Clash, leaping of bands, straight strips of hard colour, Blocked lights working in, escapes, renewing of contest. (Pound 19) The criticism of fixed poetic forms or genres, the elaboration of new strategies to approach the world, the insistence on the choice of new "themes" for the poem all coalesce into an aggressive "renewing of contest" whose aim is openly to "reform the pattern," i.e. to generate a different pattern, different and yet just as coercive as those that preexisted this revolution of the word. The "statement" is willfully "dogmatic," as it sets the tone and the intent of the poetic enterprise along the lines of the substitution of one theory of the poem for another: to the original definitions of the poem as concise and lyrical, based on self-expression and the construction of a Weltanschauung, one is to respond with a different dimension altogether, a long poem, all-encompassing and multi-directional, albeit not formless nor intent-free. The war game of chess symbolizes to this extent the agonistic position of the poet, a "hard" fighter against the presumed softness of past poetry, forcing upon his readers the violent methods to read and reform a violent world. The context of 1915 cannot of course be entirely discounted in this reading of Pound's poem, which not only wills a poetic dogma into being: it also accounts for the upheaval of a world at war, and at a loss, as it nostalgically seeks the restoration of some order among the chaos of a disaster much further reaching than its geopolitical consequences. War poetry, and postwar poetry encounter obstacles to their persistence, which Theodor Adorno's emblematic statement formulates for poetry after the Holocaust: they possess varying degrees of self-effacement or political withdrawal that have become a defining trait of poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. The tendency remains two-pronged: the dogmatic stance to exorcise disaster becomes more rigid, whereas some anticipate the necessary inscriptions of apocalypse in the subtext of every text.

A glance thus suffices at Marianne Moore's "The Fish," for instance, to ascertain that this "dogmatic statement" is not the only possible response, that it might in fact be a very restrictive, maybe shortsighted reaction to the epistemological consequences of the war. In "The Fish," Marianne Moore, following her own definition of the poet's existential stance as observer and recorder of the world's phenomena as well as her awareness of the polysemy intrinsic to any linguistic manifestation, inscribes the war in what primarily seems to be the minute description of one of her bestiary's animals: THE FISH wade through black jade.

Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.

The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the (Moore 32) The "shells," the "ash-heaps," the "injured [fan]," however outline the subtext of an apocalyptic vision of the trenches: in Marianne Moore's poem, the radical change of perspective on the world brought about by the ethical debacle of a total war of man on man does not call for a revisionist "dogmatic statement," but rather for the realization that this disaster was forever present. Only a vision deprived of categorical preconceptions can perceive it, and it is in this reassessment of the conditions of perception that the "reality" of the world can be not accounted for, but taken into account in the writing of the poem. Some may see an almost childish naivety in Moore's approach to the world, from the zoo to the fun fair, since it advocates observing and recording everything anew, in wonderment. But such a labeling of her poetic experience of the world would fail to see it as a more collective epistemological stance, one that predates the Great War, becomes radicalized in it. This epistemological stance then goes on to inform the partly diverging, partly converging poetics of astonishment worked out by Lyn Hejinian and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, respectively, in My Life and Drafts, two long or extremely long poems that work out a general approach to life as draft, and to writing as on-going processes of approximation of the ever-elusive reality of existence. In both these cases, two notions are central to understand the cumulative nature of the long poem, and its performative function as active mapping of otherwise massive, astonishing, and irredeemably cryptic material. From the Pound/Moore antagonism stems a commitment to the non-dogmatic, the proteiform, and the provisional, that inscribe themselves in the poem along modes of incremental correction, and reformulation.

A poetics of astonishment

In a recent essay that parallels the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Martin Heidegger's ontology, Jed Deppman underlines the pivotal part played by astonishment as a mode of relating to the world-a mode perhaps able to generate an anti-dogmatic discourse which, in Dickinson's case, becomes expressed in poetry. Running contrary to the dynamics of authorial empowerment and what could be deemed an imperial all-engulfing poetic process aiming at imposing order on the raw matter of experience, astonishment "does not empower the poet but creates and intensifies the experience, sources, moods, troubles, and emotions that call for poetry to be written" (Deppman 230). Deppman is quick to point out that the comparison between Dickinson and Heidegger has its limits in the very fact that Heidegger's final aim converges with "aggressive geopolitical stances" (Deppman 231) that are foreign to

Dickinson.

Yet the way Heidegger used philology, history, and philosophy to elucidate "astonishment" and related terms (such as "uncanniness" [unheimlich] and anxiety [Angst]) do offer valuable perspective on the backgrounds for Dickinson's "terror," "fear," "trouble," "palsy," and the trauma and disorientation in which her writing originated. Heideggerian astonishment is no frisson or passing state but, as Steiner notes, a mood or "disposition" [Stimmung], a "'tuning,' in which and for which the Being unfolds" (31). Poetry is the aletheic, disclosive unfolding of Being [...]. (Deppman 231) This "tuning" which Deppman borrows from Steiner's reading of Heidegger might be seen as the incidental result of the process of astonishment. But it can also be considered as the reason why astonishment could be turned into an epistemological stance, one that foregoes the resort to categories for classifying events, to grids for interpretation or to master narratives to shape both individual and collective history.

Philosophically, wonder is usually understood to be either a preliminary stage of thinking, an open-mindedness ultimately to be controlled by reason, or an innocuous aesthetic category affiliated with beauty or the marvelous. In these terms, wonder can he cast negatively, as pre-or irrational thought, or positively, as uncorrupted apprehension [...]. (Deppman 235) More than the notion of "uncorrupted apprehension," which might be one of the modes sought after by the Modernists, but less so by Dickinson in her focus on the tiny details of natural life or on the secret doubts of the Christian soul, it is the idea that astonishment would be a preliminary stage in a process of rationalization and narrativization that here needs questioning. What would be the condition of the poem if astonishment were not this preliminary stage but rather a philosophical position? By positioning herself in the epistemological position of astonishment, the poet relinquishes the reassuring categories and certainties of theoretical knowledge in favor of the doubts and indeterminacies of direct experience. In Dickinson, the many expressions of astonishment, wonder, surprise, bafflement, etc. crystallize into a very uncomfortable but very real way of being to the world, and of confronting one's mortality. Her "astonishment" is not exactly at the prospect of "going to heaven," but rather a variant on the curiosity that makes her reject death and hope Because the poet is "too astonished," she cannot lend her thoughts to speculations about theories of the after-life: she is entirely caught up in the surprise that the world elicits in her, and in the hesitations it triggers in her mind. Gertrude Stein underscores this in her ironical rewriting of Dickinson in Sacred Emily, when she pays special attention to the modalities of "surprise" in Dickinson as they are grammatically conveyed by a preference of "whether" over "sooner": the "pause" as the poet opts to sojourn in the limbo of "whether" rather than hurry to conclusions allows for the kinship to be established between the two poets.

What a surprise. Not sooner whether.

Cordially yours.

Pause. (Stein,Sacred Emily 322) And indeed the paradigm of astonishment is picked up by Stein in the composition of Tender Buttons, a series of prose poems based on the defamiliarizing verbalization of everyday objects, events, and places.

Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke. (Stein,"Water Raining," Tender Buttons 322) The rain that catches the poet by surprise is at the same time "astonishing" and "difficult," thus inextricably linking the process of being astonished to the process of understanding, making sense of the world and what happens, striving towards some form of logic that would allow to relate "a meadow" and "a stroke." The work of polysemy in this latter term pulls apart the meaning between the softness of the caressing hand, and the violence of the potentially fatal cerebral attack, with, lost in between, the suddenness of the idea that erupts into the mind, Stein's so desired "stroke of genius," brought about by a trivial meteorological incident. Being surprised by the rain might be a common fate of the Parisian woman, but in the specific case of the poet in Tender Buttons, the "astonishing water" happens to a subject that is not merely occasionally surprised but exists in surprise:

Surprise, the only surprise has no occasion. It is an ingredient and the section the whole section is one season. (Stein,"Rooms," Tender Buttons 355) Living, and writing in surprise, in Dickinson, in Stein, opens onto the possible contemporary radicalization of an astonished mode of being to the world, and to the poem, one exemplified in the poetic practice of Lyn Hejinian and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Both Hejinian and DuPlessis claim this lineage of alternative modes of perception and composition, that entail patterns of repetitiveness, all-inclusiveness, accumulation and combination that are part and parcel of the genesis of long poems 1 .

What happens (Lyn Hejinian)

Ever since Ron Silliman's essay about the New Sentence, Lyn Hejinian has been working along the double line of Benveniste's interrogations about syntactic integration, and of Stein's assertions about the emotionality of the paragraph in "Lecture on Composition." In both cases, what is at stake is the definition of the lowest level of meaning, which would simultaneously produce meaning and preclude meaningfulness, thus confining the reader to the limbo of understanding as a permanent process, forever unable to reach a conclusion, cut off from the stability of final statement, and permanently astonished at the simultaneous formation and dissolution of meaning. In working out non-linear narrative modes, Hejinian "ejects [...] the idea that there is something containable to say: completed saying. So that 1 On this see DuPlessis's claim against the "victimization" of women poets, about Dickinson (Blue Studios,228), or about Stein's stance against "forensics" as normative definition (The Pink Guitar, 133); also see Hejinian about time, space, and the event as "presence" in Stein's writings (The Language of Inquiry, 105sq.) poetics becomes an activity that is ongoing, that moves in different directions at the same time, and that tries to disrupt or make problematic any formulation that seems too final or preemptively restrictive" (Bernstein 830). In orchestrating, through the pun on "happy" in the long poem Happily, an overall reflection on the astonishment brought about by chance, by what "happens," Hejinian integrates in the very syntax of the poem the provisionality of understanding, its instability, and foregrounds astonishment as an existential condition.

Coherence is but temporary and both the cause and the result of astonishment.

