Technomodern Poetics: The American Literary Avant-garde at the Start of the Information Age 9781609385903

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technomodern poetics

The New American Canon The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture Samuel Cohen, Series Editor

technomodern American Literary poetics The Avant-Garde at the Start of the Information Age

Todd F. Tietchen

UNIVERSITY of IOWA PRESS, Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2018 by the University of Iowa Press www.uipress.uiowa.edu Printed in the United States of America Design by Barbara Haines No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tietchen, Todd F., author. Title: Technomodern poetics : the American literary avant-garde at the start of the Information Age / Todd F. Tietchen. Other titles: American literary avant-garde at the start of the Information Age Description: Iowa City : University Of Iowa Press, 2018. | Series: New American canon : the Iowa series in contemporary literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. |  Identifiers: LCCN 2018013982 (print) | LCCN 2018019649 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-60938591-0 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-60938-590-3 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: American literature—20th century—History and criticsm. | Literature and technology—History—20th century. | Literature and science—History—20th century. | Literature, Experimental—United States—History and criticism. | Beat generation. | Authors, American—20th century—Political and social views. | Technology and the arts— History—20th century. | Science and the arts—History—20th century. Classification: LCC PS228.T42 (ebook) | LCC PS228.T42 T54 2018 (print) | DDC 810.9/356—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013982

For Melissa and Isadora, my dearest loves

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To understand a thing rightly we need to see it both out of its environment and in it, and to have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

CONTENTS

1 2 3 4 5 6

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Poetics of Symmetrical Critique 1 Starting with Olson 19 Humanizing the Network: Noise! 39 Dharmic Atomism: On the Metaphysics of Extended Cognition 59 Secondary Paradise: The Surrealist Immersion 81 Surveillance as Pleasure 99 Mirror, Mirror: Thoughts at the Interface 117 Epilogue: Contextualizing Quantification 135



Notes 145 Bibliography 163 Index 173

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deep thanks to James McCoy, the director of University of Iowa Press, and Samuel Cohen, New American Canon series editor, for their support of this project. My initial acquisitions editor at Iowa, Elisabeth Chretien, also deserves a great deal of thanks for her enthusiasm for this book. Catherine Cocks, Ranjit Arab, Susan Hill Newton, and Meredith Stabel also provided significant help and guidance in seeing this project through to its publication. A number of my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell (UML) should be commended for the support they have shown to my scholarly endeavors since I arrived there in 2011 and for maintaining the vibrant and collegial environment that continues to nurture those endeavors. Thank you, Keith Mitchell, Maggie Dietz, Melissa Pennell, Jonathan Silverman, and Sue Kim for all you have done in that regard. My colleague Mike Millner deserves additional gratitude for reading portions of this manuscript and for his insightful responses. Thanks also to Luis Falcón, the dean of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UML, for providing research funding assistance that allowed me to visit the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley and the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. I have been fortunate to be able to hone many of the ideas in this book at a number of venues in the past several years: the New Jersey College English Association Conference at Seton Hall University, multiple sessions at the annual American Literature Association Conference, the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Ink and Electricity Lecture Series at Monmouth University. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared as “Frank O’Hara and the Poetics of the Digital” in Criticism 56, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 45–61. My thanks to journal editor Renée C. Hoogland for seeing the value in that essay and getting it into the hands of such helpful readers. I am also extremely grateful to Ammiel Alcalay, Bob Comeau, Mick Nagy,

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J. C. Cloutier, Amy (Red) Washburn, Tim Hunt, Graham Harman, John Wargacki, and the late John Sampas for all they have done to help develop these ideas in the past several years. Our conversations have been clarifying, gratifying, and memorable. Finally, Melissa Hudasko has lived with this book since we started reading Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery together in 2010. She has been my first and last reader, my tireless ally, my fellow (and always game) adventurer, my fortification, my horizon, and my love. Our daughter, Isadora, provides me with the greatest joy, the loveliest respite, and the most inspiring challenges on a daily basis. I offer you both the sage words of Seneca the Younger: Quos amor verus tenuit, tenebit (Those who true love has held, it will go on holding).

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Acknowledgments

technomodern poetics

Introduction The Poetics of Symmetrical Critique

In 1960, Grove Press published The New American Poetry, 1945–1960. Edited by Donald Allen, The New American Poetry remains one of the most iconic collections of twentieth-century American writing. This study comparatively examines the technological imagination of several of the writers anthologized by Allen. As we shall see, poets and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, and Frank O’Hara generated a canon of work increasingly relevant to our technological present. That work engaged and elaborated on the philosophical assumptions and social longings undergirding so much of our evolving information economy, as theorized by contemporaneous technologists Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, J. C. R. Licklider, and a host of noteworthy others. The aesthetic transformations heralded by the body of works that became known as the New American Poetry were intrinsic to the era’s sociotechnological transformations, for the work of its most representative writers wrestled with a complex of issues raised by the dawning of the nuclear age, computer-based automation, and the expansive reach of electronic media. These developments had been catalyzed by the military and technical imperatives of World War II, and after the war’s conclusion the term technology came to signify both the anxieties of possible annihilation in a rapidly changing world and the exhilaration of accelerating cultural change.1 Opening a window on these anxieties, the avant-garde impulses of the New American Poetry conceptualized social and subjective longings that came to be embodied in computing and communication technologies—or within the object realities of our technical lives—even as the writers generating those novel forms and concerns often questioned whether the era’s wide-ranging technological changes were inherently progressive (i.e., geared toward human well-being).



