Juxtaposer

At the outset I apologize for this post being a bit slapdash: I've been preparing my presentation for this week, but I will not allude to it here. I want it to reach you (classmates) immediately when I present it tomorrow. Were I to mention it at all now, it would surely be compromised.

Now then, for Strickland: what interests me about her work is that it is first and foremost poetry, not programming - i.e. she has a way with words. Now if we can just ignore her interpretations of her own work, we'd be all set.

Furthermore, she is clearly a formalist. She gives herself constraints, writing many poems of similar structures, dividing 'em all up into discreet units. Even on the page, her segments have two general types of meaning: micro- and macrocosmic. Let's take V: WaveSon.nets & Losing L'una as an example. To start at the macrocosmic side, we can read the book as a whole. Then we can read each side as a whole (e.g. WaveSon.nets). Getting smaller, we can read a series of son.nets that begin with a new sentence and end with a period as its own unit (e.g. WaveSon.nets #12-14). Then down to the individual son.net, the individual stanza, the individual line, the individual word. Each unit means something on its own, yet that meaning changes as enters into any larger context.

This is classic enjambment: to use breaks to alter both sound & sense. The technique, of course, isn't anything new. John Milton's Paradise Lost employs it constantly, and his brief note on the verse structure of his epic is a classic defense of enjambment. He writes that most important to a poem is "true musical delight," which "consists onely in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings." The modernists, in opposition to the prim elegance of Victorian style, began extensive experiments with enjambment, and the technique's prevalence has only increased to the present day.

What's new with Strickland, however, is the enjambment between poems, and not just lines or stanzas, a fact that she foregrounds in the Losing L'una section by giving each tercet a unique call number. Strickland further amplifies this enjambment by the third Web part of V (Vniverse) cutting up her WaveSon.nets into tercets (even though they rarely appear as such in the book version) and assigning each a star in the sky. The reader can then explore by dragging his/her mouse over the stars and follow his/her own reading order.

Thus, by juxtaposing new segments of the poem, thousands of new meanings open up (some better than others). Yet this is not merely cynical fragmentation or resistance to interpretation: the new meanings only become possible because each unit works as a discrete entity which, when juxtaposed next to a different unit, creates a new meaning that proceeds from the two.

This method of juxtaposition is nothing new either. One of its more recent theorizations is soviet montage theory in film studies: juxtapose one image with another and their clash will create a third meaning. One of the older formulations of this kind of juxtaposition comes from the "Great Preface" to the Mao edition of the Chinese Classic of Poetry (詩經), which dates (the preface, that is) to the first century A.D. at the latest. In this preface, the author writes that one of the primary techniques used in the poems is called xing (興) or oblique comparison, which is distinct from bi (比) or metaphor. The clearest illustration of this technique in English comes from Ezra Pound, who had read the "Great Preface":

In the Station of a Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

In any case, what makes Strickland interesting in this regard is that she uses new media to embrace this proliferation of meaning through juxtaposition rather than resist the accretion of meaning. Meaning (and yes, that means semantic meaning) is impossible to shuck off. Why not exploit it?

Failure Forgotten

All art is grounded in failure.

Pondering the various theories of 20th-century avant garde we've covered in class, I realized that most hold no water philosophically. I used to think this was a problem. I now realize this is their success. Though they're meant to justify a particular artistic approach, they always fail as such. Futurism, for example, seems fairly traditional 100 years later. Marinetti's manifestos draw on long rhetorical traditions while attempting to disavow all tradition. This is O.K. It doesn't mean there's no artistic value in his manifestos.

Coming to this week's topic of computer-generated poetry, I noticed the utter failure to remove the human element. Charles O. Hartman and Hugh Kenner's Sentences (found poems produced by running an 1870s elementary school textbook through two computer programs, TRAVESTY and DIASTEXT) involve considerable human work, as they recognize in their afterword:

(1) we discerned Found Poetry in the Thayer School sentences. Then (2) we judged their vocabulary so strange (in 1988) yet so centered (in circa 1870) that a selection made by TRAVESTY could be rich with potential. And (3) we saw in DIASTEXT a capability for approximating magisterial Form. Finally, (4) taking a liberty granted even the most be-Mused poet, we entitled the fifteen sections, obeying what decorum seemed most apt.

To this I'd like to add that lightly edit the text and write an afterword explaining what they've done. The result is a series of mediocre poems.

More interesting and entertaining to me is apostrophe by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry. It is a series of statements that begin with "you are," the first section being an original work, the second being a series of "you are" statements generated by putting the original statements through a program that finds "you are" statements on the Web. A random selection from apostrophe's second section reads as follows:

you are a man, you have no guest right here 。you are a curious one 。"You are a reincarnated soul of many past lives," Vivian was relaying with astonishment 。you are a junior or senior in high school and this movie was made for you so run and check it out 。you are a true romantic, you believe in the power of love and you are willing to take a leap of faith so this movie is for you 。you are an insomniac and you like cool, dark places so go see this movie

The result is a fascinating series of seemingly connected statements about the reader. Kennedy and Wershler-Henry claim that apostrophe "perform[s] a digital détournement that liberates language from one context in order to tease out other entanglements." Clearly, a commentary on the Web. However, while it does critique the language of the Internet, it simultaneously fails in this task, reinscribing the ideology of the Internet in the poem simply by using its language and elevating it to the level of art.