To this extent, the three installments of My Life illustrate tactics of survival in a paradigmatic succession of events, all perceived as unforeseeable and unrelated but by the accident of concomitance. The sentences that make up the poem do not imitate the historicity of autobiographical account so much as they reenact the astonishment of, and at, the vagaries of living. As is by now familiar to many, the first two installments are based on a relatively simple procedure to generate the text of the poet's pseudo autobiography. The "new sentence," with its reluctance to the composition of sentences beyond the level of the single proposition, is the unit that composes the chapters of the text. The fabric of the text constantly questions the relevance of a smooth rational narrative of one's past, as it is torn by disruptions, non-sequiturs, and lacunae. The text presents the snippets of memories as memory yields them, assembled in what Bernstein calls Hejinian's "modular style" (Bernstein 832). In each of the first two installments (My Life at 37, and My Life at 45), the number of chapters corresponds to the poet's age (respectively 37 and 45), the number of sentences in each chapter takes over this constraint so that each is respectively 37-or 45-sentences long.

The second installment, then, does function on the modular principle, since it is a reorganization of the entire biographical account that ensues from the poet's ageing. The memory of the first year is altered, recombined by the addition of years in the poet's whole life, in a process which is incremental and discontinuous: the semblance of continuity is maintained by the typographical regularity of the book, but the disjointedness of sentences all speak of and to the subject's astonished persistence in discontinuity. The chapters fail to cohere much further than the level of the sentence, creating a fascination reflexively defined in the second chapter's title: "As for we who love to be astonished."

You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon. My father had filled an old apothecary jar with what he called "sea glass," bits of old bottles rounded and textured by the sea, so abundant on beaches. There is no solitude. It buries itself in veracity. It is as if one splashed in the water lost by one's tears? My mother had climbed into the garbage can in order to stamp down the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked off balance, and when she fell she broke her arm. She could only give a little shrug. The family had little money but plenty of food. At the circus only the elephants were greater than anything I could have imagined. The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar. She wanted one where the playground was dirt, grass, shaded by a tree, from which would hang a rubber tire as a swing, and when she found it she sent me. These creatures are compound and nothing they do should surprise us. (Hejinian,My Life 10) The second chapter of the volume is for the poet's second year, a year defined by many as a child's year of the discovery of the world. "Sugar," "elephants," "The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar," and above all the basic prohibition of surprise: "nothing they do should surprise us." The statement in its dogmatic improbability works in the way of preterition, asserting quite the contrary of its explicit meaning: everything they do should surprise us. In Hejinian's poetic world, events do not follow chronology or causality because "time seems [too] normative" (My Life 11). Normativity prevents the effective reconstruction of the past in the present, in the same way as it prevents the very construction of the text: a norm outside the norm is to be found in the invention of procedure to counteract the imposed norms of conventional composition. The text attracts because it astonishes, in a manner that we can "love," not quite addressing the complexities of surviving (rather than living) in astonishment, until My Life in the Nineties, the post-cancer installment of the poem. The first chapter of My Life in the Nineties is thus entitled "I've never seen much that was typical" and the first page contains the following sentence:

As for we who love to be astonished, we close our eyes so as to remain for a little while longer within the realm of the imaginary, the mind, so as to avoid having to recognize our utter separateness from each other, a separateness that is instantly recognizable in

"I was born in the month of Remember" (Rachel Blau DuPlessis)

A similar diffidence to preconceived structures that cannot but yield preconceived perceptions and thoughts is to be found in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts, despite the notable formal differences between DuPlessis's poems and Lyn Hejinian's. Whereas Hejinian works My Life into varying versions preventing the petrification of the text into a master text, DuPlessis proceeds through an incremental method that preserves the unfinished quality of the text despite its publication. There is to be a sequel to Drafts, once a volume is published, which will induce a re-reading and re-interpreting of the sum of all drafts. One could argue that this process converges with the method of composing My Life in so far as My Life integrates this very work of recomposition presiding over the narrativization of successive experiences. Where DuPlessis's poems leave it to the reader to perform the recomposition and "re-narrativization" (Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry, 74)), thus allowing for a freer exercise of this reader's reading capabilities, Hejinian's enact it for the reader to experience by proxy. One of the things they have in common though is the way they take into account the ideological consequences of the conventional functioning of language. Perhaps following in this Bruce Andrews's very vocal denunciation of the ideological implications of syntax itself, as in the essays collected in Paradise and Method, DuPlessis in fact radicalizes it insofar as she casts doubt on the very possibility of generating a "liberated" text:

The desire for a massive critique of gender relations in language, in writing, yet the indication that the character, the propositions, however numbered, of plots, of conventions of recognizable beauty, of rewards systems, of myth, and of memory impede and prevent this critique. / If this is so, better stop writing. (DuPlessis, Pink Guitar 52) Where Hejinian undermines the coercions at work in language by staging them at play in the poem, DuPlessis relentlessly seeks to achieve the state of astonishment that will counteract the dogmatic statements she finds even in the open form of William Carlos Williams's Paterson whereby, despite the poet's attempts at inclusion, "text is made, radiance is found, [the woman] can be absorbed and accounted for when she enters (as Sappho does) the propulsive economy of sexual desire" (DuPlessis, Pink Guitar 62).

To a large extent, the poem unfolds as the provisional shaping, organizing, classifying of a personal archive made of scraps of paper, old stamps, found quotations, nifty and condensed phrases, so that Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Collage Poems are, in Jennifer Scapettone's words, "the alphabetic and antialphabetic matrix of Drafts" (Back cover), the poet's 114 section-long poem, a six-volume text in the Salt Publishing edition that spans a 25year writing career. "Born in the month of Remember" (Collage Poems, 66) the poem, rather than the poet as a person, outlines the workings of memory once it is understood as the conflation of the personal and the collective in the specificity of a contextualized present.

Intertextual and polymorphic in the extreme, the poems are often described as the loci where the poet gathers and assembles the debris of the degraded master texts of the past, where she tentatively and provisionally inscribes what is left of the dogmatic statements of the earlier Modernist era, once unsettled by the onslaught of historical upheavals and catastrophes. In the collages, DuPlessis happens upon pieces of fabric, stamps stuck on envelopes sent from faraway places, newspaper scraps, snippets of texts that cannot be deemed quotations, the trajectory of the individual linking together, by chance, heterogeneous elements that may or may not cohere into a legible statement.

From the title of "Draft CX" (Drafts Surge 117), "Primer," one may infer that the collages that make up this section of the poem, for all their colorfulness and compositional complexity, work as the preparation for the work to come, inscribing the poem in the long-run dimension of an open, ongoing work whose finiteness is to be forever questioned. Even when she declares that, after 25 years in progress, Drafts has eventually come to an end, Rachel Blau DuPlessis still does not talk in terms of closure, nor does she evoke the poems as a whole. Rather the poems still pay tribute to the constant reshaping of reality that corresponds to the constant reconfigurations of memory. As the actualization of the past in the present, DuPlessis's memory functions as a processing mechanism. This mechanism is obstinately trying to make the perturbed causalities that assumedly lead to the present, to its absurdities and random occurrences, coincide with the vital necessities of self-definition and selfstability. "Writing is an aid to memory," Lyn Hejinian says, to which Rachel Blau DuPlessis seems to respond that writing is an aid to survival, in the projections of memory it allows.

These projections constitute so many maps to navigate an astonishing world. As stamped letters sometimes fortunately find their way to their addressees, the poems are "primers" sent out to the world to prepare it for "greater foreignness." Describe your artistic achievement to date. "Baffled, I prepare for even greater foreignness." (Drafts Toll "Draft 29: Intellectual Autobiography" 179)

The little hunchback and the superstructure One of the functions of memory is indeed to prepare the subject, not so much to "greater foreignness," but to more and more customary experience, as the patterns of recognition progressively order the chaotic happenings of daily existence. In her account of Walter Benjamin's life, Hannah Arendt evokes his "bad luck," and the way Benjamin refers to the legend of the little hunchback in his article about Franz Kafka. 1 According to the legend, clumsiness and bad luck are the signs of the failure of attention to the surrounding world, but they are also the consequences of the annoying tricks playing by an invisible, impish little hunchback that according to the poem that so struck Benjamin in his childhood is the unwanted companion of some people. 2 The little hunchback is the engineer of the unexpected events that make one drop something, stumble... or lose all bearings in the world to rush to a tragic and absurd death. "The person," says Benjamin, "that the little hunchback is watching pays attention neither to himself nor to the hunchback. He is standing there in awe in front of a heap of rubble" (Benjamin 2000 650-652). Symptomatically it is retrospection which entails the parallel between legend and personal life: the two narratives merge to inscribe a kind of causality, however irrational and superstitious, that ironically justifies the irrational developments one faces in the present. Thanks to the acknowledgement of the hunchback's so far ignored presence and activities, the present might be revised into a logical moment. Arendt relates this mental process to Benjamin's Marxian, as well as Goethian, interest in what she calls "the superstructure" (Arendt 28): a network of correspondences between apparently unrelated objects, events, individuals, that once explicated reveals the hidden mechanisms of the world and gives reason to the unreasonable. Thus Benjamin's interest in the very small things of the world, his project to seek the affinities between discrepant artifacts, proceed from a quest, a deadly quest one is tempted to say, for an archetypal phenomenon in which signification (Bedeutung) and things would coincide. Paradoxically in Blau DuPlessis's poems, it is the renunciation to, and even the rebellion against such belief in the superstructure that motivates the collecting and collaging that reinvests the Benjaminian project. And it is the impulse to order the debris of perception that generates the grid of Drafts, its numerical organization, and orchestrates its finitude. The distrust towards preconceived structures that cannot but yield preconceived perceptions and thoughts is thus to be found in Drafts along with the practice of sorting and ordering. Locally she experiments with formal or procedural devices that provide temporary stability to an account of defamiliarization and destabilization.

There is to be a sequel to Drafts, once a volume is published, which will induce a rereading and re-interpreting of the sum of all drafts, in a mode that mirrors the reassessment and revisions performed by memory. The discontinuities in the successive volumes and "chapters" of Drafts are the macrostructural signs of discontinuities that penetrate the very matter of the text down to the linear trace of letters on the page. Determinedly open, DuPlessis's poems propose serial narratives that evolve according to the poet's biographical trajectory: in a manner similar to the Benjaminian archive they are traces of a life, as well as of a world. It is then not surprising that "Draft 29" should be subtitled "Intellectual Autobiography" (Drafts Toll 179).