1

Allen did not see the impetus for the New American Poetry in exactly those terms. Instead he offered the contents of The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 as a countertradition to the poets collected in the 1957 volume New Poets of England and America, edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson and featuring an introduction by Robert Frost. Allen viewed the poets represented in that volume—including Robert Lowell, Kingsley Amis, Robert Bly, and Catherine Davis—as neoformalists whose academic orthodoxies had grown out of touch with the experimental impetus animating the most interesting postwar poetry in the United States. Allen’s motivations subsequently found significant support in poet-critic Kenneth Rexroth’s assessment of The New American Poetry in the February 1961 issue of the New York Times Book Review, in which Rexroth identified the poets in question with a new embrace of the American vernacular and of open poetic form—or what Charles Olson had influentially termed “projective verse” or “poetry of the open field.” Rexroth saw this return to the vernacular, attuned to “direct, personal communication,” as avant-garde in nature, allied against the “Reactionary Generation” of American poets who came to prominence between the world wars. Rexroth proclaimed that up “until the end of the Second World War the dominant tendency in American poetry was politically reactionary and stylistically conservative. Its politics was derived from the novels of Walter Scott and those American imitations Red Rock and The Clansman, and the rasher political excursions of Mr. Eliot. Its literary modes were the poets of the English Baroque and the Chaucerian cadence.” He seems to have in mind the overwhelming influence and acclaim afforded not only to T. S. Eliot but also to figures such as Robert Frost, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom.2 Despite Rexroth’s initial proclamations on the aesthetic and political value of the New American Poets, Alan Golding has suggested that these poets were ostensibly literature’s version of rebels without a cause, engaged mostly in a negative critique of academic poetry and long-standing formal orthodoxies. Golding states that Allen’s anthology is “merely reactive” and that it ultimately falls short of formulating a succinct and principled tradition or cause of its own.3 But in his review Rexroth had astutely observed that many of the writers included in the anthology were invested in novel forms of “social protest” and outsider subject matter and had created an oppositional public sphere in order to disseminate their perspectives. Allen made much the same point in the preface to his volume, stressing that these “poets have already created their own tradition, their own press, and their own public” through publi 2

Introduction

cations such as Floating Bear, Yugen, Semina, Evergreen Review, and Black Mountain Review, along with book publishers such as City Lights and Grove.4 As a collective, the New American Poets created and nurtured these alternative venues of expression—outlier networks—on the margins of Cold War containment culture. These venues served as part of a constellated refuge for unconventional thought and expression that also included locations such as Six Gallery (San Francisco), Cedar Tavern (New York), the Living Theatre (New York), and Black Mountain College (Asheville, NC); Olson was eventually named rector of the latter.5 Allen’s anthology included a cast of writers who had helped expand the cultural field—or the contents of the experience economy—toward democratization at a moment in which the external threat of communism had become wedded in public discourse to a multiplicity of internal threats to traditional notions of domesticity and nationalism. These threats issued from an entangled cast of dangerous “others,” including those vilified as sexually deviant; drug users; racialized subjects; and advocates of outsider political positions ranging from anarcho-pacifism to communalism, along with a number of other perspectives, actions, and thought forms marginalized into eccentricity and abjection.6 In short, we might read these alternative venues of expression, which give voice to experiences that had been phenomenologically devalued in the culture at large, as equivalent to decentralizing inputs jacked into the total circuitry of the postwar public sphere. As a whole, the literary avant-garde that is represented in Allen’s volume responded to postwar trepidation about the manipulation and canalization of will or subjectivity by establishing alternative distribution networks on the margins of the cultural mainstream, which served as oppositional sites for expression and becoming. As Rexroth and Allen made plain, many of the New American Poets remained dedicated to opening the field of public expression and our notions of who might constitute the demos to perspectives and experiences long marginalized (though perhaps not as ideologically unified or transparent as critics such as Golding would like). Thus the writers and publishers at the center of postwar avant-garde and experimental literature helped to democratize the experiential and expressive capacities of the evolving information economy through an insurgent approach to print media, modeling an ethos that ultimately proved highly influential to the utopian imaginings of electronic and computational media within the 1960s American counterculture that these writers and publishers had not only anticipated but had often contributed to in direct and notable ways. Recognizing this genealogy of influence requires that we view the

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publication of The New American Poetry as a signal cultural event; toward that end, this project does not limit its focus only to works and aesthetic endeavors that appear in Allen’s initial anthology, although works from that anthology will indeed be referenced throughout. Instead I am interested in both the impetus for the original anthology, as assembled by Allen, and the degree to which that impetus evolved through representative works and within larger networks of influence, spanning the containment culture of the 1950s through the proliferation of new cultures of surveillance during the Watergate era (the early 1970s). As we shall see, this period overlaps with notable transitions within the democratization of cultural production that presage and rehearse our current era of social computing (or mass interactivity). Allen’s own recognition of the scope of his initial vision—along with the extensive influence of the writers whose works he had collected—is registered in the contents of his 1967 follow-up anthology, The New Writing in the USA, coedited with poet Robert Creeley. The contents of this anthology— which include Amiri Baraka’s play “The Dutchman”; Charles Olson’s essay “Human Universe”; and prose selections from Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and John Rechy’s City of Night—locates the animating principles and guiding rationales of The New American Poetry within a more extensive cast of writers and literary forms, situating the initial anthology within a cultural shift with implications reaching beyond poetry. Allen’s introductory comments in “Writer as Native: Preface” again identify the writers included in the 1967 anthology as part of an avant-garde insurgency constellated through specific movements and coteries such as the Black Mountain School, the Beats, and the New York School. Collectively, Allen tells us, their stance is not only underground and fugitive but also “ ‘hip’— intellectually alert and, at the same time, involved,” by which Allen means to suggest that their “concerns are more responsibly and critically ethical and humane (compared with the limited civic consciousness, for instance, of an older generation).” 7 In Allen’s assessments of the New American Poetry—part of a larger phenomenon called the New American Writing—civic consciousness remains one of its identifying characteristics, piloting the creation of small presses and outlier networks as an alternative public sphere with consequences resonating across US expressive practices and social outlooks.8 Indeed, those consequences come into clearer view when we begin to consider some of the representative works of the New American Writing within comparative media histories—or within intermedia contexts—as I shall do in the pages ahead. 4