Furthermore, they note in their introduction that apostrophe "makes no claims to procedural purity," which they rightly realize as being beside the point. To me, text-manipulating programs are useful tools in the creative process and nothing more - incapable of succeeding in pure or philosophical grounds.

Another example of failure being the grounds of art can be found in digital poems (yes, I'll call 'em that) created by using Translation Party, a site which takes any English phrase you enter and uses Google Translate to translate it back & forth between English & Japanese until the same translation is repeated twice, finding equilibrium. In this work, the failure of computer translation is fundamental to the creative process. Here's an example, taken from John Pasden's blog at Sinosplice on August 8, 2009.

Machine translation here creates a lineated bilingual poem that can only be fully understood with the help of a human translator (be it another person or yourself). Any attempt to understand a phrase in the language you don't understand via machine translation or phrasebook will only repeat the problem. Yet the creation of the poem requires machine translation (and more specifically, a failed machine translation).

Furthermore, the semantic meaning of the poem contrasts the dark absolutism of the starting phrase with the vain hope of the ending phrase, suggesting the naivete of those who hope to restore healthy relations between the two countries. And note that this (false) hope is only introduced through English translation, i.e. the intervention of democratic Anglophone governments.

But wait! There's more! Because of the rapidly changing nature of Google Translate, which relies on its catalog of websites as well as user suggestions for better translations, you will introduce new translations derived from the same translations, given enough time. For example, here's a digital poem I made yesterday using Translation Party and the exact same phrase as John Pasden.



(I apologize for the low quality. My techno-knowledge does not reach much beyond everyday use.) In this version, instead of attempting to resolve China & Japan's diplomatic difficulties through naive optimism, we simply reach a translation of the original statement into the present. The poem hangs its head in resolution. The conclusion follows logically from the premise; it does not attempt to contradict it.

And this, readers, is the true potential of failure.

*Note: The title of this blog post is a reference to my high school friends' emo-core band. It later evolved into the pop-rock stylings of The Peter Marsh Group, of which I was a member. Don't worry if you failed to catch the reference.

The Conceptual, the Allegorical, and Totality

Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman is, to me, perhaps the most interesting work we've read for class so far. Part of this is due to a personal interest in the concept of allegory, especially as it articulated by Walter Benjamin - a concept Place & Fitterman frequently allude to. They also recognize allegory's fundamental grounding in the ruin (p. 40). I have wondered for almost two months now why these concepts have not been brought up in the works we've read. At last, they emerge.

Precisely what Place & Fitterman note is the following:

7c. Walter Benjamin wrote that baroque allegorical writing (save Dante) is fundamentally writing as souvenir, commodity as collector's item. Because allegorical writing is a frozen dialectic, its figural properties are necessarily deformed/destroyed - as figured by the "ruin."

This, of course, refers to Benjamin's innovative study The Origin of German Tragic Drama, to which they allude elsewhere, when mentioning the skull as the supreme allegorical image.

All this, I believe, is quite apt for their exploration of conceptual writing and new media/digital poetry. However, I believe they focus on the negative aspect of Benjamin's re-articulation of allegory to the exclusion of its positive aspect. This is a typical interpretation of Benjamin's work: critics like Georg Lukács and J. Hillis Miller, whose presences loom over theory like angels of the Apocalypse, largely support such an interpretation. They propose that Benjamin's work is negative, deconstructive, and take "ruin" at (nearly) its face value. Benjamin's actual conception, however, is far more complex.

What they're alluding to is Benjamin's statements that "allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things," that as such it reveals nature's "irresistible decay," and it thereby "declares itself to be beyond beauty" (OGT 178).

And these critics are partially correct: at this point, Benjamin is largely pointing toward allegory's negative qualities. At the beginning of this section, he writes that with allegory, “a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance.” Allegory arbitrarily assigns its object a meaning that is alien to it. This denies the material object inherent significance. Given the unimportance of detail, the “fragment” or ruin can then arbitrarily stand for something else, and hence “the false appearance of totality has gone out [geht aus]” (176). Yet geht aus can mean either "extinguished" or "left the room" - i.e. totality may come back with a vengeance.

Thus, Benjamin does not draw a steadfast line separating totality and allegory and then throw his money on the side of allegory. Instead, his mode is one of oscillation between positive and negative views of the two and of obscuring their distinction. For example, he states several times that the goal of allegory in the baroque writers is to use it in a way “which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which raises them onto a higher plane” (175), that they regarded the work of art as a “pil[ing] up of fragments ceaselessly” or as a “repetition of stereotypes” in hopes of a miraculous transformation (178). Although later interpreters may sneer at this hope, Benjamin will note its affinities with parts of Romanticism, citing one of Novalis's fragments (187). Perhaps, then, Benjamin does not equate the miracle with a false hope, but wishes to hint at the process by which the “miracle” occurs.