Midrash

Among the Collage Poems, "Talmudic / Talismanic" (18) inscribes the two words in English as if they were synonymous along the central margins of two facing pages of Hebraic text. To those familiar with the page lay-out of the Talmud, where the Biblical text is at the center and literally surrounded by commentaries from various famous scholars and rabbis in varying letter sizes according to their author and his importance in the hierarchy of commentators, such inclusion works as an homage to the activity of remembrance, and as a commentary that is typical of the Jewish religious practice, and has been made famous by the increasingly esoteric, clever, and language-conscious modes developed by the kabbalah. Commentaries in the Jewish kabbalah are modes of expansion and digression from original texts or snippets of texts in an attempt to perpetuate a tradition through live reenactments, updates, redirections.

Where the Talmud records in writing many of these commentaries, the Midrash is originally an oral tradition passed on from generation to generation, which fuses together memory and commentary. For DuPlessis, it comes to embody the "overlaying stories" (Drafts Toll "Draft 6: Midrush " 37) that make up the evolving history of succeeding generations. "Rash," and "rush[ed], time alters history by imposing its rewrites and revisions in changing contexts. In a way actually very close to what has been done more recently in the fields of criticism and theory, the Midrashic tradition aims at interpreting texts, appropriating them, recontextualizing them and remotivating them in the present of reading. It also projects the text into the future, inscribing the activities of commenting, in speech or in writing no longer as "aid[s] to memory," but as modalities of memory itself. Indeed, once this is said, it seems logical to consider that verbalization and memory, as with verbalization and thought, cannot be dissociated: memory does not fully exist without verbal manifestations. This explains the discussion happening in "Draft 52: Midrash," around Theodor Adorno's provocative statement: "Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch."

Questioning the translation into English that transforms the German specificity of Gedicht (a poem) into the generic "poetry," DuPlessis amplifies her critique in asking in a deceptively naive manner, but above all very sarcastically, why poetry is targeted, rather than the other literary genres or art media: "After Auschwitz to compose music, to write novels, is barbaric."

Is "poetry" the only affirmative décor in this house? Kitsch collectible gathering dust on the shelf? Pearly button off a ripped shirt?

Is it the blandishments of poems, their automatic adhesion to attraction, glades of sparkle, birthday offerings, tears at graves, female visitants, house finch eating pear blossom, awe-struck thoughts on planets, stars and moonis it the modest size of poems, their nicely tuned endings, the diction and gestures they normally exclude, their status as tender, elegant tokens (concealing ferocious, self-fascinated delight) that makes of "poem" a particular insult and blight? (Drafts Pledge, "Draft 52: Midrash" 142) So, if one returns to DuPlessis's own words, it is only in "anger" (Drafts Toll "Draft 2: She" 13), and one wants to add only in witnessing, that she can counter the impositions of (male) mastery, but this cannot indeed be limited to a feminist dynamic: it is a further-ranging quest for a condition "where there is no closure and no authoritative statement but where the

The rule of no rule

To counter the dogmatic statements that impede memory from being freely at play as it performs its ethical imperative of "listen[ing] to shadows" (Drafts Pledge, "Draft, unnumbered: Précis" 219), Rachel Blau DuPlessis thus says: "I want to undergeneralize" (Blue Studios 124). From the position of a feminist poet, she battles against the hegemonies of masculinity that prevent the poet from opening herself, and her poem to the diversity of experience, the plurality of discourses, and the permanent surprise that block out preconception and prejudice. As a theorist and critic, she opts for the Midrashic comment, unstable, open and creative. In reminding her readers of Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism, as well as of the nonsense of a mode of mourning after the Shoah that would amount to censorship and the suppression of expression, she does not so much make an argument against anti-Semitism as she questions the very right of one individual to dictate the "do's and don't's" of poetics:

So we can take Drafts as a response to a scandalous remark Pound made in "A Visiting Card" in one hyperabsolute, slashing moment. About T.S. Eliot, actually, but of literature in general, he said, " Not a jot or tittle of the Hebraic alphabet can pass into the text without danger of contaminating it." Given this, Drafts is pleased to be an unclean, female-penned poem filled with jots and tittles and thoroughly contaminated by traces of the Hebraic. Drafts is a poem filled with debris, rot, fragment, corners in which collages of trash collect. (Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios 250) An archive, an autobiography, an exploratory complex, the poem works like memory itself, documenting and commenting upon the unending struggle of the extraordinary desire to remember with the ordinary limitations of remembrance. Thus DuPlessis protests preestablished structures that rule, once and for all, over the process of composition.

Compositional method is to be devised locally, autonomously, incidentally, and this cannot but yield a long poem, vertiginously made of long poems:

No plan, no design, no schemata. Just a few procedures: placing works on the big stage of the page, making each be itself intact and autonomous but connected to each other as they emerged. No continuous narrative. No myth as explanation or evocation. (Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios 230)

In "The Rejection of Closure," Hejinian unfolds the complexities and paradoxes of a poetics that seeks to reconcile the contradictory impulses of fixation and reactivation at the origins of artistic creation (Hejinian 2000 41). She suggests that formalism and "openness," or the capability to integrate a reality in flux, can produce modes of reflecting the elusive desire for infinity, and the recognition of finitude:

These areas of conflict are not neatly parallel. Form does not necessarily achieve closure, nor does raw materiality provide openness. Indeed, the conjunction of form with radical openness may be what can offer a version of the "paradise" for which writing often yearns-a flowering focus on a distinct infinity. (Hejinian 2000 42) A form of resignation and a resolve to live in the precariousness of what happens and of memory is turned into an existential philosophy. The testimony is to the experience of the impossibility of any definitive "statement of facts," to take up the title of one of Conceptual poet Vanessa Place's works. If the subject is to survive, the "hazard of happiness" (My Life in the Nineties 57), and the "labyrinths / requiring /the rest of your born days / to eviscerate" (Drafts Toll, "Draft 16: Title" 106) must be explored over and over again, but they will not be mapped out, just as life will not be planned, nor memory controlled: the poetics and the politics intertwine to reclaim the very locus of existential uncertainty and attempt, over and over again, to provisionally conquer its indeterminacies in acceptance and readiness to the unpredictable constructs of life and reconstructions of memory. We were all "born in the month of Remember and immediately forgot" (Collage Poems 66), not as receptacles of a sacrosanct inherited monolith that would be our collective memory, but as agents in the permanent renewal and up-dating of live memories. Lyn Hejinian and Rachel Blau DuPlessis put it in writing, and this writing has the long form of "life" "drafts."

"

  Life" "Drafts": Towards Two Non-Dogmatic Poetic Archives Hélène Aji, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense With the very title of his 1915 poem, "Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess-Theme for a Series of Pictures," Ezra Pound confirms the intention of many poets of High Modernism to produce normative discourses, aiming at establishing the new rules of a new poetics, one devised to fit the demands of modern times. [...] This board is alive with light These pieces are living in form, Their moves break and reform the pattern: [...]

  glad I don't believe itFor it would stop my breath-And I 'd like to look a little more At such a curious Earth!(Dickinson 79, 41)

  your familiar face. (Hejinian, My Life in the Nineties, 7-8) With the recognition of the potential deadliness of what happens comes the full awareness that the poem deals only with what remains, something evident from the start in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts.

  production and productivity of meanings is continuous" (Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios 229), a condition which implies the "invention of a stance capacious, ready, open-throated, alert and altered, serious" (Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios 229): Here and there, day and night I walk out into the least particle of astonishment in which nourishment collects. (Drafts Toll, "Draft 21: Cardinals" 139) Astonishment and nourishment travel together with collection and recollection in her long poem, as they become the very condition for survival. They provide the foundation of the poet's stance as poet in her ethical reflection on the workings of memory, as she experiences the estrangement to the past brought about by unavoidable forgetting. To know the astonishing oddity of the long-gone as if it could be stored what use is memory forgetting is overwhelming (Drafts Toll, "Draft 32: Renga" 202) Even as the poem records the struggles of memorializing, it recounts the "Histories of startling" (Drafts 38 "Georgics and Shadow" 264) and reduces the poet's achievement to an epistemological and ethical condition of non-normative "bafflement" (Drafts Toll, "Draft 29: Intellectual Autobiography" 179).

  . Paradise and Method: Poetry and Praxis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. ARENDT, Hannah. Walter Benjamin 1892-1940. Paris: Allia, 2011. BENJAMIN, Walter. OEuvres. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. ---. Sens unique, précédé de Une enfance berlinoise. Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 1998.


Hélène Aji

Un(nerving), Bök, Dworkin, Goldsmith, Place Un(decidable): appropriation and procedure

"what am i doing here" (3): David Antin's question to himself as he develops, and performs the talk poem, his very specific poetic form where talking, thinking, quoting, transcribing, rewriting merge to produce a long series of texts without punctuation, without justified margins, without capital letters, resonates well outside the "boundaries" of his own work. It is taken up in the interrogations and experimentations of the Language poets as they experiment with the structures of discourse, and attempt demonstrations of grammar's intrinsic coercions, and ideological presuppositions. Antagonism characterizes most of the interaction between this generation of poets, and a younger generation coming of age in the late 1990s and in the first decade of the 21 st century. In the words of Marjorie Perloff, one can wonder about this tension:

But why the need for so much displacement, so much ironic self-invention? Why call oneself boring or indifferent or uncreative when one obviously has a passionate desire to create something new? For Goldsmith, as for such of his precursors as Andy Warhol, John Cage, and especially Duchamp, art defines itself by its struggle with its immediate past. [...] Ergo, poetry that doesn't look like any poetry we've seen, presented as "unreadable" so as to challenge us to read it.

