Building Nothing Out of Something

Goldsmith in his infinite fur-coated wisdom writes, “Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard?”

The simplest answer is to say why not atomize, shatter, and splat language, but if you want a more philosophically sophisticated answer, it lies in everything ever written by the Dadaists and the Futurists. Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with Goldsmith—I like to stuff words into towers too, and there are masterpieces made in doing that—however I must bring up an argument made in our class by the subtly aphoristic Dave “The Mean” Levine who said that art movements love to base themselves on the negation of all art before themselves. Goldsmith doesn’t really throw out everything before him—he says Flarff is “[f]using the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present,”—but he is still saying that the old stuff isn’t as good as the new stuff. Stealing is better than breaking, mink is better than fox.

The question of aesthetics, the question of what is appealing, comes to mind. Earlier in the semester Erin brought up the topic of liking a piece of art for its aesthetic, non-philosophical appeal alone, and isn’t that enough. My answer is that it is enough if it is good. John Cayley’s “Translation” for instance was ugly as hell, the music atonal and awkward, and the text illegible. It’s appeal is in its philosophy, and what it stands for, or really, what it stands against, that makes it a good piece of art. It stands against harmonies and readability that we usually associate with good art. Understanding brings appreciation. “Translation” is meant not to be understood, and is therefore unlikeable. However, the fact that it is meant to be “ugly” in all ways, creates understanding, and therefore makes it beautiful. Q.E.D.

But even so, Dave is still right. “Translation” is made to negate all art before it, and in doing so it promotes itself as worthwhile. Is it really worthwhile? How worthwhile is it compared to a van Dyke painting. Most people would not want to compare the two because of the philosophical space that separates them, but what if you take out the philosophy? What is left?

Liberalism and Free Internet

At the small press festival on Saturday Oren, our dear friend Oren, got confrontational with Lori’s husband, Ben, over (it seemed) the differences between what the Internet professes to be and what it actually is. Is it a space where the copyright laws are nullified by open source code? Or is it still commodified by software companies and internet providers? (Wait for the day when Google buys Comcast. Mark my words…)

This little flare up at the small press fest has sparked a little debate among our MFA circles, based mostly around trying to figure out what liberalism is. The simple definition, it seems, is the belief in liberty and equal rights, which is a broad definition that almost doesn’t get us anywhere at all. What constitutes freedom on the Internet? Is it access to digital art or is participation a requirement? If it lies somewhere in the middle of those two, how does one discern the gradient between access and full participation? A Flash piece for instance, like YH Chang, is access with no participation, while Brian Kim Stefans’ Letter Builder is all participation, with the access being pointless without movement from the reader.

As the person in the back said, we must remember that most of the world doesn’t have access to a computer or the Internet and the software to make digital art is even more prohibiting. But I hate that statement. A lot of people in the world have never heard of James Joyce, but that doesn’t mean we should stop talking about him until everyone has read Finnigan’s Wake. We work in a very privileged field, but it is still a field that raises a lot of questions and needs a lot of answers. It is not pointless, in other words, and the question of whether the Internet is actually free or not lies at the core of that Marxist-like class argument of who has the means? I don’t see the Internet as exclusionary, even though lots of people are excluded from it. But it does not exist because people are excluded from it, unlike democracy (although that seems like a stretch too). It is theoretically possible for everyone to have access to the internet, even though it probably won’t happen. But there is all the difference in the world between “probably won’t happen” and “impossible.”

A Defense of Cynicism

Apropos of out conversation from last class, I want to talk about cynicism and Brian Kim Stefans’ The Dream Life of Letters. The argument was that this piece is cynical because it took a Duplessis feminist essay and disintegrated it, destroyed it, blew it up, and picked through the remains to make something that does not address the essay or the theories and implications, involved in the work. And according to his intro, Stefans couldn’t figure out the essay and therefore his response was something that cannot be understood (at least in a grammatical sense). Dream Life was likened to hipsters who only criticize and destroy without creating anything positive in return.

