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.