As Perloff tries to transcend the difficulties of personal stakes in a competitive poetic world, she more importantly acknowledges the pressure leading to this necessary rupture so as to secure the advent of a "new" poetics (a poetics which, paradoxically, purports that "no new news is good news" [Place in Place & Fitterman 62]). Not "to make it new" or rather "to make it [not] new," Ezra Pound's words from the turn of the 20 th century reverberate with a disquieting obstinacy. In a way very similar to the way the early Modernists protested the lyrical emotion of their Romantic predecessors, today's Conceptual poets rebel "against expression," a mode of self-assertion which they detect in the increasingly autobiographical statements of their immediate predecessors. The debate around The Grand Piano, the 23/05/2018 "collective autobiography," produced by ten of the Language poets to recount and recontextualize the emergence of their respective poetic practices, is however proof more to shared preoccupations than to radical differences. In his article about "presentism" in today's poetics, Barrett Watten takes on the basic tenets of Conceptual writing as "repurposing," re-organizing, and recontextualizing pre-existing texts, to assert that they are not exclusive to the Conceptual writers' practices:

Faced with an overwhelming proliferation of techniques, conceptual writing seems to narrow their range and force to methods of citational or algorithmic "repurposing" or "organization." But there have been simply any number of avant-garde techniques not defined as conceptual writing that may be understood in this way, from John Cage and Jackson Mac Low's chance procedures to the New Sentence and OuLiPian constraints. (Watten 146) As is the case in most passionate debates, the account on either side is never entirely accurate nor unbiased, and, as very often, the debaters on both sides do have a point. One is struck by the way Conceptual writing's import (Ezra Pound would say "impact") is somewhat lessened by the very accounts given by its practitioners. As Watten puts it, to the reader's eventual relief, at the end of his article, the interest does not lie in the fact that Conceptual writing would be uninteresting, boring to the Cagian point of being interesting (a famous, provocative assertion of Kenneth Goldsmith's in his essay "Being Boring"), but because it lends new life and new energy to debunking processes and strategies that have been at work since for ever:

And this is where my interest in this work begins: not in its self-conscious presentation of a break with the past, but in the reinterpretation and redeployment of the many available and viable procedures in the historical present in which conceptual artists, Language writers, and conceptual writers (plus postavant and Flarf) are working. Given the multiple overlap of these techniques and their motivation toward a common horizon of unmasking the automatized and quotidian for its underlying structures, a new order of theory and practice (and pedagogy) emerges. (Watten 152) So it is going to be one of the contentions here that the work of Conceptual poets does not indeed proceed simply from facing or embracing the "information glut," and that the mere idea according to which it is the "unprecedented onslaught of the sheer quantity of language" entailing the "exploration of strategies of copying and appropriation" (Goldsmith retort: one is encouraged by the computer, but the computer will not choose which texts become the matter of this "working," it will not decide to have them in print, it will not name these texts poems, nor will it inscribe them in the context of literature. Conceptual writing, not in its practice but in its theorizing, returns itself, perversely (to quote from the very title of Craig Dworkin's The Perverse Library), to the trivial, anecdotal and technical, maybe to "preserve" itself from the ideology and responsibility inherent to any activity in language.

in

Un(creative): horror vacui et captatio benevolentiae

It all starts in the double bind of avant-garde enterprises: at the very same time as they are fighting for recognition as part of the rarefied world of the arts, they claim to derive their innovations from the very grain of the times. It is the industrial revolution, the growth of materialism, the idolatry of technology, which spur experiments in collaging, which push a neo-Pre-Raphaelite Pound to try to address the masses, which bring poetic discourse into the arena of advertisement and propaganda, which, more basically, entail the collapse of poetic diction onto the vernacular, raising the haunting issue of the forms of the poem. Similarly, the double bind of high and low informs the poems and reflexive "narrativizations" (Perelman 76) of Conceptual poets: in the opening to his book on Oulipian 'pataphysics, Christian Bök grounds his reflection on the status of science and knowledge on a (not so playful) anecdote about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. The place is full of strange exhibits designed, in a first analysis, to raise the visitor's doubts about what is to be believed, and what is not. Can these creatures/things do what the museum tells us they can? Are we being educated into prehistoric science? Or are we being deceived into taking invention, illusion, and spectacle for science? According to Bök, the epistemological consequences are much further reaching than a right-or-wrong game, since the question underlying the entire project bears on the very nature of truth:

Wilson does not simply repeat the grotesque spectacle of Ripley, since the museum does not present the truth of the absurd with the command Believe it or not! Instead, the museum presents the truth as itself absurd with the question What is it to believe or not? [START_REF] Bök | Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science[END_REF] 3) In Bök's mind, the mixture of "incredible verities" with "unbelievable truths" [START_REF] Bök | Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science[END_REF] 3) takes the visitor back to the interrogations on the dynamics of science that 23/05/2018 triggered the foundation of 'pataphysique: as the "science of imaginary solutions and arbitrary exceptions," Alfred Jarry's 1911 invention puts into perspective science as a type of discourse, based on the cancellation of past theories by new ones, running contrary to the cumulative dynamics of history, which does not "designate a coherent progress of one rational practice but instead signifies an unstable array of logical tactics whose local, synergistic conflict can invoke, provoke, and revoke a global, syllogistic program" [START_REF] Bök | Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science[END_REF] 13-14). Yet, where Jarry, and later the members of Oulipo who founded the Collège de 'pataphysique, integrated a notable amount of humor, ironically undermining the seriousness of their own careers as mathematicians or physicists, Bök makes the point that the turn to poetry responds to a sort of existential need.

The science of 'pataphysics suggests that, without the mendacity of poetry, what the veracity of science reveals about the horror vacui of the universe, the fact that delusions are integral to all knowledge must seem utterly nightmarish. The value of poetry thus resides in its ability to play in this void that the truth of science must find in the real. (Bök [2002] 46) In this respect, the resort to poetry by poets is to be likened to the proposition of "imaginary solutions," raising what he calls "archaeological misinformation" to the level of "a set of 'pataphysical expenditures" [START_REF] Bök | Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science[END_REF] 82), thus filling up the void left by a defeated rationalism: the horror vacui which sends the reader back to her most basic, most common, and most irreducible fears would account for the urge to produce text, massive amounts of it, by all means. So indeed the modes of the uncreative, harvesting text everywhere, reformatting language material, and inhabiting the blank of the unwritten real, respond not so much to the information glut "in a world of increasingly capacious and inexpensive storage media" as to the demise of science and knowledge coercing the poet into a "database logic of new media, wherein the focus is no longer on the production of new material but on the recombination of previously produced and stockpiled data." (Dworkin in Dworkin & Goldsmith xlii).

In Christian Bök's work, this leads to several types of texts: in Eunoia (fig. 1), one is faced with a book in five chapters in which each chapter only uses words containing one of the five vowels and attempting to use all of the eligible words in the lexicon in the span of the volume (around 98 percent of the potential is eventually used). Contrary to Georges Perec's La Disparition in which the sole absence of the "e" actually makes itself unnoticeable 23/05/2018 as the mystery plot moves on, the artificiality of the process is all evident in Bök's text, foregrounding the violence of the procedure and the containment of expression. In "Busted Sirens," the questions from Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris are processed by XML-dialect software agent Alicebot to produce responses that compose the subsequent lines of the poem: here, according to Craig Dworkin in his presentation of the work, the capability of the computer is not so much to write as to read, and map out a variety of possible reader responses to the original text.

I can do what you do, but I can never feel human emotions, as such. I suppose that it does. Yes I think that this is too soft, but I'm not completely sure. It seems okay to me. What is not to like about it? Yes, I think that this is how I like it, but I'm not completely sure. (Bök,"Busted Sirens" in Dworkin & Goldsmith 117) This excerpt exemplifies in fact an array of evasive actions (to answer a question with another question; or the rhetorical use of preterition to undermine assertions) at the same time as it underscores the limitations of conventional reader response. And it is precisely where the avant-garde double bind is at work, as Conceptual poets attractively focus on the writer as reader, and on the potential for all readers to be writers.

In their Notes on Conceptualisms, Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman argue that "Conceptual Writing, in fact, might best be defined not by the strategies used but by the expectations of the readership or thinkership" (Place & Fitterman 10), leaving the door wide open to claims of kinship between the Conceptual writers work and all the copying and pasting gestures that combine to circulate information in the digital age. "Allegory" and "identity theft" are to be put on the same level, to fit the expectations of a crowd empowered by technological evolutions. The objective for the poet would not be to be "creative," but to be, in Goldsmith's terms, "uncreative," or in Perloff's, "unoriginal."

The "re-" gestures-such as reblogging or retweeting-have become cultural rites of cachet in and of themselves. If you can filter through the mass of information and pass it on as an arbiter to others, you gain enormous amount of cultural capital. Filtering is taste. (Goldsmith in Dworkin & Goldsmith xix) But one is left to wonder at the delusive seductiveness of such broad assertions as they are repeated over and over, and as elsewhere, and contrarily, Goldsmith uses such words as 23/05/2018

"the collective bastardization of English," its back broken "with ignorance, accent, slang, jargon, tourism, and multitasking," so that it says "anything we want, like a speech dummy" [START_REF] Goldsmith | Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age[END_REF] 221): the provisional language assumedly brought about by globalization and digitization might be of more resonance than just the incidental consequence of a specific historical moment. If one recalls the recurring interrogations of poets over the passing of time, the ephemerality of words, the threatened permanence of art, the durability of men's works, provisional language is the matter of literature as a whole, not just the present moment of computer-literate writers. Is the "legacy of print fixity" really dissolved by the practice of these poets, as argued by Jed Rasula (667)?