One place where he begins to hint is in a passage about nature's irresistible decay, a passage favored by his negative critics: “However, nature was not seen by them in bud and bloom, but in the over-ripeness and decay of her creations. In nature they saw eternal transience...” (179). More than the other section on irresistible decay, this one states definitively the absolute degeneration of nature into rot, yet it is precisely that that he states: absolute degeneration, or in the words of the text, eternal transience. As Lukács notes at the conclusion of his essay, Benjamin is “much too precise a stylist to ignore” the full implications of his words (88). The word “eternal” is totalizing: nature always falls into decay, a decay as irresistible as the Calvinist God's grace – i.e. one cannot under any circumstances avoid it. Whether pointed upward or downward, eternity is still eternity, and as the Jena Romantics demonstrate, the arrow can be turned around.

This use of the word “eternal” is the point where Benjamin does turn it around. The baroque artwork, he says, “wants only to endure, and it clings with all its senses to the eternal,” and therefore, in allegory, it sets up “consciously constructed ruins,” the form of which is meant to withstand time's erosion (181-82). Benjamin's treatment of this topic is worth quoting at length:

The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic form is as follows: to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth. This transformation of material content into truth content makes the decrease in effectiveness, whereby the attraction of earlier charms diminishes decade by decade, into the basis for a rebirth, in which all ephemeral beauty is completely stripped off, and the work stands as a ruin. In the allegorical construction of the baroque Trauerspiel such ruins have always stood out clearly as formal elements of the preserved work of art. (182)

In this passage, Benjamin swings fully into the positive mode in describing allegory. The baroque artists, it turns out, knew what they were doing. As opposed to those artists who sought immortality through sheer greatness, those of the baroque followed a kind of Taoist wu-wei path by which they consciously employed weakness to their advantage. In a world of irresistible decay in which details are of no importance, baroque artists employed unimportant details that would purpose(ful)ly decay, leaving behind only a fragmentary form that would lead to a rebirth in eternal life. How this occurs, again, is explained by the Jena Romantics, but an investigation into their theories is beyond the scope of this post.

As I mentioned above, Benjamin will not be content with staking his claim on one side or the other. Soon after the passage quoted above, he returns to the negative mode. Contra a “symbolic totality” in which one or several objects are “comprised of one single feature... it is as something incomplete and imperfect that objects stare out from the allegorical structure” (186). Nature becomes personalized “not so as to be made more inward, but, on the contrary – so as to be deprived of a soul,” he writes, quoting Herbert Cysarz approvingly (187). Allegory is still ruinous, but now those ruins are despiritualized. The rebirth the baroque artists longed for, Benjamin claims, did take place, but it was mere illusion. Fragments cannot become something new; they only give the appearance of doing so. And yet the haunting language of totality remains. If objects within the allegorical structure are imperfect and incomplete, it seems they must forever remain so, which leads us back to totality.

Benjamin recognizes this, and so at the conclusion of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he rapidly oscillates between the positive and negative poles, first seeing the negative as positive: “Whatever [the baroque age] picks up, its Midas-touch turns into something endowed with significance. Its element was transformation of every sort; and allegory was its scheme.” The material object is infused with the spirit by means of the allegorist's touch. Yet this turns around, the positive becomes negative, for absolute spiritualization “destroys itself in its emancipation from what is sacred. Materiality – but here soulless materiality – becomes its home” (229-30). Allegory, in this presentation, divides the spiritual from the material: the material object may act as a sign pointing to the spiritual, but the two never overlap. In its haste to separate itself from the spiritual realm, the allegorical sign cuts itself off too and so denies it any reality in the realm of things. On the side of the material realm, it is presented as merely a sign, and thus it is also denied existence.

Hence, this double denial incites Benjamin's rage against what he perceives to be allegory's denial of the existence of evil (233-35). Despite this rant, simultaneously powerful and elusive, Benjamin concludes his book thus:

In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are; and for this reason the German Trauerspiel merits interpretation. In the spirit of allegory it is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the last. (235)

Somehow, after writing about allegory's irresistibly destructive nature and its denial of both the material and spiritual realms, Benjamin manages to conclude in the positive mode, back on the note that ruins, though dead, remain intact, while others only glimmer and, unaware of their own inevitable destruction, just as quickly vanish. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our allegorist stands forever.

To understand exactly what Benjamin (and, by extension, Place & Fitterman) are dealing with here, we would have to examine Friedrich Schlegel's fragments, and, behind him, Kant's three Critiques to get a firm philosophical grounding. Clearly, such an exercise is beyond the scope of a blog post.

But what all this means for conceptual writing is that, far from avoiding totality, authoritarianism, or whatever, it constantly fluctuates between the positive and negative as a kind of bottomless well. Dworkin rightly points this out at the conclusion of his essay, finding the cataloguing nature of conceptual writing complicit in the technology of the U.S. government's desire for "total information awareness" while still attempting to challenge the authority of such technology.

Totality is total. In attempting to escape it, one flees only into more totality.

Quotation & Translation

In last week's class, we briefly touched upon the topic of collaboration: is collaborative reading the best model for the interpretation of interdisciplinary art (such as digital poetry)? My response to this was the whole "death of the author" notion described by theorists such as Roland Barthes and Stanley Fish (I know - shouldn't lump them together), in which meaning stems from both author and reader as well as the cultural contexts surrounding both of ends of the game. That is to say, all reading is collaborative, as is all artistic creation.

