Editing Jackson Mac Low (section)

=== Connection to anarchism ===
Jackson Mac Low was invested in pushing the boundaries of author and audience. He regularly asserted that the author is not responsible for producing meaning, but rather creating the environment for the audience to extract a unique interpretation.<ref name=":1" /> He was interested in the dynamic between chance and choice within syntax. Works produced by chance allow the performers of the poem to have their own sense of determinism, which reflects Mac Low's own anarchist affiliations. Speaking on this dynamic between the author and performers, Mac Low stated:<blockquote>"Although performers are not directly regulated by a central authority, eventually they are, since I as the composer am giving them the materials, procedures, rules, etc. This is why I usually say these days that such performances are "analogies" rather than "paradigms" of free communities. Nevertheless, they're exercising their own initiative within the situation, the given materials being analogies of the real-life conditions provided by nature and society."<ref name=":1" /></blockquote>Within Mac Low's work, he disrupts subjectivity through the use of chance operations and the responsibility to extract and enact meaning falls on the role of the reader. Because of this, the reader functions more as performer than the author. For Mac Low, this method of producing poetry reflects his [[Anarchism|anarchist]] engagements because it dismantles the power structure between reader and author and serves as an analogy for a free community in which people make their own choices for how to live and structure their thinking and decisions.<ref name=":1" />