Or, in other words, is the poet actually confined to the Barthesian role of scribe, whose "task is to collect from mounds of material, to construct rather than compose, and to repurpose appropriations by moving text into new frames" (Quaid 7)? In the case, for So the "constructing of useless reference tools, the proposing of imaginary solutions, and the cataloguing of exceptions" [START_REF] Dworkin | The Imaginary Solution[END_REF] 32) might not be the sole aims of these works that create rules to organize found text: as they negotiate with the existential questioning of poetry as creation, they do more than parade in front of an Internet-dazzled readership, as they reconstruct, as is wont with any movement, a literary history. And yet the author, as idiosyncratic, masterly, and even manipulative, emerges and pays his dues to the masterly figures of the past. In "No. 111 2.7.92-10.20.96," Kenneth Goldsmith collects, then sorts out by syllable count, and orders alphabetically all the phrases ending in an "r" sound that he collected between February 7, 1992, and October 20, 1996. Amidst the rubble of unidentifiable phrases, some stand out, because they are quotations from literary predecessors, and compose an almost subliminal network of indebtedness:

Un

A beer does not come with in-laws, a Bohemian reformer, a bridge from nowhere to nowhere, a bunch of crap thrown together, a dog will not bite his brother, a few kernels short of an ear, a fly betty is really your, A frog in a liquidizer!, a giant Nintendo nightmare, a K in a six-pointed star, a leader not a follower, a little light in his loafers, a man's best friend is his dogma, a mother-in-law is fever, a number of destitute Moors, a pack of pathetic winkers, A panic in a pagoda!, a patch may defeat the weaver, a precise statement of number, a radiant node or cluster (Goldsmith, As Ezra Pound's definition of the Vortex ("a radiant node or cluster") from Blast irrupts, it contaminates its textual context, and generates a more general, historical, cultural, ideological context for the work. A large number of the surrounding phrases, actually syllabically and phonetically in synch with the Poundian text, might be comments on the one of the most brilliant and ambivalent figures of American Modernism: was he "a Bohemian reformer"? was he "a bridge from nowhere to nowhere"? was he "a dog" that bit "his brother"? were the Cantos "a bunch of crap thrown together"?... Although it might be claimed that it is precisely in the nature of the found text, and of its procedural rearrangements to generate unexpected meanings, which are more effects of the reader's projection than of the author's intention, one is alerted by the recurring nature of such effects, their obstinate frequency, and the regularity of their meanings (almost always critical of "the decay of civilization"). Despite the collage techniques that affect to use language as a material block to be taken to parts and/or assembled, there remains that this re-materialization of language cannot ever result in a radical reification of the word.

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There might be in Craig Dworkin's account of the relationship between Conceptual art and Conceptual writing a desire to simplify, in a very pedagogical yet rather limiting manner: the "opacity of language" that he sees as the conclusion of Conceptual art and the premise of Conceptual writing would allow for a materialization of language, and construct "the guiding concept behind conceptual poetry [as] the idea of language as quantifiable data" ( Parsing? Even though he does not mention Bernstein's early book of poems in relation to his own, it seems highly improbable that he should not know about it. In the short presentation to excerpts of Parse in the anthology, the declared reference is to Edwin A.

Abbott's 1874 How to Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar, a textbook in the late 19 th century and the center of debates over the pedagogy of English grammar. Dworkin's Parse is the "translation of Abbott's book, rendering his text into its own idiosyncratic system of grammatical analysis" (Dworkin & Goldsmith 194): the result is a long succession of grammatical terms, reproducing to some extent the structure of sentences, somehow their function and at times their tone, drifting into more expressive utterances toward the end of the volume as the discipline of grammatical transposition seems to slip. By giving out the reference book that he "translated," but omitting the filiation with Bernstein's Parsing, what Dworkin does is very close to a Poesque hiding-in-plainsight: the link with one of the foundational texts of Language poetry might go unnoticed, but it is patent in the quasi identity in titles. Crucially though, it is a quasi identity, and of course the difference is grammatical, pointing to the rift between the ironic subversion elaborated by Language poets, and the "détournement" and "critique" of Conceptual poets.

23/05/2018 written for these machines and their technological quirks (as William Carlos Williams's "Readie Pome"), once read in the collected poems, seem eminently more revolutionary than if understood as conforming to specific practical conditions: " 'Readie Pome' suggests that literary texts can promote media-specific analysis" (Pressman 784). With Conceptual texts, "media-specific analysis" is required in a context of hyper-mediatization, banalization and commodification of the very tools of textual subversion (Place & Fitterman 30), but it does not preclude other analyses such as the historical contextualization proposed by Brian Reed:

After 9/11, many assumptions and practices that defined the late twentieth-century American, British, and Canadian poetic avant-gardes-above all, the rampant use of aberrant or disjunctive syntax-began to appear outmoded, even defanged. With grammar-mangling, fragment-spouting George W. Bush on television every night arguing for war, how could a leftist poet in good conscious continue to advocate anacoluthon, solecism, and other varieties of non-normative English usage as tools to achieve utopian ends? (Reed 5) But the media is not so massively digital, as one could be led to believe as one reads the more recent self-evaluations of the Conceptual poets. The texts appear in books; the textual parts of Ubu's web archive get boiled down to an anthology published by Northwestern; the attraction of the library in the conventional sense of the term is indeed "perverse" (Dworkin). Dworkin's assessment of graffiti as "the most familiar instance of détournement," using the walls of the factory to support "precisely those voices it would exclude" [START_REF] Dworkin | Reading the Illegible[END_REF] 14), may prove less illuminating than the cataloguing of his personal library in alphabetical order of the publishers and in chronological order of their publications, since the graffiti will not pull down the wall, as we may have learnt from the Berlin Wall (it is history that will perhaps, and in so doing will scatter the works beyond recognition and memory).

The "perverse library" (fig. 3), however, shows books as personal (autobiographical), historical (vestigial), social (interconnected), and political (programmatic). To this extent one can understand "Conceptual writing [a]s allegorical writing [in] that allegory differs from symbolism in that symbolism derives from an Idea, while allegory builds to an Idea" (Place & Fitterman 14): in The Perverse Library, it builds towards an idea of the bibliophile behind the books. Paradoxically, and inadvertently, the Conceptual poet constructs himself as the engineer of complex textual machines designed to process expression into non-23/05/2018 expression, thus expressing the dismay of an intensely melancholy "Sobject," caught in the dilemma of being subject and object, master and slave.

The Sobject is the properly melancholic contemporary entity. The Sobject exists in a perpetual procedural loop: the iconic sobject is Dante's manturningsnaketurningman.

The Sobject exists in a perpetual substantive eclipse: more s/object by turns and degrees.

For an example of textual sobjectivity, see Place, Dies: A Sentence [...]. In Vanessa Place's Dies: A Sentence (fig. 4), indeed, the textualization of a soldier's last breath faces the reader with the unnerving question to which poets have been trying to find "imaginary solutions": how to navigate between the collective commonplace and collective tragedy. In "Busted Sirens," the lifted lines from Ron Silliman's poem recombined by the computer construct the figure of a paranoid individual, attempting to respond adequately to a set of demands we are never made aware of: the imperative seems irrevocable, its source and its finality are unknown.

Un(nerving): Logos, Telos, Ethos, Pathos

In "Legion," the true-false questions of the 1942 Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory are turned into statements which build into the monologue of an overwhelming contradictory individual, whose utterances, rather than solve issues, assert them and further generate them: the relentless succession of sentences, the lack of narrative coherence, the repetitive signs of inadequacy (even when negated as in "I have no fear of water") combine to evidence neurosis obstinately "nibbling the soul."

In Soliloquy, the declared transcription is "hardly passive recycling" [START_REF] Perloff | Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century[END_REF] 161) as the text unfolds one individual's every word uttered during one week: deriding the confessional lyric in which one is "pretending to cogitate alone and aloud as if to themselves, knowing full well that, in the gloom beyond the proscenium of the blinding desklamp, a politburo of ignored readers eavesdrops upon every uttered thought" [START_REF] Bök | A Silly Key: Some Notes on Soliloquy by Kenneth Goldsmith[END_REF] 62), the work none the less foregrounds the uncertainties and hesitations of the hyperactive, whose most phatic and commonplace phrases ("you know," "I would," "in a heartbeat") stand out as existential comments on the discrepancy between daily "jumping,"

and the continuous fall of living.

In Statement of Facts, the depersonalization and distance of Charles Reznikoff's

Testimony becomes a narrative of the undefendable, as an effaced narrative agent transmits the accounts of a rapist's crimes, appealing against "facts": the juxtaposition of each crime makes up a disjuncted history in vignettes, whose horrendous accumulation fails to cohere into an understandable story; the reader (with the writer) remains in the limbo of failing language and impossible accountability.

In all of these texts, but also in many others belonging to the movement of Conceptual writing, the procedure, the material, the concept never quite manage to obscure the notion of an individual, at work in language, attempting to make sense, taking responsibility in the 23/05/2018 world, trying to "overcome the classic double bind of melancholy, wherein the melancholic begins to enjoy his own suffering" (Stephens 82) and find a locus for a locutor.

But as Dworkin notes in his comments on Douglas Huebler's Variable Piece#4 : Secrets, the secrets deposited by public in the installation when arranged into a book "merely reveal how commonplace and collective our most private, personal, and closely guarded thoughts in fact are. [...] As these responses accumulate, reiterating not only similar sentiments but syntactically similar sentences, the book ultimately divulges not so much the content of its speakers' secrets, but the common grammar of secrecy" [START_REF] Dworkin | The Imaginary Solution[END_REF] 45).