By saying Dream Life is cynical is saying that it is not a positive creation. And since it is indeed a creation, that much I am sure, if it isn’t positive, it is a negative creation. I find this to be a unjustified heirachization, the bane of literary theorists (MAs, PhDs mount your steeds! To battle! To battle!). To assume that Dream Life is a negative creation is to assume that Duplessis essay was a positive creation. I am not arguing that it wasn’t, but I am arguing that because Dream Life is in dialogue with it, we assume the first to be correct. I have defended this piece in two classes now, and both times it is just assumed that the feminist approach was inherently better than what Stefans produced. Yes, inherently. No one has read the fucking essay! How can we say that Dream Life is cynical if we don’t know what it is destroying? For a hyperbolic argument, what if Dream Life took the words from a Mussolini speech and made them beautiful. Essentially the piece would be the same, with the same movement and colors and whatnot, but the creation would be positive (assuming a Mussolini speech is a negative creation). That is the problem with calling a piece of artwork cynical. It creates a positive out of nothing, and vice versa. Doesn’t a creation of artwork boil down to just being a creation, even if it is in dialogue with another piece?

I feel that this is the Conan O’Brien argument for cynicism, the argument that nothing good will ever come from cynicism and therefore there it is only destructive and only harmful. I consider cynicism to be our political pain, a feeling that tells us something is wrong. It is impossible to notice something is wrong and have a replacement, or answer, instantaneously. Duplessis wasn’t wrong, of course, and Dream Life was not an extemporaneous response. But to deem a destructive response as automatically a negative one, I find jumping too far ahead.

Alternumerics and the 1 to 1 ratio

Paul Chan in his introduction to his Alternumerics makes some hefty claims:

“Alternumerics explores the intimate relationship between language and interactivity by transforming the simple computer font into an art form that explores the fissure between what we type and we what mean [sic]. By replacing the individual letters and numbers with textual and graphic fragments that connect and signify what is typed in radically different ways, “Alteranumerics” transforms the act of typing into a digital performance and any computer connected to a standard printer, into an interactive art making installation.”

To say that he his project has transformed the act of typing into a performance is assuming that the act of typing isn’t already a performance. Notice he doesn’t say, “transforms the act of typing from ______ to a performance. The question of what is being transformed is never addressed only assumed not to be a performance. However, the act of typing is very much an act. It is a simple act, and one that is overlooked easily, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a performance, a creation of some sort. While Chan’s graphic fonts more fully reveal the “fissure” or signification processes that we experience when we type, that does not mean the new fonts created that fissure. It’s always been there, it’s just not very apparent because we are so used to it (I feel like this is a phenomenological problem, but I’m definitely not smart enough to figure it out).

This leads to other issues. The fonts Chan created aren’t so much fonts as they are a simple code, a one to one ratio. “A” is represented by a certain type of squiggly line, “B” is a different squiggly line. When you read writing typed in this Squiggly font, you can read it if you internalize the cipher, the same way people can read computer code, or read phase space diagrams. Reading this is even simpler than learning a new language since the grammatical structures don’t change. (It reminded me a lot like reading A Clockwork Orange.) The next logical step might be that all fonts are code. That doesn’t mean that all language is code, necessarily, but fonts, maybe. Fonts after all are all graphic depictions of alphanumerics, and Zaph Dingbats or Wingdings does the same thing that Chan is doing with his graphic fonts.

The House as a Horror Story

Mary Flanagan’s The House is a horror story, a physical and psychological haunted house in the vein of Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The horror of the piece is derived from its alogical spatiality, its non-directionality floating architecture, which forces a sort of agoraphobia onto the reader. The shrinking and enlarging of the boxes provides the semblance of movement and therefore control of one’s surroundings, while simultaneously remaining elusive, tangential, to the reader’s control, and mocking of the logic of human movement. The mocking of the human perception of space is a very Dadaist trait in terms of self-negation. The stripped down architectural elements both reflect the essence of structure (the literal building blocks of architecture) but are simultaneously subverted by their own ungroundedness and maneuverability. The reader’s body is denied placement and control, although given the illusion of both.

This is similar to House of Leaves, which gives the illusion of walls, doors, and staircases but stretches their representations to the point of the infinite, thereby negating their meaning altogether. The point of a door is to lead to somewhere else, but in infinite space, one point is the same as the last. The boxes of Flannigan’s piece are obvious constructions, which sets them apart from the surrounding grey space. However, because the grey space is infinite (at least from my perception) the structure is negated, as its placement in space can never be found.