Another topic Lori, our prof, recently brought to our attention was quotation. This New York Times article mentions recent controversy over works by (German) Helene Hegemann and (American) David Shields, who both make extensive use of quotation and appropriation of previous writers' words, blog posts, etc. In no way is this technique new: Shields himself cites the likes of Joyce, Eliot, Sterne, and others as literary thieves. Walter Benjamin, whose critical work is chock full of quotations, composed his gargantuan Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk) entirely from quotations. The Taoist classic Lieh-tzu (written around 200-300 CE, and which I'm currently translating) borrows liberally from the older Taoist classic Chuang-tzu. Ecclesiastes 1:9, written sometime between 400-200 BCE, states: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: there is no new thing under the sun." And yea, that was before modernism.

What's new about the controversy is copyright law. The Google Books Project has brought this issue to the forefront: what business has one business to make their business from another's business? Well, apparently our founding father's thought it was necessary to a vital democracy that ideas circulate freely, so they limited copyright to 15 years. However, this length of time grew until, after the most recent incarnation of the Mickey Mouse Law, it now lasts "the life of the author plus 70 years" or, for corporate authorship, "120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier." Given the enormous wealth to be made from art (some types more than others, naturally), many artists and publishers get seriously pissed off when someone appropriates their work for a profit. Thus the current controversy.

What's interesting to me is how closely this relates to translation. When I quoted from Ecclesiastes earlier, I quoted as if the original were English, even though the original is more like "מַה־שֶּֽׁהָיָה֙ ה֣וּא שֶׁיִּהְיֶ֔ה וּמַה־שֶּׁנַּֽעֲשָׂ֔ה ה֖וּא שֶׁיֵּעָשֶׂ֑ה וְאֵ֥ין כָּל־חָדָ֖שׁ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּֽׁמֶשׁ׃," which I quoted from the Westminster Leningrad Codex online. To what extent should we copyright translation? (The laws don't extend nearly as long for translations as they do for original works.) Are translators original authors, as Ezra Pound asserts, or collaborators drawing on entire cultural traditions, as theorist Lawrence Venuti asserts (though later contradicts himself, but that's a discussion for another course)?

How about when translation is passed off as one's own work, such as the many parts of Paradise Lost that are direct translations from Ovid and Virgil? How about when one's own work is presented as a translation, such as Kenneth Rexroth's The Love Poems of Marichiko? What if the work I translate from and pass off as my own is still copyrighted? What if I translate the fake Chinese versions of Book 7 of the Harry Potter Series - should I be sued?

For my final project, I've been considering translating parts of the Lieh-tzu into digital poetry, working with a collaborator, adding explicitly collaborative (digital) elements, and inviting readers to interpret it collaboratively. Is this a form of quotation? Am I right to call it a translation? Is it an original work? Of both of us, or just my programmer/collaborator?

All this and more.

Concrete

Before beginning to examine concrete poetry and its relation to digital poetry, I must get something out of the way. In the "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry" by Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, they make several erroneous references to the Chinese language. I have already blogged about the concept of ideogram elsewhere. My beef is with the way they describe Chinese as an isolating language (as does Wikipedia) in that it offers a "pure relational syntax, based exclusively on word order."

This comes from an erroneous understanding of Chinese grammar, which, while it is far less inflected than English (and miles away from something like Russian), nonetheless relies on other grammatical markers to create syntax. Let's take classical Chinese because that's shown to be more isolating than modern Chinese. One of the first things a student of classical Chinese learns is the A B 也 [yě] pattern, which equates A with B. Definitions are written with this pattern, such as "孔人名也" [kóng rén míng yě], which translates as "Kong is the name of a person." The particle 也 is essential to the meaning of the sentence, not the word order. It's kind of surprising that they'd get this so wrong because Pignatari does make a correct reference to the Chinese character for sun, 日 [rì], in one of his concrete poems on the word LIFE.

With that monkey slain, I move on to the elephant in the room: concrete poetry. Let me begin by some remarks by Mary Ellen Solt from her introduction to Concrete Poetry: A World View. After admitting the difficulty of finding a unifying principle for concrete poets, she gives a few: "concentration upon the physical material from which the text is made," a focus on "reduced language," "making an object to be perceived rather than read," and a view that "the old grammatical-syntactical structures are no longer adequate to advanced processes of thought and communication in our time." Basically, concrete poetry marks a shift away from emotive and representational language, which it seems we've outgrown in this advanced day & age.

Let's look at two images of concrete poems to see how/if this plays out. The first is a page from Steve McCaffery's "Carnival." Here the emphasis is on overall visual design, produced by a typewriter. Letters appear in strings, clusters of various density, semicircles, etc. The emphasis appears to be away from representation, toward the raw materiality of the typewritten page (although we are viewing it on a computer screen). The design is quite beautiful, in fact: somewhere between a photograph of distant stars and the better kind of abstract painting.