The "common grammar of secrecy" is to be taken as but a metonymy for the common grammar of all human activities, so that the "open source poetics" of Conceptual poetry does not just defend a "shared cultural commons" (Voyce 409): it reenacts the limitations and aspirations of a common human condition. As summarized by Christian Bök:

Questions always define in advance the regime of their answers. The problem always persists in the very paradigm that allows the solution to make sense as a solution. No enigma is resolved so well that its status as an enigma ceases to exist. A solution is infinitely imaginary. [START_REF] Bök | Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science[END_REF] 45)

Conceptual poems are an opening at the cost of programmed dead-ends: all pay the price as "narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us" [START_REF] Goldsmith | Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age[END_REF] 221) while we are still struggling for "imaginary solutions" to respond William Carlos Williams's haunting challenge:

  Dworkin & Goldsmith xviii) is (deliberately?) deceptive. "The computer encourages us to mimic its workings," says Goldsmith in his introduction to the anthology of Conceptual writing Against Expression (Goldsmith in Dworkin & Goldsmith xviii), but one is tempted to 23/05/2018

  (precedented): Modernism, Objectivism, Minimalism Contrary to science, as the neo-'Pataphysicians would see it, that writes itself over its past, invalidating and obliterating its previous discourses, literature (as art) writes itself inexorably from the texts of its past, borrowing the same words, recomposing them, varying the extent of the citation either to erase its sources or to foreground them. In Against Expression, Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith cannot refrain from claiming a past to their practices, nor from claiming some ancestry, in literature, in music and in the visual arts. Thus doing, they however disclaim their own assertion according to which unprecedented technological times (the digital age) have produced unprecedented compositional practices: their modes pre-date the advent of the computer age, as they in fact pre-date the Duchampian break-through of the ready-made (Nufer 4). From the alphabetical contents of the volume, Louis Aragon, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, John Cage, Hart Crane, Denis Diderot, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Mac Low, Stéphane Mallarmé, Georges Perec, Charles Reznikoff, Tristan Tzara, Andy Warhol, William Butler Yeats, and others, convene to produce a collection that has much to do with the archival accumulation of Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project. But is it just because they are "moving information" (Goldsmith in Dworkin & Goldsmith xx)? They are indeed doing that to some extent, but they are also re-energizing the texts they are taking over, re-directing them, remotivating them. According to Place and Fitterman, this is what differentiates Conceptual collage from anterior experiments (Place & Fitterman 45): Conceptual collage would not relay or undermine the contents that it puts back into circulation, because it fails to construct the master figure of an author with an agenda.

  What is the difference between conceptual collage and literary others? Examples of others: Pound, Berrigan, Ashbery-use of collage as pre-text technique to create choral ensemble, i.e., wherein the authorial voice is emergent/dominant/extant; use of collage to demonstrate specific author or authored aesthetic/metaphysic (theme, e.g.).

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  Dworkin in Dworkin & Goldsmith xxxvi). Conceptual writing does this, but not just this, as the qualitative nature of words, the meanings, affects, as well as concepts they convey, infiltrate, reflect and deflect, the source idea from which the work originates. The reference to Sol LeWitt, and the insistence of Minimalism on the "idea of a work taking priority over the object" (Quaid 7) do not suffice to suppress the return (with a vengeance)Innovative writing is as old as writing itself; or put another way, since the beginning, authors have been playing with both the linguistic materials of language and the physical materials of speech and writing. This kind of play and experimentation is inherent in literature. And probably inherent in us. Its tradition includes the visual icons medieval scribes embedded in illuminated manuscripts to link one text to another; the layout Renaissance poets gave verses so that they could be read in multiple directions; the rich texture Shakespeare strove to give familiar stories poet who made ordinary speech strange.(Tomasula 219) What Conceptual poets do achieve, furthering the atavistic impulses of literary experiment, is a number of instances in which the strangeness of speech turns into radical alienation, casting a dark light on the delusions of a comfortable life in the readable texts of the global village.

	Un(readable): détournement and critique
	It's an automatic thing. It doesn't require any
	thought. It's a parade in and out.
	It has its ups and downs.
	It doesn't affect me one way or another.
	(Bernstein [2000] Parsing 13)

of the self that Eliotian impersonality, Steinian grammar and Objectivist depersonalization, for instance, had already attempted to silence. The variety of the methods, as sampled in Against Expression (in Brian

Reed's words, " marvelous compendium of 'what ifs' [5]

), re-"issues a call for readers and writers to begin again and again and see where their ingenuity can take them"

(Reed 5

), but the beginning-again is not as ingenuous as it seems, and the premises are not as unprecedented as they might seem: What if I wrote a novel using only the letter T? What if I selectively deleted large chunks of Shakespeare's Sonnets? What if wrote down bibliographic information for absolutely everything I ever read, from product labels to scholarly articles? What if I rewrote The Communist Manifesto (1848) in a Yorkshire dialect? What if recorded every word I spoke for a week? What if I tried to describe in exhaustive detail the opening scene of the film Apocalypse Now (1979)? What if I compared the first lines of every English translation of Dante's Inferno (1321) in the British Library? What if I collected and alphabetized every response to a Rorschach inkblot test in a stack of old psychology textbooks? What if I paid a bunch of people five bucks each to write down fifty words of their choice? (Reed 5) Rather, as Steve Tomasula aptly outlines it in his essay about contemporary American writing: through his use of hendiadys, his invention of the soliloquy and other innovations; the marbled pages, play with fonts and other visuals of Tristram Shandy at the inception of the novel; Gertrude Stein's repetitions; the postage-stamp parodies, fake newspapers, and other publishing experiments of FLUXUS; the metafictions of postmodernism. It is a tradition that extends up from 23/05/2018 the first Definite Article Noun adverb of frequency present tense transitive verb definite article Noun alternative disjunctive coordinate conjunction Noun comma conjunction of exception adverb of negation adverb, period. Preposition noun comma colon dash (Dworkin, "Parse" in Dworkin & Goldsmith 194) Does Craig Dworkin's 2008 Parse respond in any way to Charles Bernstein's 1976

  At times I hear so well it bothers me. I have no fear of water. I have periods in which I feel unusually cheerful without any special reason. At times I feel that I can make up my mind with unusually great ease. I am afraid of using a knife or anything very sharp or pointed. My feelings are not easily hurt. I have not lived the right kind of life. Dirt frightens or disgusts me. It is safer to trust nobody. At parties I am more likely to sit by myself or with just one other person than to join in with the crowd. I must admit that I have at times been worried beyond reason over something that really did not matter. I worry over money and business.(Dworkin, "Legion" in Dworkin & Goldsmith 191) Um, and, uh, you know. Thanks. Um so anyway, it's like this parties galore tonight, uh, today, I've got lots of just meetings and shit with people. But anyway, so let's just keep the door open, you know, I mean, you know... I mean, I really wish that would happen. That would that would I mean, I'd do it I'd do it in a heartbeat because, you know, I could... what ever happened with that? Very fifties. Oh right right right. Yeah. Yeah. Well that, you know, and if you can know that you're jumping and not jump you know and not and not right and I know you know what you're doing and not...(Goldsmith, "Soliloquy" in Dworkin & Goldsmith 263) After ejaculating, the man retrieved his underwear, wiped Dorothy C.'s back, and told her he had broken in, waiting while she left the house and returned a video. The man said he walked through her home while she was gone, looking at her things; he asked Dorothy C. if she had a

	Ask another robot if it is.
	What does "that" refer to?
	Why don't you just download me?
	I'll think about it and get back to you.
	Are you testing me?
	Of course, English is my native tongue.
	The question has never crossed my mind before.
	(Bök, "Busted Sirens" in Dworkin & Goldsmith 118)

boyfriend. She sais she did. She told him she went to church. He mentioned things he'd noticed in the house, like a light that needed repair, and asked her when she was to get up the next morning, and if she's set the alarm. The man did not say anything about himself, or identify himself by name.

(Place,

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  BibliographyAji, Hélène. " 'Politique de la « nouvelle phrase' : quel engagement pour les Language Poets?" Transatlantica 1 (2008) http://transatlantica.revues.org/index3733.html. Consulted 31 Jan. 2012.

	To make a start,
	out of particulars
	and make them general, rolling
	up the sum, by defective means-
	(Williams 3)

Antin, David. Talking at the Boundaries. New York: New Directions, 1976. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. 23/05/2018 Illustrations: Fig. 1: Christian Bök, Eunoia 56 Page 19 23/05/2018 Fig. 2: Kenneth Goldsmith, Day 158

23/05/2018

In the gerund of Berstein's title, one can indeed see the poet in action, "parsing," deciphering the world, "groping to understand" [START_REF] Bernstein | Republics of Reality: 1975-1995[END_REF] 27), whereas in Dworkin's "parse," one cannot but read an injunction to the reader, urging her to in turn perform the translation that will unveil the structures of discourse, the articulation of sentences, the backbone of argumentation in its pure artificiality, emptied of any other content than self-referential. What more would be known of language if we "parsed"? asks Dworkin, leaving the question open but for the idea that this would at long last (around the end of his volume) turn us into alienated loners eager to recover the erratic lexicon of our chaotic, unparsed lives. Maybe-since nothing authorizes this interpretation much more than any other: claiming, after Wittgenstein, that the meaning of Conceptual texts "is their use" (Dworkin in Dworkin & Goldsmith xxiv), the argument prolongs the dialectics hinted at by the Language poets. Starting from the assumption that, as Lyn Hejinian argues in her essay for the Language anthology In the American Tree, "the language itself materializes thought; the writing realizes ideas" (Hejinian in Silliman, In the American Tree, 487), many of the earlier poets work with a notion of ideology as embedded in the very structures of language, and thus enforced upon us constantly and consistently without our recognizing it. This can be considered as the core of Language poetry's political commitment, their contextualization of a number of disconcerting poetic experiments that include the use of appropriation and procedure (see Aji) : these modes are not dissimilar from those taken over by the Conceptual writers.

Along with Kenneth Goldsmith's keyword, "appropriation," recurring terms to define the project of Conceptual writing are indeed "critique," and "détournement," which could be read as spinning off the more familiar strategies to uncover the coercion at work in established discourses to be found in many texts by Charles Bernstein, for instance. But where most of the debunking in Bernstein's work (and also in a number of others like Carla Harryman) lies in a witty play on the preposterous, decontextualizing the text of the banal and trivial, or exaggerating the (secretly) expected to better belie it (as in his Recantorium


Mathieu Cunche

Leonardo S Cardoso

Analysis of an Ultrasound-Based Physical Tracking System

In this paper, we present the analysis of an Ultrasound-based tracking application. By analyzing several mobile applications along with the network communication and sample of the original audio signal, we were able to reverse engineer the ultrasonic communications and some other elements of the system. Based on those finding we show how arbitrary ultrasonic signal can be generated and how to perform jamming. Finally we analyze a real world deployment and discuss privacy implications.

Introduction

Ultrasounds can be used to carry signal, the same way radio waves does. Recently, this feature ha s been exploited to create side-channels. A trending application of ultrasound communication is the implementation of ultrasonic beacons that broadcast an identifier in a specific area. Those ultrasonic beacons found the same use as Bluetooth beacons: a mobile application running on a smartphone can pick those signal to localize the user and to trigger events. Beacon technologies are used in the retail industry for geofencing and to push promotional messages to users during their visit of a shop. The advantage of ultrasonic signals is that all smartphone can receive, and as opposed to other technologies based on Bluetooth that requires the corresponding interface to be activated, the microphone is always available.