In this way Flanigan’s piece reflects Kandisky’s description of clowns:

“‘Clowns in particular, build their composition on a very definite alogicality. Their action has no definite development, their movements are incongruous, their efforts lead nowhere and indeed, they’re not meant to.’ Lack of motivation and of clear direction: these elements contributed to a ‘depthlessness’ and play which disputed the absent authority of the ‘paternal’ text” (Nichols 236).

Flanagan’s piece the grammar of the text is removed, once again giving the semblance of language but without its supporting structures. The text can be read backward and forward, upside-down and from behind, negating the spatial structure on which we depend to derive meaning from the language.

The negation of that spatial language structure is once again reflecting the Dada negation of itself, leaving “absolute irony as the only valid mode of self-consciousness” (Nichols 232). The House is aware of its own horror, its own arbitrariness, and its spatial existence is an anathema to human spatial existence. That is the point. The text is ostensibly about human relationships, as described by the author, and human relationships, are, indeed, horror stories.

The Death and Rebirth of Time and Space

“Time and Space died yesterday.” Marinetti’s eighth postulate in his Manifesto. Not exactly true, or if it was true at the time, it is no longer true. For futurists, Time is dead because “We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.” And that was written in a time when mail was a letter, not a binary coding. The speed we have witnessed and experienced since Marinetti wrote this manifesto is exponentially more than what they had experienced. However, our great speed, and the conquering of outer space (kinda), has revealed that the speed of our “life” is far from “absolute.” The material limits we have discovered have reigned in the infinity perspective that the futurists seem to revel in. Even while digital poetics has opened up new experiences of immediate time and space (works can be viewed simultaneously from anywhere at anytime), the field has become very aware of its own limitations. A new quantum technology is being put into iPods because there just isn’t the space to add anymore parts that aren’t on the atomic scale. Digital artists know operate in the limits of what a program can do, even if they don’t know all it can do. Alan Sondheim’s programming poetry is taking programs and pushing them to their limits to see what happens. But he always finds a limit.

It is interesting that the futurists were invested in such boldly material typography but still thought the “absolute” was essential. Apollinaire, I gathered from the reading, thought the same thing. There seemed to be a real cognitive dissonance with the futurists, where they tried to force a perception of the world without fully investing themselves in the consequences. Their wanting to “destroy…feminism” is their retaliation against being “human”, a title that men claimed in the previous centuries. Essentially, they are saying men are now machines, and women are now human. Our proof is that we say so. Shucking the material of the person, they turn to the material of the letter and got nuts with it. Maybe in this sense, women are the writings of men, a proposition with which I just bet Kelly will have a problem.

Walter Benn Michaels, You Are Not the Boss of Me

In The Shape of the Signifier Walter Benn Michaels structures his arguments in terms of very imperialistic dichotomies where “if you think the intention of the author is what counts, then you don’t think the subject position of the readers matter, but if you don’t think the intention of the author is what counts, then the subject position of the reader will be the only thing that matters” (11). (I will assume this is his argument, although I can’t quite tell. He just calls it “the” argument.)

A note to all scholars, you can’t tell me what I do and don’t think. My ability for cognitive dissidence holds no bounds, so if I want to believe in both the intention of the author and the subject position I will, goddammnit.

While WBM’s logical progression to make this divisive statement appears sound enough, it also doesn’t seem to allow for a grey space, a space (under which I was impressed to believe) is where everything lies. McGann calls a poem an experience that has movement and temporal elements associated with it. The movement can fall into the virtual space between author intention and subject position, where all sorts of incomplete canoodling occurs. (This is the space occupied by the cyborg, an entity that takes in dichotomies without hierarchizing either polarity and mixes them into a nice goulash of incomplete shiftiness [not a direct quote].)

A grey space that might cause problems in WBM’s theory is Jörg Piringer’s Soundpoems. Not only is his website entirely grey, Piringer’s sound projects are extremely simple, theoretically complicated, and insanely fun. I want to focus on Soundpoem 1, which operate a little differently than 3-6, although all share similar principles.

Piringer’s SP1 and SP2 function as software for the creation of sound poems. And while it may seem that it looks like software from 1993 with limited permutations (compared to GarageBand, SoundBooth, or Audacity), there is deceptive depth to what can be created from such basic elements. In SP1 an operator can place nine buttons in four squares to make combinations of sounds. However, there is no limit to how many buttons can be placed in the squares, which means opens up exponentially more permutations (not infinite, I don’t think, because the beats loop). The authorial intention here is based in the material limitations of what we are given. There are an infinite number of sounds that could be used to create a sound poem; we are given eight and a pause. I think it is hard to ignore such limiting boundaries that Piringer has placed on the subject. However, the subject-position cannot create anything without Piringer providing the software. Whatever poems we create, however diverse and divorced from Piringer’s intention, are all limited by his construction.