Introduction

Technomodernist Poetics

Although Rexroth’s and Allen’s assessments of the New American Poetry’s standing in literary history remain undeniably cogent, neither addresses the extent to which this postwar tradition of literary opposition—constellated through coteries and scenes such as the Black Mountain School, the San Francisco Renaissance, Beat writing, and the New York School—was also responding to the foundational theories and emerging technological capabilities that grounded the postwar information society as it assumed its nascent form in Cold War America. These influences simply do not appear on Allen’s or Rexroth’s critical radar, for their perspectives remain too confidently confined within the conception of literary history as an object unto itself—as a hermetically sealed tradition of influences and antithetical responses elaborated within book culture or the book-form. But this tradition of influence does not adequately explain the antiacademic and outlier tendencies expressed in the formal experimentations that characterize the New American Poetry. As shall become evident, the opening of form—those poetic qualities seen in the New American Writing’s interests in spontaneity (what has been called “instantism”) and the aleatory—were in part catalyzed by the absorption of formal characteristics from media other than the literary. Placed within the context of more comprehensive intermedia histories, the influences of information theory and nonliterary expressive forms become evident, revealing some of the most influential New American Writers as technomodernists. I borrow this designation, of course, from Marc McGurl’s influential 2009 work, The Program Era, to demonstrate that a decade or so before the technomodernists examined by McGurl—such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo—the poets and other writers at the center of this study generated work that formally and thematically acknowledges “the scandalous continuity of the literary techne (craft) with technology in the grosser sense—including, most importantly, media technology.” 9 As such, technomodernist work reminds us that technological development is the product not only of economic and political motivations but also of cultural imagination and social desires that become embedded within technological forms in unexpected and uneven ways—and often from sources that we have not entirely suspected. In the case of the New American Poetry, many of its representative figures fashioned technomodernist responses to the technical and communicative paradigm shifts in which their work often became implicated—or with which it became symmetrical—

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further contributing to the ways in which readers, spectators, and audiences came to think about communication, information, consciousness, networked interaction, and alternative or virtual worlds. Like postwar fiction writers Barth and Pynchon, many of the writers anthologized by Allen integrated the formal and expressive capacities of nonliterary media forms and technical culture into American poetics in order to examine the social and subjective stakes of the postwar information society as it began to coalesce.10 Postwar developments in electronic communications and computing will be referred to throughout this book with the umbrella term informatics, by which I mean the technical processes involved in information engineering as well as the epistemological assumptions undergirding (or entwined within) the collection, analysis, storing, retrieving, and sharing of data as those practices emerge across the electronic and computational era, or within what is most often deemed the information age. One of the defining characteristics of the Cold War era was the elevation of information technologies to new heights of cultural, political, and economic significance; such technologies frequently came affixed—and indeed still do—with the potential for reimagining and remobilizing social life in more equitable ways through personalized and democratized media participation. Moreover, many of the writers and artists treated in this study rendered visions of alternative sociality operating within newly available, or newly imaginable, networks of existence, adding to the idealization of the information society as the potential home for a more expansive, technologically empowered demos. Although these yearnings for more democratic networks of expression and belonging were to a large degree organized in opposition to the social and cultural mores of Cold War containment culture, they nevertheless existed in a state of pervasive anxiety over the possibility that newly coherent modes of control or exploitation might become embedded within the networked linkages and data-storing capacities of the information society—that what might indeed emerge out of cybernetics, information theory, computational media, and the new visions of human-machine symbiosis developing within computer engineering were, in fact, more effective modes of surveillance and containment that could potentially block the migration of long-marginalized existential possibilities and modes of awareness from the cultural margins to the center. Many of the seminal figures of the New American Poetry longed for an informatics of liberation while remaining leery of an informatics of control, prefiguring tensions that continue to be of concern. The authors of the 2012 6