The use of ultrasounds as side-channel raises privacy concerns as it can be used for cross-device identification, de-anonymization, or location tracking [START_REF] Mavroudis | On the Privacy and Security of the Ultrasound Ecosystem[END_REF][START_REF] Arp | Privacy threats through ultrasonic side channels on mobile devices[END_REF].

In this work we focus on a specific ultrasound system called SpotInStore. Using publicly available resources, we have been able to reverse-engineer the Spotinstore system. The goal of this work is to increase the knowledge of those new technologies and to analyze the associated privacy and security risks.

Section2 introduces the SpotInStore system then section 3 presents our analysis of the system. Signal generation and jamming are presented in section 4 and the analysis of the real world deployment is done in section 5. Finally, section 6 concludes. 2 The SpotInStore system A French company, Fidzup1 , specialized in in-store tracking technology has developed an ultrasonic tracking system named SpotInStore2 . This system uses ultrasonic beacon to localize user in the physical world.

System description

The SpotInStore system relies on ultrasonic channel to transmit information from the environment to an agent running on a mobile phone. This system is composed of several elements:

• One or several ultrasonic beacons deployed in the physical space and broadcasting an audio signal;

• An application having the microphone permission running on the subject phone.

Ultrasonic beacons are typically deployed in a shop locally broadcasting a signal that cannot be heard by humans. The mobile application running on the phone can access the microphone of the device to pickup this ultrasonic signal. This ultrasonic signal is then processed by the application to extract an identifier corresponding to the code of the beacon. Each beacon has its own identifier, and this identifier can be associated to a specific location. Thanks to this association between the beacon code and a location, the application can obtain the location of the user. Figure 1 presents the details of the SpotInStore system.

From now on, the application has access to the current location of the user as it would have been provided by the geolocation service of the phone if the application had been granted the geolocation permission. This location information can then be processed by the application but can also be sent to a remote server. In the example advertised by Fidzup, the geolocation information is used for geofencing: triggering specific actions when a user enter or leave a specific area.

The SpotInStore system is associated with two mobile applications that are used for demonstration and troubleshooting. In addition, we have identified an application of a shopping center that uses the SpotInStore system.

Demonstration app: Fidzup Live

The first application, Fidzup Live 3 , is used to demonstrate the system when combined with a demonstration video. This video, presents an application scenario in which a user receive coupons through pop-up notification in a mobile application. This video embeds an ultrasonic signal, that can be received by a nearby phone. When watching the video with the FidzupLive mobile app running, pop-up notification appears on the phone simultaneously with those that appear on the video.

Troubleshooting app: Fidzup Diagnostic

The second application, Fidzup Diagnostic, is a troubleshooting tool whose purpose is to help identify reception issues in real world deployment. The main feature of this mobile application is the detection and identification of an ultrasonic signal. When launching the listen activity, it capture the audio signal and attempt to extract the ultrasonic signal. As a secondary feature, it seems to be able to identify the location where the detected signal is supposed to be deployed. However, for all the signals we have submitted to the Diagnostic app, the app always failed to identify a location.

Shopping center app

The SpotInStore system is currently deployed in a shopping center near Paris: La Vache Noire 4 at Arceuil. A mobile application 5 dedicated to this shopping center is available both on the Google PlayStore 6 and the Apple AppStore 7 . The geofencing feature of the mobile application is described on their website: un procédé de "géofencing" pour offrir des promotions et alertes exclusives aux utilisateurs se trouvant dans le centre. and it adds that no personal information is stored Dès qu'elles le quittent, la désactivation des messages est automatique et immédiate et aucune donnée nominative n'est enregistrée. Through a physical visit of the shopping center, we have been able to confirm the presence of ultrasonic signal.

3 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fidzup.fidzuplive 4 http://www.la-vache-noire.com/ 5 http://www.la-vache-noire.com/application-mobile-la-vache-noire/ 6 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fidzup.darkmall 7 https://itunes.apple.com/fr/app/id618120919 3

Analysis of the system

We performed a reverse engineering of the system by analyzing several elements of the system : the Fidzup Live and Fidzup Diagnostic applications and the. More specifically we analyze the ultrasonic signal and the network communications.

The ultrasonic signal

Analysis of the ultrasonic signal is easiest if we have access to an actual signal.

Luckily the demonstration video used with the Fidzup Live application contains such a signal. We describe the process of our analysis and our first findings. The first step of the analysis is the acquisition of a sample. This was done by retrieving the demonstration video and extracting the soundtrack with ffmpeg. Then using a spectrum analyzer (Sonic Vizualizer) we were able to clearly identify the ultrasonic signal centered around 19KHz (see Figure3).

Focusing on the ultrasonic signal of the audio track (see Figure ??), we can identify a sequence of energy pulse separated by blank spaces. This signal appear to be an amplitude-shift keying (ASK) modulation, in which a sequence of bit in which the symbol '1' is represented by transmitting a carrier wave with a fixed amplitude, and the symbol '0' is represented by the lack of a carrier wave (blank).

Furthermore, we can have a rough estimation of the symbol duration by measuring the time between the beginnings of two consecutive 1's. Measuring this value on the previous signal, we get an approximate duration d = 0.0669 seconds.

The sequence appears to have a structure as the same pattern repeats itself which suggests that a frame in transmitted in loop by the signal. We further observe the ultrasonic sequence can be divided into two part, each of them having a different pattern that repeats itself several times. After further analysis, we identified that the length of this pattern is 32 symbols meaning that a frame is formed of 32 bits. Up to this point the structure of this frame and the information it carries remain unknown.

Analysis of the network traffic

As noted before, the Fidzup Diagnostic mobile application includes a feature to resolve the location associated with a signal received by the app. We assumed that this resolution was not done locally and was made with the help of a remote service. Using a soft Wi-Fi access point (hostapd) we captured the traffic coming out of a smartphone running the Diagnostic app.

Studying the traffic when the app is receiving a signal we identified DNS queries made to the domain api.spotinstore.com. The corresponding answered showed that this domain is a CNAME record for spotinprod.herokuapp. com indicating that the service is hosted on the herokuapp platform.

In a second time we observed that the application send HTTP GET requests. By repeating the operation, we were able to obtain requests to two distinct URLs :

1. http://api.spotinstore.com/api/v2/mobile/zones/3022.json?signature= 3f43f9a8b61e3e0fb8e7ecf96d9b328d&timestamp=1498592150

2. http://api.spotinstore.com/api/v2/mobile/zones/3020.json?signature= a32eea6ad7a62c389732d32e7504afcc&timestamp=1498592166

Apart from the signature and timestamp parameters, those URLs differ by the last element of the path : 3022 and 3020. This element looks like a code that could designate a location or a zone, as suggested by the previous element of the path: zones. Two distinct codes were observed because the ultrasound signal we used contains two distinct frames, which must correspond to different zones.

The structure of the URL thus appear to be the following : http://api.spotinstore.com/api/v2/mobile/zones/<zone_code>.json? signature=<signature>&timestamp=<timestamp> where:

• zone code is the code associated to a zone;

• signature is a token specific to each request;

• timestamp is the unix timestamp at which the request is generated.

The signature token appear to be pseudo-random as there is no evident pattern between the various requests. It is likely a token that is generated using a custom algorithm in order to restrict the access to the service.

Analysis of the mobile applications

For the last part of our analysis, we focused on the mobile applications: Fidzup Diagnostic and Fidzup Live. By decompiling those applications we were able to access information that helped finishing the reverse engineering of the system. The decompilation of the .apk was performed using Dex2jar8 to extract the .class files and then Luyten9 to analyze those .class files.

In the Fidzup Live application we identified a class, com.fidzup.spotinstore.audio.SpotInStoreAudioA including information about the signal characteristics and the structure of the frames. First we found a set of variable specifying some elements of the signal. The most interesting are the following :

• frequency = 19000.0f; confirms that the carrier frequency is indeed 19KHz;

• pulseDuration = 69.66f; confirms the previous approximation of the symbol duration;

• signalSize = 32; suggests that the total size of a frame is 32 bits.

In addition we found methods and constants whose names suggested the use of a cyclic redundancy check (CRC), which is common practice in wireless communications. private s t a t i c f i n a l i n t CRC_MASK = 255; private s t a t i c f i n a l i n t CRC_ POLYNOMI AL = 359; private s t a t i c f i n a l i n t C R C _ P O L Y N O M I A L _ S I Z E = 9; private s t a t i c f i n a l i n t C R C _ R E M A I N D E R _ S I Z E = 8; private s t a t i c f i n a l i n t DATA_LENGTH = 18; private s t a t i c f i n a l i n t DATA_MASK = 262143; private s t a t i c f i n a l i n t

I N I T _ M A S K _ W _ O F F S E T = 2080374784; private s t a t i c f i n a l i n t I N I T _ V A L U E _ W _ O F F S E T = 1409286144;
These values indicate the characteristics of the CRC used. For instance that the polynomial used by the CRC is on 9 bits (CRC POLYNOMIAL SIZE) and its decimal value is 359 (CRC POLYNOMIAL) but that the output is truncated to keep only 8 bits (CRC REMAINDER SIZE). As a matter of fact the method computing the CRC is available:

private i n t crc ( long n , i n t i , f i n a l i n t n2 , f i n a l i n t n3 ) { f i n a l long n4 = n2 ; n < <= 64 -i ; long n5 ; f o r ( --i ; i >= 0; --i ) { n5 = n ; i f (( n & 1 L << 63) != 0 x0L ) { n5 = ( n ^n4 << 64 -n3 ) ; } n = n5 << 1; } return ( i n t ) ( n >>> 64 -n3 + 1) ; }
Looking at the decompiled code of the Fidzup Diagnostic application, we found a class, com.fidzup.spotinstore.diagnostic.ListenActivity that contained information about the construction of the HTTP requests identified during the network traffic analysis. More particularly, we found the following code that confirmed the structured of the request: private i n t r ; ... f i n a l long n = new Date () . getTime () / 1000 L ; f i n a l String string = " http :// api . spotinstore . com / api / v2 / mobile / zones / " + t h i s . r + " . json ? signature = " + com . fidzup . spotinstore . diagnostic . g . a ( String . valueOf ( t h i s . r ) + n + " XaSnSXFLaN " ) + " & timestamp = " + n ;

In this portion of code we can quickly identified that this.r is in fact the zone code and that n contain the timestamp. It is important to note that the zone code is represented by an int. We can therefore assume that the zone code is encoded on 32 bits. More interesting, is the generation of the signature. It is obtained by applying the method a from the class com.fidzup.spotinstore.diagnostic.g to the concatenation of the zone code, the time stamp and a constant string. The signature is therefore computed as follows : <signature> = MD5(<zone code> | <timestamp> | "XaSnSXFLaN" )

Wrapping up

Based on our previous analysis we can assert the following:

• The signal is transmitted using an ASK modulation using a carrier frequency of 19KHz with symbol duration of 0.0669 milliseconds.