However, then I notice that the big, falling letters on the right-hand side spell "PLUUUUUGE," with the last two U's turned upside-down to look like N's, thus reading "plunge." Now we have the word "plunge" representing its meaning (in a very emotive way, I might add). Also, I find on the right-hand side the "penetration to the white experience between the words." Ignoring the racial undertones, this is a very literal representation of what's going on in McCaffery's work.

The next image is from a work (or several works?) by Kitasono Katsue (北園 克衛)., Here, again, the emphasis is placed more heavily on the design aspect, with still a little bit of representation involved (such as with the "Siamese Twins" in the bottom right-hand corner or the "Egyptian Cross" in the bottom left-hand corner). Actually, these may be book covers he's designed (I just did a Google image search), but no matter: one thing we've established in class is that if you critique it as poetry, it is poetry.

What I've been wondering with regard to concrete poetry is what separates it from comics. Clearly, concrete poetry allows "non-linguistic material" in such works as "the 'Popcreto' of Augusto de Campos" and "the plastic poems of Kitasono Katsue" (to quote from Solt). It also allows some element of representation, as I've just demonstrated.

Case in point, a "Quimby the Mouse" comic by Chris Ware. (Parenthetical remark: Ware does all his artwork by hand, none by computer, although he obviously has to scan his work to reproduce it as a comic.) Here we have a slightly more representational use of both language and art. The sentence is coherent (if somewhat colloquial throughout and mirrored at one point) and the drawings clearly depict a mouse, a landscape, a cat head, etc. There's also an implied narrative on both the visual and verbal levels, which we have not found in any of the concrete poems viewed thus far.

However, much like concrete poetry, the emphasis is on design and on stretching the capabilities of word & image. The words are as visually significant as the images, and the images invite a "reading," as if they were words. Meaning emerges from the play between the two levels of artistry. To me, this sounds a lot like concrete poetry.

There's more to say on that, but I'd like to turn my attention to "Jabber," the Jabberwocky Engine created by Neil Hennessy. First of all, it eschews images to focus purely on the verbal level. Also, it seeks to be nonsensical, with meaning instead created from the concept.

And yet I find it full of representation still: the words move like "molecules," as his artist statement says, and combine to create "portmanteau words [sic]" in a way that sub-atomic particles combined to create new elements in the first stages of the universe.

Also, after letting the engine run for about 20 seconds, I exported the word list, which read:

horaderl
humaryin
ancaluai
arne
depeacor
clinenia
araporte
adsly
graeli
beet
sutbos
clest
menticie
chessin
dortesto
ende
ottooentsk
fins
quis
ions
orplorn
itee

Of these "fake" words, the Oxford English dictionary recognizes six as real words:

arne - obsolete word for adler tree (last usage date: 1830s)
beet - root vegetable
ende - obsolete word for a duck (last usage date: 1430s)
fins - fish appendages
quis - school slang for who (from Latin - last usage date: 1998)
ions - charged particles

And, though unintentional, what could be more representational than the word "ions" appearing in a neo-concrete digital poem in which new words are created by letters moving about like molecules?

Daddy Dada ("Ironic")

Let letters loose! lay language loose like leis

Or line-like lie, yet let 'er lay a loom

That she should weave a word within a haze

Lest we would leave the world within a tomb.

-Ben Adam

A bit of doggerel to kick off today's post. This week we examined the roots of certain digital poetries in Dada. As BP Nicholls has it, Dada would "redefine antagonism as a form of absolute skepticism," this in opposition to Futurism's violent attack on history which yet maintained a surprisingly naive faith in the future. In early forms of Dada, too (such as Hugo Ball's "mystical" "affirmative" "buffoonery"), we find this faith still in operation: Dada would become a kind of stripping away of the artifice of signification to lay bare a field of primitive play. It would take Tristan Tzara to bring Dada's irony to its logical (non-)conclusion.

What Tzara realized is what Paul de Man would later articulate in The Rhetoric of Temporality: irony is an essentially destructive force, a process that, once put in motion, must progress infinitely. De Man will call it "a relationship, within consciousness, between two selves." When the consciousness divides into two selves, the "ironic" one then laughs at the "mystified"/"authentic" one (here he cites Baudelaire on dedoublement).

Is the ironic self, then, demystified? Do we then reach Duchamp's "meta-irony" that "destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative"?

The answer is no, because as soon as one's self claims an affirmative stance, it opens itself up to irony once again. The ironized self splits and becomes ironized. Then, the second-level ironized self splits and becomes ironized. Then the third-, fourth-, fifth-levels, etc. Go as far down the rabbit hole as you'd like, you'll never reach the end.

Case in point: the stanza I wrote at the beginning of this post, about Joerg Piringer's wir alle, which I attributed to "Ben Adam" (a name meaning "son of man" in Hebrew). To what extent is it genuine? Obviously, a certain amount of effort was put into the puns and alliteration of the first two lines, yet they're definitely overwrought and the last two lines end somewhat lamely. Also, it's written in ABAB rhyme, iambic meter, a form that went out of style somewhere around Swineburne's time.

Then, perhaps, my derogatory comment about it being "doggerel" should be ironized. Do I really mean it? Am I in fact proud of my few quickly written rhymes?

And that last paragraph: are my questions disingenuous? Are they rhetorical? Shouldn't it be ironized, too?