Introduction

work Digital_Humanities have observed that in terms of informatics and social computing today, “the utopian prospect that the massive spread of shared knowledge across networks could give rise to a state of ‘ubiquitous scholarship,’ of ever-more interconnected, publicly engaged, ‘participant citizens,’ continues to exist alongside the realization that ubiquity has a dark side: pervasive surveillance and tracking, the colonization of everyday life by information technologies, the quantification of the biopolitical sphere into ever-smaller units of analysis and monitoring, the inability or incapacity to ‘de-link’ or ‘opt-out’ of these technologies.”11 The technological imaginations of the writers discussed in this book helped make these dualities or paradoxes legible within the burgeoning postwar information economy. Those dualities are internal to the emergence of algocracy as a structuring phenomenon of neoliberalism. Jentery Sayers has defined algocracy as “the programmatic description and reconstruction of the physical world in digital form,” which in turn has created a new reliance on algorithmic rationality to produce or reproduce culture within planetary cybercapitalism.12 A. Aneesh, the first to employ the term algocracy to describe this transformation, was hoping to elucidate a “new kind of power” based on the “rule of the algorithm, or rule of the code.”13 In algocracy, according to Sayers, “the programmatic treatment of the physical world in digital form is so significantly embedded in infrastructures that algorithms tacitly [begin to] shape behaviors and prosaically assert authority in tandem with existing bureaucracies. Routine decisions are delegated (knowingly or not) to computational procedures that . . . run in the background as protocols or default settings.” 14 That is, the democratic expansion of computing potential within the information society continues to evolve hand in hand with newly flexible and self-justifying modes of surveillance and ascription embedded within networks of horizontal or decentralized information flows (or loops). In algogracy, quantitative rationality models social reality as if revealing a truth (or series of truths) independent of its programmed operations and protocols. It realizes, within digital networks, certain qualities of neoliberal governance and social organization as diagnosed by Michel Foucault in his 1978–1979 public lectures at the College de France in Paris. Those lectures, published in 2004 as The Birth of Biopolitics, examine the extent to which the state forms of the Cold War West began to outsource the responsibility for the population’s well-being and the maintenance of social cohesion to private interests (such as corporations). The guiding objectives of neoliberal governmentality are ruled not by appeals to moral truths or universal and natural

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human rights but by appeals to advanced modes of quantitative rationality that Foucault usefully termed “regimes of veridiction.” Such regimes, operating under a markedly new form of governmental reasoning, work to produce conditions that we understand as freedom; or, as Foucault put it, “The new governmental reason needs freedom . . . , the new art of government consumes freedom. It consumes freedom, which means it must produce it. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of government therefore appears as the management of freedom.” 15 Foucault was particularly interested in the extent to which this shift involves the abandonment of distributive justice programs (such as the New Deal) by governmental and corporate forces that claim to generate worthy policies—worthy to the extent that those policies honor the true operations of the market as documented through insistent modes of quantitative microanalysis. These modes have since come to characterize cybercapitalism, or algogracy. Although neoliberalism “must produce freedom,” according to Foucault, it also entails “the establishment of limitations, controls, [and] forms of coercion” capable of freedom’s management. Thus digitized neoliberalism comes to be organized by the interlocking of the informatics of liberation with the informatics of domination, or as Foucault so presciently put it, emergent modes of power peculiar to the neoliberal era are “internally sustained, as it were, by [the] interplay of freedom and security.” 16 That tension between an informatics of liberation and an informatics of control—a contradictory coherence that has certainly come to animate digitized neoliberalism—was of particular interest to Charles Olson in the years immediately after World War II, and his interest found expression in his first major poem, “The Kingfishers,” chosen by Allen as the lead selection in The New American Poetry. As we will explore in chapter 1, the complexities of Olson’s sociotechnological imagination, presented in early works such as “The Kingfishers,” Call Me Ishmael, and “Projective Verse,” emerged from his experiences during World War II and immediately after. Olson’s involvements with the Office of War Information left him incredibly leery about the top-down, dominative management of information, as did his complex relationship with Ezra Pound, whom Olson visited numerous times during Pound’s internment in St. Elizabeth’s Federal Hospital for the Insane in Washington, DC. In 1946 Olson served as a courier between Pound and James Laughlin of New Directions Press as the two were preparing The Pisan Cantos for publication. Olson’s exposure to The Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was incarcerated by US occupying forces in Italy and awaiting his trial for treason, 8

Introduction

inspired Olson’s influential theorization of projective verse as an informatics of liberation—a newly inclusive and dynamic outlier network for the demos—while leaving him deeply troubled about the potential of electrified media and postwar information science to be absorbed into neofascist projects or aims, much as Pound had been instrumentalized by Italian Fascism through his wartime Radio Rome broadcasts. As we shall see, Olson’s hopes and anxieties regarding postwar information culture and the promises of human-machine symbiosis were deepened by the formulation of cybernetic philosophy by Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and others at the Macy Conferences of the 1940s and 1950s. Approached in relation to what Olson saw as the utopian and dystopian potentials of cybernetics elaborated at those conferences, “The Kingfishers” is revealed as a poetic case study into the complex symmetry between evolving information science (or informatics) and the aesthetic and social longings of postwar experimental writing. In replicating an informational feedback structure in ways that coincide with divergent, and indeed antithetical, theorizations of the social implications of feedback at the Macy Conferences, Olson’s poem still provokes us to consider the extent to which the democratization and personalization of expressive capabilities within social computing have perhaps liberated us into more efficient terrains of existential domination and ubiquitous surveillance. In engaging the intertwining duality between the possibilities of liberation and domination as imbricated within cybernetic philosophy, Olson’s work in “The Kingfishers” and elsewhere proves far more endemic to the technomodernist concerns of the New American Writing than even Allen initially imagined. Ostensibly, Olson’s troubled yet insistent technomodernism, expressed within the cybernetic poem “The Kingfishers,” takes the form of a critical analogue, a designation used throughout this book to distinguish a literary or aesthetic gesture that simultaneously critiques and extends the assumptions embodied within the technical modality or technological ensemble it mimics. That is, critical analogues often simultaneously engage in and withdraw from their own technicity. Moreover, the critical analogue emerged as one of the principal expressive gestures of the Cold War American avant-garde, a technomodernist approach to artistic practice that involved experimenting with well-established aesthetic objects (such as the poem or novel) in light of information theory and the new expressive capacities of postwar information technologies such as television, networked teletyping, and early mainframe computing.