If the “only thing that matters” is either the author-intention or the subject position, nothing will be created in SP1. The program/poem does not create sound on its own, but without the program/poem the subject cannot create a poem either.

Something Historical This Way Comes

What if Sir Isaac Newton couldn’t read? Or if Henri Poincaré couldn't write, the mathematician who coined the Poincare Conjecture, one of the Millennium Prize Problems with a $1,000,000 award for whoever could prove it? What if Grigori Perelman, the man who proved the Poincare Conjecture 99 years after it was posed, couldn’t formulate his proof into words? How would we know what they knew?

Perelman said at the MIT lecture in 2003, just before he presented his famous proof, “I’m not good at talking linearly, so I intend to sacrifice clarity for liveliness.” What is the need for either linearity or liveliness? Numbers, in comparison to words, are objective, and however they are written, whatever font they are typed in or whether they are written with chalk or marker or dirt, 2+2 will still equal 4, no? While there are arguments to be made for the materiality of numbers, beyond those of surface geometries (although I know of very few), words and their fickle meanings have been intertwined in scientific discipline (really all disciplines) for as long as those disciplines have existed. Newton’s Principia was not groundbreaking because it combined words with mathematical theories. The words were taken as a given, their relationship an obvious necessity.

While Funkhouser tackles historical and material circumstances for digital poetry rather inclusively, he still operates within a scope of the arts. While I admit, as most anyone would, it is hard to operate in an entirely inclusive scope—Life, The Universe, and Everything—but not taking a glance over one’s shoulder every once and awhile could find us looking at old concepts, now re-contextualized, and thinking they are new and must be dealt with accordingly. Funkhouser makes this point well, contextualizing digital poetry in terms of Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Blake, Olson, the Dadaists, Futurists, Constructionists, the Concrete poets and on and on. However, even as he lists these influences in the introduction he also says, “Because literature has now joined forces with mathematics and computer science, as well as other art forms, it foists and entirely different set of circumstances on the reader” (4). Of course, mathematics “joined forces” with literature essentially at its inception, which means the set of circumstances on the reader is not entirely different. What has really changed is the balance between literature and mathematics, as well as the propagandizing phrasings. Because literature is the one joining the forces with mathematics, the circumstances are assumed to be entirely different. For me this reveals a narcissism and inclusiveness within our field, which is ironic because literature is supposed to be encompassing and inclusive of other fields, breaking boundaries and so forth. Funkhouser displays this irony when he summarizes Eric Vos:

“Contemporary modes challenge authors to avoid looking at any part of these systems—audible, alphabetized, imagistic—as discrete or independent units. Building a widely conceived philosophy of text is the responsibility of authors working with fully integrated (audio/visual/alphanumeric) and layered (linked and coded) texts. According to Vos, exploring the interrelationships between these aspects is the quest of new media poetry” (19).

Yes, obviously the signifying ratio of words and letters to visuals, kinetics, and material has shifted so much that digital poets need to know programming and other scientifically developed mediums, mediums whose genesis was not meant for artistic purposes. However, it seems the “widely conceived philosophy” hovers around the edges of the arts, even while in theory we are reaching out to computer sciences and math. Vos assumes that fully integrating audio, visual, and alphanumeric texts is quest, ignoring the wealth of potential associations and information available if we go outside our discipline more.

As a rather long-winded and maybe unfruitful example, Funkhouser presents critics arguments against digital poetry saying, “Digital poems do not exist in a fixed state, and they may be considered less refined as a result of this condition” (21). Another field that revolves in un-fixed states and perpetual flux is that of quantum mechanics. And, as we are seeing in digital poetry, quantum mechanics (at least for some physicists, like some poets) was also considered less refined because of its “indeterminability.” In a convenient overlapping of contexts, Einstein’s famous dismissing quote on quantum mechanics—“God does not play dice with the universe”—is an interesting anti-echo of Mallarmé’s, “A roll of the dice will never abolish chance". While Einstein and Mallarmé are in agreement that an authority exists (or should exist), Richard Bailey points out that for Mallarmé that authorship is “re-created in different terms” (11) while Einstein’s authority is Relativity. Einstein’s quote is taken from a letter he wrote to the quantum physicist Max Born in 1926, only a year after Werner Heisenberg unleashed on the world matrix mechanics (essentially the Indeterminacy Principle). If quantum mechanics had proven unproductive, like studying “aether” had in the 1890s, then Einstein’s doubts, which he based off little else than a “my-way-is-better” approach, would have been proved correct in the forthcoming years. Of course, 85 years later quantum mechanics has yielded the most accurate theory-to-test results in the history of physics, and while digital poetry has had some of the same doubts in its early years, it is still going after fifty-odd years.

In A Brief History of Time Steven Hawking explains the criteria for a scientific theory to be simple (while fitting the date) and useful in explaining the universe. Digital poetry is extremely useful in the artist expression of the multi-dimensional, associative, and digitally material existence of our 2010 existence and presumably for our future years. While art is not always thought in terms of “useful”, the intractable argument being “that is not the point,” the new materiality of poetics is a new piece of data that needs to be accounted for in our perception of the world. The similarities between digital poetics and print poems may seem an obvious starting point or anchor for book like Funkhouser’s. If I were to write a book like his, I would do the same thing, only I assume much, much worse. But what if, for some reason, the mathematicians tipped the balance between literature and math first, meeting somewhere in the middle, like digital poetics is now (kinda, go with it)? Wouldn’t we frame in a historical context of mathematics and see the literature as secondary? Of course, that is not how it happened, but that does not mean that the historical approach of math or physics or any other discipline wouldn’t be informative to digital poetics, because we are all digital and there is not escaping that.

The Question of Organization

Lo!(ss) Pequeno Glazier, writing in the forgotten annuls of 2002…

While Digital Poetics is applicable to the present in the same way the Magna Carta still has purpose, Glazier’s book does reveal an underlying quest for organization among the nodal divergences in digital poetics. The question Glazier tries to disguise seems to be: where are the boundaries for digital poetics?, and even though it uses the word “boundaries”—a word which, if you are and Literature graduate student, is customarily required to be said at least once every three sentences—such a restrictive question would surely in the lit community mean banishment (“Away with thee to the boundaries!”). English people do not like to limit possibilities, which is one reason we never get real jobs. (When I say English people, I do not mean the British… probably… maybe… I don’t really know how much commonality they share as a whole with literature scholars.) But nevertheless a double-step seems to be occurring where we want to rope off digital poetics so we can talk about it without getting bogged down in all the old stuff, but it is a mortal sin in modern lit theory to declare a real boundary, anywhere. Quite the dilemma.

Underlying the question of boundaries is the more interesting question of how do we organize this stuff? Hopefully, so as not to offend the poets (Dave) by assigning subjective titles like innovative and non-innovative, I will address the problem of organizing digital poetry in terms of print poetry, or analog poetry. In the introduction to New Media Poetics, Adalaide Morris says, “What we think is conditioned by concepts developed, for the most part, in a world of print,” and Glazier even addresses the organizational systems used for print like the Dewey Decimal System and alphabetical arrangements. So far these same systems have tried to corral digital poetry in the same way they managed with print, but I do not know if they are going to succeed. For one, there are no categories in digital poetics with everything crossing over into every other thing. There is one category so far and it is any combination of the words, New, Media, Poetics, and Digital.

Talan Memmott said in his essay in NMP that “because digital poetry cannot be reduced to a genre of poetry, we must begin to consider the applied poetics of the individual practitioner” (294). In terms of categorization, this could mean that each reader is a category, a notion which seems very bizarre and unhelpful in terms of a library setting (“I am looking for the ‘What Todd Seabrook enjoys section’.”)

How useful is that? Perhaps in a digital world it is more useful than alphabetizing. I don’t know; I’m not a scientist. But I do believe there exists a useful categorization for digital poetics, although I bet it is not one that looks anything like a categorizing system. We already know that our brains think in terms of association (this was pointed out in one of the essays, somewhere), and the million-dollar Netflix algorithm that tells you what you might enjoy is probably closer to wielding this new subject matter effectively than the seemingly unsurpassable alphabetizing system that has worked so well for so long.

In conclusion, boundaries.