Etc.

How I

now lie.

Future! Future! Future!

Scorn for the past! Though never fully justified - for a valorization of the future at the expense of the past is just as absurd as its converse - it brings about a certain liberating quality. What's important is your work, here & now, alive, changing.

What I'd like to note today are two vastly different ways of shucking off the past (both of which, ironically, have become canonized). The first comes from F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto:

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. [trans. not listed]
    

Here, a dismissal of the past is the only way to innovate the present. What's past is dead, and we must actively toss aside its stinking corpse.

Here, on the other hand, we find a passage from the Taoist 莊子 (Zhuangzi or Chuang-Tzu):

Duke Huan was reading in his hall. Wheelwright Bian, who was cutting a wheel just outside the hall, put aside his hammer and chisel and went in. There he asked Duke Huan, "What do those books you are reading say?"

The duke answered, "These are the words of the Sages."

The wheelwright said, "Are the Sages still around?"

And the duke answered, "They're dead."

Then the wheelwright said, "Well, what you're reading then is no more than the dregs of the ancients."

The duke: "When I, a prince, read, how is it that a wheelwright dares come and dispute with me! If you have an explanation, fine. If you don't have an explanation, you die!"

Then Wheelwright Bian said, "I tend to look at it in terms of my own work: when you cut a wheel, if you go too slowly, it slides and doesn't stick fast; if you go too quickly, it jumps and doesn't go in. Neither too slowly nor too quickly - you achieve it in your hands, and those respond to the mind. I can't put it into words, but there is some fixed principle there. I can't teach it to my son, and my son can't get instruction in it from me. I've gone on this way for seventy years and have grown old in cutting wheels. The ancients have died and, along with them, that which cannot be transmitted. Therefore what you are reading is nothing more than the dregs of the ancients." [trans. Stephen Owen]

Taoism, too, finds in the words of the past nothing but "dregs." However, was posited instead is far less violent than the quasi-fascism of the Italian Futurists; Taoism instead cleaves to the paradox of 無為 (wu-wei, i.e. non-action or not doing). Because the wisdom of the past cannot be taught, it is only through the cessation of striving after it that it can be attained. Activity is the attempt to impose an order; what is needed is to allow things to proceed according to their nature (自然 zi-ran in Chinese, literally "what is so of itself").

Let these be put side by side and each person choose according to her/his fancy.

Readers, Subjects, Reductionisms, & Deconstructionisms

For the sake of time, I must be brief. The articles this week bring up huge topics footnoted by libraries of commentary. My thoughts, too, abound. If they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Now brevity is the soul of wit. "Condense eternity," as Hart Crane writes.

The articles by McGann and Michaels both attempt to posit a method against a hard-nosed deconstruction. McGann wants to focus on what he calls "textuality," the material and cultural conditions of a text (as demonstrated in editions, notebooks, book prices, marginalia, etc.). The problem with "theory" is that it focuses on semantic meaning to the exclusion of external conditions. These, too, he argues, are very much a part of textual intepretation.

Michaels rightly takes this notion to task. Citing de Man. Derrida, and S. Howe on "the mark," he shows that materiality, too, is unstable. Focus on materiality, and you exclude anything remotely related to authorial intent, to semantic meaning, and to the poetic work itself. Shifting interpratation to the material actually heightens the undecidability of the text. Skepticism reigns on this level, too.

Yet Michaels is not satisfied with simply stating this attack and siding with the deconstructive heroes. Instead, he aligns a poststructuralist view with a reader's subjective interpretation of a text. Because the text has no inherent, fixed meaning, the only possible meaning is to be posited by the reader (or viewer or gamer or whatever). And this, indeed, is what many interactive digital works try to emphasize: it's all up to you.

However, Michaels's attack is upon a straw man (or maybe Stanley Fish - basically the same thing). The hard-line deconstructionists such as Derrida and de Man would disagree with the idea that meaning lies with the reader. Meaning, they would say, lies within the text, but it's no longer single - it's undecidably multiple. But that's not all. It's impossible, they'd go on, to decide whether or not there is meaning at all. This is a feature of language, not the subjectivity of the reader (cf. Derrida on differance).

How this relates to digital poetry is something I'll demonstrate by looking at Joerg Piringer's "Spambot" sound poem, the second part of his Metaisms trilogy. "Spambot" is very much materially oriented - it fully acknowledges being on the web by its multiple sound clips and video link beneath its artist statement, which tells us that it "will deal with the language in propaganda, commercials in tv and radio and internet-spam" and that "spambot is the attempt to liberate poetry from the pages of books and perform it live through image and sound."

The sound clips themselves consist of what appears to be advertisements manipulated beyond recognition. However, because they've been manipulated beyond recognition, I must trust that they really did start out as advertisements. I have no way of knowing and must consequently put my faith in Joerg Piringer's artist statement. Thus, the focus on materiality present in "Spambot" actually does not break down any binary between the subjectivity of the reader and authorial intent. In fact, it reasserts authorial intent more strongly because I must rely on Piringer's artist statement to make any "sense" of the piece, much like illiterate churchgoers once had to rely on clerics to interpret the Latin scriptures to them.