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The significance of the critical analogue as an aesthetic gesture becomes even more evident in chapter 2, which examines the extent to which poet and novelist Jack Kerouac employed scroll composing to grapple (in a fashion similar to Olson) with the prescriptive and projective propensities of informatics and information theory. Kerouac’s compositional philosophies, spelled out in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and realized in scroll compositions such as his famed On the Road manuscript, might be approached as technomodernist responses to what he viewed as the neofascist potential of informatics, for Kerouac feared the social implications of cybernetics and information theory in a fashion comparable to Olson. Kerouac’s own philosophy of spontaneous aesthetics—which helped codify the instantism that characterized so much of the New American Poetry—has long been attributed to his well-documented interest in jazz composition, but Kerouac’s claim that he typed his celebrated road novel on teletype paper asks us to expand our thinking on his aesthetic beyond the influence of jazz. Toward that end, chapter 2 asserts that Kerouac hoped to humanize the automated information economy that was organized through networked teletypewriters and guided by the theoretical insights of Bell Labs engineer Claude Shannon. The On the Road scroll might be read as a particularly verbose, meandering, and nonutilitarian reaction to Shannon’s arguments on behalf of eliminating ambiguity and uncertainty—or what he had deemed “noise”—from technical communication, thereby ensuring the more efficient circulation of information through teletype networks and other media formats. Kerouac’s little known 1954 short story, “cityCityCITY,” reveals the author’s anxieties about computing and automated information networks; in dystopian fashion, he clearly worried that the emerging information society was a new, more effective attempt at repressing the existential yearnings and outsider longings guiding the representative figures of the New American Poetry. Consequently, Kerouac’s scroll compositions might be approached as an aesthetic refusal to be contained or quantified within Cold War culture and its emerging modes of algocracy and technocracy, even though his compulsions (much again like those of Olson) led him to project his compositional practices beyond the physical capacities of the book-form in anticipation of the technical forms of social computing. He hoped that these forms would not have their expressive capacities overrun by computational rationality, and his concerns in this regard found clear expression in his statement on poetics that appears in The New American Poetry. Moreover, by converting his typewriter 10

Introduction

into a makeshift teletype, Kerouac modeled an approach to human-machine symbiosis that offers a hopeful vision of networked technology as a site for liberated inscription rather than dominative prescription (within a top-down information architecture). As such, the On the Road scroll is a critical analogue of cybernetic modes that simultaneously throws traditional literary narrative into a state of taxonomic crisis, compelling self-expression beyond the book-form and more decisively toward the spontaneous modes of first-person testament and self-projection so prevalent within the New American Writing, and now within the scrolling expressive media of our digital milieu. Moreover, the correlations between Kerouac’s scroll writings and the period’s evolving information technologies lay bare the extent to which the avant-garde’s postwar repudiation of reigning aesthetic criteria had been catalyzed by technical innovation, while beckoning us to reflect more thoroughly on the capacity of experimental aesthetics for anticipating or influencing emergent notions of technical design, including what we might now identify as the animating features of computational media. As a textual artifact, then, Kerouac’s scrolling manuscript remains well suited for examining what N. Katherine Hayles calls the “synergies between print and digital media” within a more ambitious and comparative media philology.17 Writers and artists poised on the advanced edge of their expressive forms often find themselves there as a result of compelling forces within technological and media history; in responding to the new demands and promises of ascendant technologies or recently secured media environments, such artists have renovated their expressive objects in anticipation of future communicative practices, while perhaps helping to mediate or facilitate wider cultural adaptations to new technological forms and practices. Thus, in works such as Olson’s “Projective Verse” and Kerouac’s scroll compositions, we encounter condensed media histories—objects embedded within historical media continuums that ask us to contextualize literary artifacts in relation to other information media, often in spite of our inclinations to raise literary expression to more rarefied heights than other communicative forms. Thus, if we aspire toward a more robust comprehension of the motivations and longings that drive postwar and contemporary cultural aesthetics, the object qualities of the literary simply cannot be separated in hierarchical fashion from the evolution of other media technologies—as Rexroth did in his review, for instance. Although social computing and the information economy may have recomposed our expressive practices, individual desires, and collective

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longings, these renovations did not happen ex nihilo but instead emerged as extensions of a complicated and interlinking history of expressive technologies and media, including literary culture and the book-form.18 In chapter 3 we will explore the significant influence of literary culture over Bay Area notions of interconnectivity and intersubjectivity as they took root in other modes of experimental expression during the atomic era. A number of writers represented in The New American Poetry—Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Phillip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac—combined fundamental insights from the dharmic (i.e., Eastern) religions with the era’s pervasive interest in the atom into new tropes for democratic social experience. In both poetry and essays, these figures sought utopian notions of networked cognition and transpersonal holism that proved fundamental to the Bay Area metaphysics of information liberation. In seeking out democratic alternatives to the monolithic and top-down media architectures of the Cold War era, as well as a pacifistic alternative to the geopolitical and nationalistic hostilities animating Cold War life, figures such as Ginsberg were in part moved by residual concerns about propaganda and cognitive conditioning as carried out in Nazi Germany (as Olson had been moved by the troubling specter of Pound). The newly interactive and democratizing expressive modalities that Ginsberg and others imagined in the Bay Area during the 1950s came to embody a countercultural architecture of yearning that was foundational for the work of techno-utopians such as information activist John Perry Barlow, LSD guru Timothy Leary, and avantrock performers such as the Grateful Dead. All of them played a major role in promoting the Bay Area metaphysics that has piloted innovations in social computing to this day, in which human-machine symbiosis and the personalization of electronic technology has been idealized as an informatics of liberation antithetical to centralized authority. As chapter 3 demonstrates, many of the principal figures of the New American Poetry helped to formulate the sociotechnological imagination of the 1960s counterculture. Some of the most talented artists associated with the counterculture deftly integrated those influences into the realms of visual and musical production, on which hippiedom and certain factions of the New Left came to rely for so much of their orienting information. The transformation from print into more immersive and interactive media, as chapter 4 demonstrates in its treatment of figures such as Gerd Stern and Owsley Stanley, was plainly evident in the advent of the highly amplified, multimedia concert culture and hippie gatherings of the 1960s, not to mention the 12

