Toronto Research Group is a collective pseudonym for the Canadian poets bpNichol and Steve McCaffery. In his essay Technologies of Dictation: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group, TCR 2-50 contributor Darren Wershler-Henry argues that the TRG is an author in the sense that Foucault describes in the essay “What Is An Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice – that is, it is a designation for a series of functions rather than a proper name pointing to a particular individual. It is a deliberately constructed means of classifying texts by differentiating them, both from the many other texts that comprise the archive of twentieth-century poetics, and from other works produced either by bpNichol or Steve McCaffery as individual authors. Like all authors, on close examination the TRG proves to be a complex and contradictory entity, an agglomeration of discontinuous elements that perform often contradictory (and sometimes even unsuccessful) functions.
For example, Foucault notes in “What Is An Author?” that one of the primary functions of the author is to serve as an “object of appropriation” that determines the legal status of certain kinds of texts. Yet this is one of the areas where “TRG” has most explicitly failed to do its job. The TRG archives currently reside with the bpNichol archives at Simon Fraser University, yet McCaffery, an equal partner in the TRG, is very much alive and active. Further, one of the two major collections of the TRG’s work, Canadian @Pataphysics, is actually a bootleg reproduction of the “Canadian @Pataphysics” issue of Open Letter magazine, produced by unknown parties in the Coach House Press bindery, without the knowledge of at least McCaffery, probably the press manager, and perhaps of Nichol as well. Authors do not always authorize.
The AUTO-MINABINDA at The Coach House Press bindery.
Darren Wershler-Henry / Technologies of Dictation: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group
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other islands in this text-fed stream
