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).