Yeah this sounds right.They recognised that French theory fits in better with people like Leary, Burroughs, Ballard, McLuhan, than with boring old academic stuff. It's all part of the counter culture and LSD and so on.
Sounds exhausting.
Like you mentioned earlier the occult is an essential part of this.
Kraus' biography of Kathy Acker is good. Basically slags her off.
I really enjoyed I love dick, just seemed to have the right amount of everything. Then I read torpor and it was a bit too grim, I started the other one, angels in America is it called? And it seemed OK but then I lost interest cos it was a PDF and too hard to read.
The idea of the limit is abandoned. The CCRU is about as close as you get in the '90s I suppose.
Is part of the reason this kind of writing can’t sustain these days about the credulity, freedoms, semi-anonymity afforded by collective operations? As fallible individuals with basic needs and insecurities and questionable income streams and messy love lives these people are easily reduced, dismissed, laughed away but as a collective you can say stuff you don’t live up to
The twitter age of self branding plays it safe, calculated controversy for capital, which makes real risky transgressions and boundary pushing in the politics and theory sphere less likely. The extreme excommunication of cancel culture etc
When I said their fanzines I meant re/search I couldn't rememeber the name of the thing
or just rational avoidance of cultural over-exposure, there used to be an undergroundCultural cowardice.
Yeah RE/SEARCH was the big one - the first proper massive US anthology of weirdness. But Semiotext(e) did some good anthologies too about US counter culture, German, Italy.
RE/SEARCH also inspired stuff like the slightly fashier Apocalypse Culture series and the UK's Rapid Eye. These things were like the textbooks I absorbed when I was supposed to be doing actual school/college stuff.
All got a real seediness to it which it shares with post-punk, industrial etc people with nob piercings etc