Introduction

pronounced degree of studio experimentation and adventurous audio engineering that defined the rock era. Building on Fred Turner’s influential scholarship on this topic, I demonstrate that the blossoming of the critically ignored Bay Area surrealist tradition into psychedelic multimedia was one of the principal developments through which the New American Poetry came to influence the contours of alternative media experience—or, more specifically, the notion that virtuality, a secondary paradise realized across fantastical networks of interactivity and play, might liberate the human potential for agency and more ecstatic modes of collective life. Like Kerouac and Olson, Philip Lamantia, the most innovative surrealist poet and essayist to emerge within the Cold War Bay Area, was wary of technocracy—indeed, he even suggested that Olson’s poetry and essays might have been complicit in the technocratic cultural shift he so clearly abhorred. Nevertheless, in insisting on a more expansive expressive and imaginative space for what Lamantia termed “the marginal,” by which he meant those “precarious [modes of] existence outside societal norms” capable of calling entrenched subjective and social assumptions into question, Lamantia helped André Breton’s call (in Manifesto of Surrealism) for alternative sensual experience and perspectival experimentation migrate into the outsider cultural ethos of the Bay Area. That ethos, and the varied technological forms it eventually assumed, greatly influenced the worldviews and cultural aspirations of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. The immersive installations and events created by Bay Area artists such as Gerd Stern and Owsley Stanley offered access to a new collective eros, nourished on voluntary surveillance, as participants were often subject to the projection and broadcast of their actions within alternative theatres of existence and expression. In chapter 5 the focus shifts to the East Coast and the New York School as it examines Frank O’Hara’s contribution to emergent surveillance aesthetics, linking extravagant and inane modes of self-disclosure— what O’Hara referred to as his “I do this, I do that poems”—to liberation and pleasure. Although Web 2.0 now offers the promise of textual fixity and narrative posterity to the most extensive cast of writers in Western history, its formats are premised on textual flux, or on the assumed disposability afforded by real-time self-reporting on the go, with many signing in faithfully to tell their story as it unfolds anew every day. O’Hara’s celebrated collection The Lunch Poems implicitly longs for this immediacy and mobility, auditioning that desire in what remains a paper-based and paperback expressive object. Indeed, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pocket Poets series, in which The

The Poetics of Symmetrical Critique

13

Lunch Poems appear, was perfectly suited for O’Hara’s poetic intentions, for the books themselves were cut to fit into one’s pocket and thus be mobile. In The Lunch Poems, O’Hara employs these formal capacities to broadcast his quotidian comings and goings, along with the daily and nightly activities of his New York friends, using the book-form to imagine an arena of universalized, real-time celebrity that largely anticipates the autobiographical narrative practices elaborated across the democratized computing technologies of today. In the Cold War era, marked by increasing concerns about privacy and the overreach of surveillance protocols, O’Hara offered up his private information willingly, refusing to keep his homosexuality and his outsider milieu closeted. Ostensibly, then, The Lunch Poems (and other works of O’Hara’s) should be understood as an informatics of liberation. Building on the work Deborah Nelson has done on the confessional poets, chapter 5 asserts that O’Hara experienced the privation demanded by the social mores of Cold War containment culture as an existential burden, and in turn much of his work longs for an expressive medium in which he might render himself more freely, and with explicit immediacy. Chapter 6 focuses on O’Hara’s fellow New York School poet John Ashbery, with particular attention paid to Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” in which the promise of expanded intimacy and sociality inspired by new modes of interactivity during the earliest days of personal computing and gaming systems is simultaneously presented as an emergent terrain for more extensive modes of containment and social ascription—or for canalizing modes of surveillance within an informatics of domination. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” serves as an aesthetic precursor to the interface or threshold cultures that emerge under social computing; in certain aspects, Ashbery’s poem longs to transform paper-based representational culture into a dynamically interactive space—a responsive, tactile, and networked social medium. This attempt emerged from within a culture in which computing and other media forms (such as gaming systems) were becoming more thoroughly personalized and responsive, a transformation simultaneously registered in the conceptual art of figures such as Nam June Paik. In the work of Ashbery, the engagement with the possibilities of interfacing—or for extending expressive culture into a third dimensional axis—coincides with concerns about new forms of containment and surveillance as they became more prevalent during the Watergate era. To a pronounced extent, Ashbery’s concerns for privacy serve as a correction to the optimism of Frank O’Hara and others covered in this study. Ultimately, much of Ashbery’s work 14

