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.