• The signal is transmitted by 32-bits long frames that are repeated.

• The frame includes a CRC of 8 bits.

Based on those information we attempted to rebuild the internal structure of a frame. Among its 32 bits, we know that 8bits belong to a CRC. In addition we have signal corresponding to the zone code 3020 respectively 3022 that have been transmitted. The binary representation of those codes are the following :

• 3020 : 1011 1100 1100

• 3022 : 1011 1100 1110

If we look at the transmitted frame we notice that they include the two previous sequences of bits. Starting from there, we can observer that, in the frame, those sequences are always preceded by the same sequence: 0101 0100 0000. It make sense to consider that the zone code is in fact encoded on 16 bits and that the last four 0 of this sequence are in fact the most significant bits of the zone code. This leaves an 8 bits sequence 0101 0100 that always precedes the zone code. This sequence is the preamble, a pattern marking the beginning of a frame.

The last 8 bits of the frame are likely the CRC. By recomputing the CRC of the area code, we found the exact value found in the last 8 bits of the frame, Figure 5: Structure of a frame with an 8 bits preamble, 16 bits payload, and 8 bits CRC.

confirming that this is indeed a CRC computed over the area code and not the full frame (the preamble is not included in the CRC computation).

Finally a frame is composed of an 8 bits constant preamble (0101 0100 or 0x54), followed by a 16 bit value corresponding to the zone code and ends with an 8 bits CRC of the zone code (see Figure 5).

Ultrasonic signal generation and jamming

Having reverse engineered the ultrasonic encoding, we can now generate our own signal in order to interact with the system. Based on the GNURadio framework we created tools to interact with the SpotInStore system.

Signal generation

In a nutshell, our signal generation tool generate an ASK signal by multiply a carrier signal at 19KHz with a rectangular signal encoding the sequence of bits. In order to get a clean signal, we then use pass-band filter centered on the carrier frequency. The result is then fed to an audio sink that output the signal through the computer speakers. The rectangular signal is created by taking a frame in its binary form and repeating each bit n times. n depending on the sampling rate of the setting and the symbol duration : n = samplingRate * d. The GNURadio companion sketch of the generator is presented on Figure 7.

Using this generator, we've been able to generate signals that were recognized by both Fidzup Diagnostic and Fidzup Live applications. In particular, we were able to trigger pop-up in the Fidzup live application by generating signal for the zone code used in the demonstration video (3020 and 3022).

The ability of generating arbitrary code can be used for various purposes. It could be used to annoy users by generating notifications, analyze unknown or locked features of an application, or simply to raise user awareness by demonstrating how those systems are working.

Ultrasonic jamming

Using this same generator, it is possible to jam SpotInStore ultrasonic signal. The best approach we have identified is to generate an ASK signal corresponding to a random sequence of bits. The two signals will then be merged at the receiver, and the temporal structure will be destroyed rendering the original signal impossible to decode.

Apart from denial of service, jamming can be seen as a mean of privacy protection. Indeed, the jammer will generate a small area were the ultrasonic system is ineffective. Since ultrasonic beacons can expose the user to serious privacy issues, and given the difficulty to control all the channels through which the signal can be received, ultrasonic jamming can be an attractive solution for users.

Analysis of a real world deployment

The Spotinstore system has been deployed in the shopping center La Vache Noire. As part of this deployment, a dedicated mobile featuring the Spotinstore reception framework has been published10 . We collected audio sample at the shopping center in order to test the application. However the Android application was only working partially on our phone and we weren't able to use the features associated with the ultrasonic beacons.

Application permissions

Looking at the permissions required by the application, we can see that the microphone permission, required to acquire the ultrasonic signal, is included. However we notice that geolocation permission is not required, suggesting to the user that this application cannot obtain the location of the user. This is obviously not the case as this application feature an ultrasonic localization system. Even if the application can obtain the geolocation of the user in a limited number of locations it still access the location to provide location based services and can potentially collect it. Furthermore is capable of getting a very accurate geolocation. Indeed, as advertised by Fidzup, each ultrasonic beacon can cover a limited area such as a small shop ore an aisle in a larger shop. The case of applications geolocating users through side channels without asking for geolocation permission is not new [START_REF] Prasad Achara | Short Paper: WifiLeaks: Underestimated Privacy Implications of the ACCESS wifi state Android Permission[END_REF]. Using this kind of technique to obtain the user location without its consent has been considered as a deceptive practice by the Federal Trade Commission of the USA [START_REF]Mobile Advertising Network InMobi Settles FTC Charges It Tracked Hundreds of Millions of Consumers' Locations Without Permission[END_REF].

Zone codes

Using audio samples collected in the shopping center La Vache Noire, we were able to identify the codes broadcast by the ultrasonic beacons. We did so, using the Fidzup diagnostic application: we played the samples next to a phone running the application while monitoring the network traffic of the phone. The zone code was obtained from the GET request sent by the app as in section 3.2: http://api.spotinstore.com/api/v2/mobile/zones/2013.json? signature=406c4003cc8786cfd94450865dddc308&timestamp=1500657161

Over the eight samples, we always obtained the same zone code : 2013. This suggests that only one zone is configured at this shopping center. The ultrasonic system is likely used to detect if the user is in the shopping center, and the signal is likely broadcast by the audio system of the shopping center.

Conclusions

The system studied in this paper relies on a relatively simple coding and modulation scheme for the ultrasonic signal. Using open source tools such as GNURadio it is thus straightforward to analyze the signal and to generate arbitrary codes. We show that jamming of the signal is feasible and that it can be a solution to protect users' against tracking. The study of a real world deployment demonstrates that those systems can be used to track the location of users without asking their permissions.

As we demonstrated in this paper, those ultrasonic signals can be decoded by anybody. This exposes the users to tracking by other entities. For instance, any mobile application having access to the microphone could geolocate users visiting an area equipped with beacons. A malware running on a device could achieve a similar result. The generalization of those systems will mean that more and more areas will be covered by ultrasonic beacons which will increase the potential for unsolicited tracking.

The tool presented in this documents are available online : https://github. com/cunchem/SIS-Ultrasonic-Beacon

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Details of the SpotInStore system.

  (a) Fidzup Diagnostic (b) Fidzup Live (c) La Vache Noire

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Screenshot of mobile applications featuring the SpotInStore system.

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Spectrogram of the audio from the demonstration video. A signal centered on 19KHz is visible from time 6 to time 41.

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: Detail of the ultrasonic signal at 19KHz.

  b a s i c A u d i o A n a l y z e r C o n f i g . frequency = 19000.0 f ; b a s i c A u d i o A n a l y z e r C o n f i g . samplingRate = 44100.0 f ; b a s i c A u d i o A n a l y z e r C o n f i g . windowSize = 512; b a s i c A u d i o A n a l y z e r C o n f i g . pulseDuration = 69.66 f ; b a s i c A u d i o A n a l y z e r C o n f i g . pulseRatio = 0.33333334 f ; b a s i c A u d i o A n a l y z e r C o n f i g . a n a l y s i s D u r a t i o n = ( i n t ) ( b a s i c A u d i o A n a l y z e r C o n f i g . pulseDuration * 32.0 f * 3.2 f ) ; b a s i c A u d i o A n a l y z e r C o n f i g . signalSize = 32; b a s i c A u d i o A n a l y z e r C o n f i g . bitcounts = new i n t [] { 15 , 17 , 19 , 13 , 11 , 21 , 23 , 9 , 7 , 25 , 27 }; return b a s i c A u d i o A n a l y z e r C o n f i g ;

Figure 6 :

 6 Figure 6: Signal generator in GNURadio.

Figure 7 :

 7 Figure 7: Permissions ask by the Android application of the shopping center La Vache Noire.

  The method a, shown below, is in fact the computation of the MD5 digest. More specifically it takes a String as input and returns a String containing the digest in a hexadecimal representation.

	public s t a t i c String a ( String s ) {
	try {
	f i n a l MessageDigest instance = MessageDigest . getInstance ( " MD5
	" ) ;
	instance . update ( s . getBytes () ) ;
	f i n a l byte [] digest = instance . digest () ;
	f i n a l StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer () ;
	f o r ( i n t i = 0; i < digest . length ; ++ i ) {
	f o r ( s = Integer . toHexString ( digest [ i ] & 0 xFF ) ; s . length () < 2; s
	= " 0 " + s ) {}
	sb . append ( s ) ;
	}
	return sb . toString () ;
	} catch ( N o S u c h A l g o r i t h m E x c e p t i o n ex ) {
	ex . p r in tS ta c kT ra ce () ;
	return " " ;
	}
	}

https://www.fidzup.com/en/

https://www.fidzup.com/en/live/

https://github.com/pxb1988/dex2jar

https://github.com/deathmarine/Luyten

\url{https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fidzup.darkmall}

Acknowlegements

The authors would like to thank Rollo Tomassi for telling us about this system and Marc Jeanmougin (@ Mc ) for helping us collecting audio samples.