Introduction

cautions us that the possibility of personalizing or liberating the information economy in the ways that O’Hara and others had anticipated might usher subjectivity and oppositional collectivity into a new containment culture capable of subverting the outsider ethos and social objectives so present in the New American Poetry. Indeed, such a reading of Ashbery’s concerns overturns the long-standing notion of Ashbery as an apolitical artist, far too staid to be drawn into the countercultural impulses of his time. Andrew Ross, for instance, has declared the “political appeal” of Ashbery as “low” on account of the poet’s avoidance of socioeconomic issues, his failure to engage in “any passionate revolt against any elitist literary knowledge,” and his refusal to use language as an instrument of “terror” against systems of domination.19 Ashbery’s political concerns have actually remained veiled, in a manner of speaking, by the intentional obscurity of so much of his poetry, in which his referents remain consistently ambiguous and vague. It is from within that cultivated sense of obscurity that Ashbery not only expresses his concerns about privacy but also refuses to have his poetics absorbed within the experience economy of the information society. As early as the 1960s the poet was concerned that the coteries or scenes organizing the New American Poetry had merely come to serve as a mode of marketing and branding, a concern that continues to resonate with the performative aspects of selfhood within the networked social spaces of cybercapitalism. As much as those dissident networks imagined by the postwar avant-garde might be viewed (both positively and negatively) as the precursors to the niche-based social and commercial forms on which algocracy feeds, Ashbery’s work declares the liberatory networks imagined by the New American Poetry to be self-defeating. The epilogue builds on Ashbery’s concerns by comparing the technological longings and apprehensions of the principal figures in this study with some of the claims and protocols of the digital humanities (DH), a field that applies computational analysis and tools to the study of the humanities. In particular, I argue that we might in part see recent trends in DH toward software-based reading and the mining of big data merely as institutional adjustments to the ascendancy of technical and algorithmic reasoning in an era of increasing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) funding, one of the principal ways in which the university system is solidifying its corporate standing within cybercapitalism. Efforts have certainly been under way to divert more funding toward the STEM disciplines, at the expense of the humanities. In true neoliberal fashion, government and corporate officials (including

The Poetics of Symmetrical Critique

15

university administrators) justify those efforts by the pragmatic calculus of the job market, contributing to a regime of veridiction that situates truth in the job-placement numbers and starting salaries of recent degree recipients. STEM graduates, the argument goes, are simply in greater demand, given the ongoing technological evolution of society in the information age, and as a result they acquire jobs at higher rates and earn far higher starting salaries than their peers in the liberal arts.20 The divide between STEM and humanities funding seems destined to widen in the coming decades, and that divide is already affecting humanities work. Thus, it becomes worth asking what the humanities might have to lose or gain by outsourcing their analytical traditions and capabilities to algorithms and automated modes of cognition. Following Alan Liu’s provocative suggestion that DH practices have yet to adequately theorize their relationship to the corporate, technocratic university, I consider the fate of those traditions of social critique upon which the humanities have so clearly depended in recent decades—modes we see auditioned at times in the representative work of the New American Poetry. Indeed, I concur with the Babel Working Group’s perspective, spelled out in its evolving Disrupting the Digital Humanities project, that the institutionalization of DH within the neoliberal university violates the field’s own history as an outlier network, coaxing us in turn toward a reassessment of how digital tools might function in the future of our humanities disciplines. Data mining and textual mapping—dependent, as they are, on machine-reading software able to extract particular information or knowledge from a text— remain starkly antithetical to the New American Poetry’s aesthetic disavowals of calculative or computational reasoning, and those disavowals might in turn guide our engagement with reading and interpretation software based on quantification or computational rationality. Such software can never fully speak for (or “sum up”) literary artifacts, which might be more fruitfully approached through an intermedia philology that remains open to the inherent richness of meaning and associations contained within the networks, contexts, and relations enabling literary and cultural expression. This richness cannot be bound or reproduced solely within quantitative analytics; it continues to speak affirmatively to the sharing of knowledge across networks in ways that reflect some of the foundational aspirations of representative figures with the New American Poetry and DH. The longing to democratize the scholarly enterprise among newly empowered citizen-participants through the ubiquity of networked knowledge sharing and information streaming cannot help but run headlong into the paradox 16

Introduction

at the heart of the intellectual history reconstructed within this book. Justifying the trade-offs or benefits of the networked information economy through democratizing language cannot ultimately talk itself out of the fact that “the dark side” of ubiquity concurrently renders such utopian claims suspect. The textual artifacts at the center of this inquiry help make legible the history of that paradox or contradiction, and I hope that the analysis offered here will ultimately prove vital to the evolution of a worthy, nuanced scholarship of expressive media and cultural aesthetics as they have evolved (and continue to evolve) across the computational age. Toward that end, one of this study’s most important claims, I believe, is that the ascendancy of social computing provides a valuable sense of critical retrospection, allowing certain textual economies to present their concerns to us in new, revitalized ways that ask us to reassess the boundaries of canonicity.