While I agree that a focus on materiality does put to the forefront certain cultural questions that have previously been ignored (and that this focus is a good thing), we must not suppose that this focus in any way solves the problems deconstruction has posed. In translation studies, no one claims to have solved the problem of the untranslatability of literature. The way we proceed forward is by recognizing translations happen in spite of this theoretical issue and go from there. In other words, we simply recognize the problems inherent in interpretation, agree to bracket them, and then dig in. McGann and Michaels make the naive mistake of assuming they have solved something that is by nature unsolvable.

Ideograms

In this week's readings, I was disturbed to come across the concept of the ideogram (or ideograph) repeatedly. Funkhauser mentions the ideogram twice (pgs. 13 and 103-4 - both in more historical contexts) and Hayles mentions them at least twice (pgs. 21 and 30 - with more obvious misunderstandings, but I'll touch on that later). Perhaps I should have expected it. Most digital poets seem to trace their lineage to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets of the '60s & '70s who in turn see themselves as extending the linguistic experiments of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.

Pound, for his part, has arguably done more to promote East-West cultural misunderstanding than anyone else in the twentieth century. Although he himself did not read Chinese, his Personae included translations from Chinese based on the notes of Boston brahmin Ernest Fenollosa, who did not read Chinese either, but Japanese. Fenollosa's knowledge of classical Chinese were based on what Japanese teachers had taught him. Thus, Pound's American reader is at least four steps removed from the original text.

But more misleading than Pound's loose poetic translations (which are quite beautiful poems considered on their own) are his essays describing the ideogram. Take this passage from The ABC of Reading:

The Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of the thing; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures. (pg. 21)

An example he gives is of the word for east (pronounced dōng in modern Mandarin, but Pound wouldn't have known that). It contains two parts:

木 meaning wood
日 meaning sun
and thus we have
東 which, in Pound's words, depicts "the sun tangled in the tree's branches, as at sunrise, meaning now the East"

First of all, the graphs themselves are not nearly as intuitive as Pound would have us believe. 木, for example, only depicts a tree trunk and four branches if you know what you're looking for. Show that character completely out of context to your average American, and they will have no idea what it's supposed to mean. Furthermore, although the sun is written as 日, the word for "to say" is written 曰. The difference between the two characters is minimal, the latter one slightly wider than the former, with the middle horizontal stroke not completely touching the right-hand side.

Secondly, as John DeFrancis mentions in his masterful book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, less than 3% of all characters in Chinese script are written in this obliquely pictographic manner (pg. 84). The vast majority of characters combine a semantic component and a phonetic component to represent a word. For example, the word 馬，pronounced mǎ, means horse. If you add the graph 女, meaning woman, on the left, you get 媽, pronounced mā, meaning mother. In this example, the 女 (woman) is the semantic component and the 馬 (horse) is the phonetic component.

Whereas Funkhouser seems to use the term "ideogram" in a more restricted, historical sense (i.e. in reference to Pound and those who claim lineage to Pound), Hayles clearly misunderstands a great deal about East Asian languages. Her first ideogram reference (pg. 21) is to poetry that mixes multiple languages, such as The Glide Project, which she says "has only clusters of denotations, functioning in this respect somewhat like ideographic languages." In fact, there are no ideographic languages. The phrase itself comes from a muddling of the definitions of "language" and "writing," how the two function, and how the two relate. See this chapter from John DeFrancis's book for greater depth to this objection.

In the second instance, she describes "Nippon" by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries as employing "Japanese ideograms in red and English in black appearing on successive screens" (pg. 30). Actually, the majority of the Japanese used in the poem is kana, a purely phonetic syllabary, with only a few kanji, which is just the Japanese way of saying 漢字, meaning "Chinese characters."

While this may seem to be a nit-picky, tangential issue to digital poetry, it drastically shapes the way people think about all kinds of concrete poetry. The whole idea of the ideogram is suspect - linguistic and pictorial elements can indeed blur, but we must find better terms to describe this blurring.

If we must resort to a kind of digital orientalism, we would do better to follow in the footsteps of John Cayley, who uses the term "digital wen” to describe what's going on. The term wen, written as 文, originally referred to "patterned markings," often to tattoos in China's earliest history. Over time, it came to mean "language" and eventually incorporated into compound words meaning "literature," "culture," and "civilization." By attempting to cross media, doesn't digital poetry strive to be less ideogrammatic and more on the level of "artistic patterns"?

E-goraphobia, Plain & Simple

First, a brief introduction to the context of this blog: it will chart my experiences reading various works for a class I'm taking, "Digital Poetry and the Limits of Interpretation." Furthermore, writing these entries and commenting on classmates' entries is a requirement of this class. Therefore, any attempt to accommodate a broader audience will be ignored. Read at your own peril.

Now, an explanation of the title of this blog, which will then segue into a discussion of some issues in Loss Glazier's book Digital Poetics (pub. 2002). "E-goraphobia" is a term I just recently invented to describe a feeling I get contemplating any sort of online creation, be it journalistic, bloggish, literary, artistic, filmic, etc. It's the feeling of the oppression of the massive online crowd, the unchecked marketplace in which every pedestrian hawks his wares and every merchant claims to be your friend. My term is a mash up of the "e-" prefix for "electronic" and "agoraphobia," the fear of open/public spaces (but also playing on the Greek root of the word agora, meaning "marketplace"*). And truly, given the rise of Google's ad-based revenue model, what is the internet but a labyrinthine marketplace?

Yet e-goraphobia is precisely the opposite of what Glazier posits as one of the main benefits of "innovative" digital poetry. On p. 47-8, he lists his first criterion for considering a literary work innovative: "The position of the 'I' is a crucial distinction between non-innovative and literature." And again in his epilogue: "Innovative work avoids the personalized, ego-centered position of the romantic, realist, or modernist 'I'" (174). His argument for why this depersonalized "I" is integral to innovative (or, to say it directly, "good") digital literature runs thus: on the web, "texts move not only within themselves but into socially charged externalities" (37) - think of links on Wikipedia, in which each page can lead you into a multitude of directions, which will then multiply because those pages lead you in even more directions, etc. Given this non-linearity, the Web 1) exists in community and 2) provides alternative paths, i.e. ways of thinking apart from the egocentric concept of "I."

While Glazier rightly notes that an "I" will always exist in literature, he also clearly thinks that good digital poetry is a step away from it. This is demonstrated by his attempt, following Jackson Mac Low, to employ the Buddhist concept of anātman in describing the work of process poetry, in which the poet simply chooses a process and its inputs then sits back and waits for the outputs. Glazier and Mac Low believe this type of poetry reduces the role of the poet because he/she does not have direct control of the results.

First of all, this is erroneous because the role of the author is still primary, and, by highlighting the process by which a work is created, process poetry actually calls more attention to the role of the author. Rather than simply allowing a work to stand on its own, process poetry shows off how clever the author's process and variables are. While fighting against a "fetishization of narrative" (175), Glazier reveals his own fetishization of process. This isn't to say that process poetry can't result in beautiful works (in fact, one of my favorite that he mentions in his book is the process poem culled from Hawthorne and Melville's letters); rather, they accentuate the role of the poet instead of minimizing it.

Secondly, both Glazier and Mac Low misunderstand the Buddha's meaning of anātman. The self (or ātman), at the time of the Buddha, did not correspond directly with our contemporary English concept. In the Upanishads, the term referred to an eternal self/soul that would be continually reborn due to its accumulation of karma. Some Upanishadic writers went so far as to claim that ātman is bráhman (God). Reacting against this, the Buddha stated that there is no self, that the attachment to the self is one cause for suffering. In the Mahānidānasutta, the Buddha teaches his disciple Ananda that any declaration of the self - whether one sees it as structured or structureless, limited or limitless - is an assertion of selfhood. Even the desire to change one's self is a positing of the self, according to the Buddha (p. 58-9, Original Buddhist Sources, ed. Carl Olson). Thus, a self that is dispersed due to its connections to externalities and non-linear narratives via hyperlinks goes against the Buddha's teaching.

Thirdly, the ability for (almost) anyone to publish (almost) anything does not guarantee an expanded notion of the self. (Note: Glazier makes no mention of countries in which parts of the internet are censored.) Rather, if you look at old Geocities sites, you'll see increased individuality with very little attention to anything outside itself. Our current era, dominated by blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, allow an even greater degree of self-obsession. Every triviality becomes news. Conversely, only the imposed, non-innovative order of these sites allow for any kind of meaningful interconnection. Only by an orderly RSS feed can I keep up with others' blogs. Only by a rigid structure can I figure out how to friend someone and receive their updates on Facebook.

And all of this is not even to address the plethora of other problems in Glazier's book. Pulling almost randomly from my marginalia, I come across the following issues: argument from cliche, proof by (usually oblique) quotation, unclear analogy, argument from metaphor, imperialist rhetoric, substitution of association for logic, self-aggrandizement (six epigraphs from his own work), and self-contradiction (in seeking to undermine the traditional canon he praises his own Electronic Poetry Center for establishing a parallel canon (or simply extending the current one)).

But my real problem in all this is that Glazier sacrifices aesthetics on the alter of novelty. While he claims to be against novelty for novelty's sake, he ties this only with the "clinging to narrative and the textual" (167). In his world, anything digital that questions its own medium becomes a masterwork of Third Millennium art, no matter what result. For example, the process poem from Melville and Hawthorne I favorably mentioned earlier is given equal grounding with a painfully uninteresting process poem culled from Jackson Mac Low's "Methods for Reading and Performing Asymmetries." With this neutralization of aesthetics, anything framed correctly can be innovative, admitting a teeming mass of mediocrity and signaling once again the onset of e-goraphobia.


*Note on etymology: It can never prove anything about your argument because it can be stretched in almost any direction, at which point it becomes something more like word association. In Glazier's text, note p. 31 on "transmission" and p. 57 on "hyper." As an example, I could take "innovative" to consist of novus meaning "new" and in meaning "not," thus proving that Glazier's focus on form & process at the expense of semantic meaning is only "innovative" in the sense that many have already explored these issues hundreds of years ago (e.g. Cervantes, Rabelais, Sterne).