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).