Synopticon was composed as a collaborative project during the course of an extended email exchange between 1998 and 2008. Part poetics of collaboration, part cultural archaeology, part textual collage, this book records an investigation into authorship and authenticity in the construction of social texts and cultural artefacts. Collaborative praxis is not defined here solely as a method, but as a condition of discourse; a poiesis. Collaboration as a technique of invention and reinvention--as the detournement of the political and the politics of detournement. Collaboration as the disputation of existing hegemonies with the pragmatics of making use of current states of affairs. The paradox of working contraries. LOUIS ARMAND's books include Inexorable Weather (Arc, 2001), Malice in Underland (2003) and Strange Attractors (Salt, 2003), and he is editor of Contemporary Poetics (Northwestern University Press, 2007). He is director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Charles University, Prague. JOHN KINSELLA's books include Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press, 2007), Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (WW Norton, 2008), and he is the editor of The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009). He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia.