychic hold of the powerful (institutions and individuals) on the community of the ostensibly powerless that readership as such represents.
The 2018 publication of artist Simon Morris's press, Information as Material, is loosely structured in its textual flow but adheres to the outline of its concerns that appears on pages 8-9:
a. Power as delusional
b. Power as unable to crush the persevering spirit
i. the individual spirit
ii. the collective spirit
c. Power as non-existent
d. Power as a repressive force that fails to repress...
e. Power as unable to control youth
i. the transparency of adulthood
ii. the transparency of adolescence
f. Power as hiding a fatal weakness
i. that it doesn't know about
ii. that it knows about but misrecognizes
iii. that it knows about
g. Power as precariously built on the potential
reversibility of social positions
h. Power as threatened by intimacy
i. intimacy as corruption
ii. intimacy as grace
i. Power as stupid
i. and laughable
ii. and brutal
j. Power as already dead
i. the anger of the dead at the pride of the living
ii. as simply dead and gone
k. Power as not yet born or created
Information as Material (iam) was formally established in 2002 but has its roots in Simon Morris's self-published books of the late 1990s. Based in the North of England, iam operates as a collective of writer-editors and as an independent imprint that publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things.
The 2018 publication of artist Simon Morris's press, Information as Material, is loosely structured in its textual flow but adheres to the outline of its concerns that appears on pages 8-9:
a. Power as delusional
b. Power as unable to crush the persevering spirit
i. the individual spirit
ii. the collective spirit
c. Power as non-existent
d. Power as a repressive force that fails to repress...
e. Power as unable to control youth
i. the transparency of adulthood
ii. the transparency of adolescence
f. Power as hiding a fatal weakness
i. that it doesn't know about
ii. that it knows about but misrecognizes
iii. that it knows about
g. Power as precariously built on the potential
reversibility of social positions
h. Power as threatened by intimacy
i. intimacy as corruption
ii. intimacy as grace
i. Power as stupid
i. and laughable
ii. and brutal
j. Power as already dead
i. the anger of the dead at the pride of the living
ii. as simply dead and gone
k. Power as not yet born or created
Information as Material (iam) was formally established in 2002 but has its roots in Simon Morris's self-published books of the late 1990s. Based in the North of England, iam operates as a collective of writer-editors and as an independent imprint that publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things.
59 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2018
2 people are currently reading
19 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 5, 2018
Steven Zultanski writes:
Repression can provoke silence or ferocity, but it doesn’t simply lord over us demanding conformity, nor does it necessarily bottle us up tightly so that we explode under pressure.
It has no particular aim: it doesn’t want anything.
It takes whatever it gets, whatever it stumbles over.
And most of the time, it stumbles over clichés, because there are so many of them: not because people are idiotic parrots who repeat simplicities, but because the meaning of clichés is random and dispersed, so that they’re littered everywhere.
No cliché produces a single intended meaning, it adopts whatever meaning happens to be in front of us while we’re flailing around, trying to find something we can pretend we’re looking for.
This arbitrariness is far from an idealized freedom: chance can certainly be framed as liberatory (as when one courts the inadvertent so as to pretend that one’s habits of thought are temporarily thwarted), but it can also be framed as stultifying (as when an endless series of clichés chokes off the possibility of time moving forward, creating the sense of a continuous present consisting wholly of things one already knows.)
Repression can provoke silence or ferocity, but it doesn’t simply lord over us demanding conformity, nor does it necessarily bottle us up tightly so that we explode under pressure.
It has no particular aim: it doesn’t want anything.
It takes whatever it gets, whatever it stumbles over.
And most of the time, it stumbles over clichés, because there are so many of them: not because people are idiotic parrots who repeat simplicities, but because the meaning of clichés is random and dispersed, so that they’re littered everywhere.
No cliché produces a single intended meaning, it adopts whatever meaning happens to be in front of us while we’re flailing around, trying to find something we can pretend we’re looking for.
This arbitrariness is far from an idealized freedom: chance can certainly be framed as liberatory (as when one courts the inadvertent so as to pretend that one’s habits of thought are temporarily thwarted), but it can also be framed as stultifying (as when an endless series of clichés chokes off the possibility of time moving forward, creating the sense of a continuous present consisting wholly of things one already knows.)
October 2, 2022
'I don't mean to add or subtract anything to my argument, there's nothing to add or substract, I'm just repeating a theme, which, like all themes, is everywhere you look, easy to repeat.
That's what themes are good for: for over-nourishing generality.
Readers and critics like to pretend they have more important things to do - formal things, political things, historical things - but mapping themes is an underrated interpretive exercise: themes point to what's common between texts, what's shared between understandings.
For example, as I've been repeating: for at least hundreds of years, literature had been telling us that powerful people are terrible, dumb, weak, and unlikeable: their violence is a form of stupidity.
And all I've been trying to say, in my repetitive way, which I'm sure you already knew, is that books have said that.
Because that's what I think the dead are trying to tell us - or that's what they were trying to tell themselves.
And that's what I want to hear, that's what calms me down, that's what I say to myself as I'm falling asleep.'
That's what themes are good for: for over-nourishing generality.
Readers and critics like to pretend they have more important things to do - formal things, political things, historical things - but mapping themes is an underrated interpretive exercise: themes point to what's common between texts, what's shared between understandings.
For example, as I've been repeating: for at least hundreds of years, literature had been telling us that powerful people are terrible, dumb, weak, and unlikeable: their violence is a form of stupidity.
And all I've been trying to say, in my repetitive way, which I'm sure you already knew, is that books have said that.
Because that's what I think the dead are trying to tell us - or that's what they were trying to tell themselves.
And that's what I want to hear, that's what calms me down, that's what I say to myself as I'm falling asleep.'
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews