Sic

'Sic' presents a paragrammic rewriting of 'Mein Kampf' (Hitler 1925) by global micro-workers through online gig-economy platforms, as an exploration of contemporary fascism.

ANNABEL FREARSON, Sic double cover, Jan 2018
ANNABEL FREARSON, Sic gig-worker credits, Jan 2018
ANNABEL FREARSON, Sic extract (Shakespeare), Jan 2018
ANNABEL FREARSON, Sic extract (dedication)
ANNABEL FREARSON, Sic commissioners, Jan 2018
ANNABEL FREARSON, Sic extract (random), Jan 2018

Commissioned by International Literature Showcase (ILS), co-funded by British Council, Writers Centre Norwich and Arts Council England.

 

Introduction

* I did not write this book.

Sic presents a paragrammic rewriting of the first volume of Mein Kampf (Hitler, 1925) by global micro-workers. A paragram is a verbal play that reorders the letters of existing words and phrases. Thus, Sic intends to undermine Hitler’s text by rendering it deviant and to liberate the language contained therein by quite literally rewriting history. Sic enacts a material textual violence through an absolute dissolution of the original narrative and regurgitation as heterological mass comprising anagrams, disjunctive sounds and unspeakable interminglings of lettristic parts, rendering the antisemitic as antisemantic. Using online anagram generators and textual randomisers, the task force of global workers has recycled the originary toxic text. This distribution of authorial production through a posthuman intermingling of dispersed bodies and machines disrupts the singular locus of narrative power, yet further reproduces the atomisation of humans and labour under the absolutist regime of global neoliberalism that came in its wake. In an extended allegory of the current politics of disorientation, the concepts of freedom and truth are now radically scrambled.

Sic alludes to the use of the Latin word to denote actuality or authenticity of the text in hand, pointing to the veracity of it as material citation, but also to the distancing effect that its use implies within a text by the secondary, quoting author; ‘sic’ expresses a discomfiture or embarrassment in relation to the quoted text, as though not wishing to share responsibility for fallacious or erroneous terms. This is, of course, dramatized by its phonetic equivalent, with sic(k) being a visceral rejection of assimilated material. Following Bataille, moreover, public vomiting can have a communally cohesive function.


With thanks to:
abeysinghe11
Asjad J
Azis
Chris
clariza12
denniswrit
Francisco Sanchez
hasham4115
Ingridk K P
kipkiruinoah
lance_jones
Madmachine
Marysabel Martinez
Md Faisal R.
momin19
Paola O.
Pradeep S
Vivek
William Shakespeare
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