The Poetics of Symmetrical Critique

17

1

Starting with Olson

Donald Allen identified a renewed interest in civic consciousness as one of the defining characteristics of the New American Poetry. In the case of Charles Olson, whose 1949 poem “The Kingfishers” serves as the lead selection in Allen’s initial anthology, the development of his civic consciousness was rooted in his experiences of information engineering and the extensive politicization of media during World War II. Olson was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1910 and attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He completed his coursework for a PhD in American Civilization at Harvard University and then accepted a position as the publicity director for the American Civil Liberties Union in February 1941.1 By September 1942 Olson had joined the Office of War Information (OWI) as the assistant chief of the Foreign Language Section, only to resign in reaction to what he viewed as the heavy-handedness of OWI Director George W. Healey. Olson biographer Paul Christensen explains, “The incident was reported in the New York Times, where Olson and his associate Constantine Poulos, who had also resigned, were quoted as saying that they had been prevented from ‘functioning to offset Axis propaganda aimed at creating dissension among America’s 35,000 citizens of foreign ancestry.’ ”2 Olson’s resignation can also be attributed to the frequent censoring of his press releases, which he considered a violation of his right to free expression under the First Amendment.3 Thus Olson’s time in the OWI left him profoundly troubled over the dominative or hierarchical manipulation of print and electronic media by both the Axis powers and the administrative structure of the OWI, each of which had proven adept at canalizing or mobilizing the wills of nation-bound masses within the professed exigencies of technologically advanced and frighteningly destructive modern warfare. Call Me Ishmael, a critical study of Moby Dick published by Olson in 1947, put those concerns on candid display. Offered as Americans were still basking

19

in their defeat of the Axis powers, Olson’s study asserted that the true American contribution to the world was not an actually existing democracy, but an unwavering (because largely uncritical) faith in machine culture. He put this plainly on the book’s opening page, declaring that in the wake of World War II “Americans still fancy themselves such democrats. But their triumphs are of the machine.”4 Although the eighteenth-century dissolution of aristocracy and monarchy made room for more inclusive and participatory notions of social life, those revolutionary dissolutions also created room for the predatory and authoritarian impulses embodied in Ahab as the captain of technology and industry; that, in Olson’s estimation, is the fulcrum on which the tragedy of Moby Dick balances. The crew of the Pequod, composed of “all races and colors functioning together, a forecastle reality of Americans not yet a dream accomplished by the society,” is poised to become an actually existing, uniquely networked demos, but its members are instead transformed into (and ultimately overwhelmed by) the component parts of a machine, “the whaleboat, the precision instrument,” bound together under authoritarian rule bent on the corporate and imperialist subjugation of the natural world and its inhabitants.5 Approaching the crew “as OBJECT in MOTION, something to be shaped for use,” Ahab mobilizes and canalizes their wills within the capitalist imperatives of the technologies of the whaling industry. In turn, their death represents the impossibility of a functioning and inclusive democratic collectivism, for Herman Melville reframes “tragedy in terms of democracy,” or its failure. In short, Ahab remains “the FACT, [and] the crew the IDEA.”6 The machinery or technical forms of the whaling ship, “one of the most successful machines Americans had perfected up to that time,” provide the setting in which either possibility—the liberation of the demos or its mobilization by authoritarianism—becomes thinkable or operable, just as in Olson’s engagement with informatics in “The Kingfishers.”7 Olson’s treatment of this duality in “The Kingfishers” extends his concern about information engineering, as experienced during his time in government service, into a poetic investigation of cybernetics, a new set of perspectives on the circulation of information within regulatory systems, approaches that also emerged within the context of wartime technical change and the mobilization of collective will. Much like Olson, the American anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead feared the propensity for subjectivity and agency to be rendered by dominative interests through the mobilization and dissemination of information, so they offered cybernetics as an antidote to information mobi 20

Chapter One

lized by the needs of competitive nation-states (or other dominative interests). Their idealization of cybernetics as an informatics of liberation stands in contrast to cybernetics as an informatics of control or domination, encountered most notably in the work of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mathematician Norbert Wiener during the same period. These contrasting views of cybernetic philosophy hold the key to understanding “The Kingfishers,” in which Olson models a feedback structure in order to examine those conflicting claims, establishing the poem as a critical analogue of cybernetic processes as theorized during the Cold War era. As I hope to show in this chapter, Olson’s particular longings and anxieties regarding cybernetic philosophy—which he saw as reflecting both the possibilities of newly liberated modes of expression and dominative modes of information engineering akin to fascism—come into clearer view when we consider the aesthetic disharmony of “The Kingsfishers” in relation to Olson’s engagements with technical development and networked communication in Call Me Ishmael and in his highly influential aesthetic manifesto “Projective Verse” (1950).

Contending with Pound

Call Me Ishmael had its beginnings as Olson’s master’s thesis at Wesleyan. His completion of the published version of his study on Melville followed his government employment and coincided with his visits to Ezra Pound in the psychiatric ward at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where Pound was institutionalized for twelve years after World War II. Olson’s anxieties about the destruction of Ahab’s crew through the technological canalization of their propensities—or of their very being—were undoubtedly deepened by his witnessing of Pound’s predicament. Indeed, as we shall see, contending with Pound left a paradoxical impression on Olson’s civic consciousness, which was especially evident in his corresponding engagements with the expressive possibilities and limitations of cybernetic information engineering and networked communication. Expatriated since 1924, Pound had of course allowed his high modernist disdain toward what he deemed the cultural backwardness of his homeland to justify what many saw as a traitorous embrace of Italian Fascism. John Tytell has observed that Pound’s wartime broadcasts on Radio Rome on behalf of Benito Mussolini “savaged America and its political leadership with venomous bitterness.”8 Viewing Mussolini as possessed of a genius far superior to that of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Pound considered his broadcasts not as an act of treason but as well within his First Amendment

Starting with Olson

21

rights. He eagerly gave himself over to the Fascist ideological apparatus and became absorbed in nationalistic information engineering in a way analogous to the mechanization of Ahab’s crew in Olson’s provocative rendering. Despite Olson’s respect for Pound’s artistic abilities and initial concerns over the older poet’s well-being—indeed, these were the motivations for his visits in the first place—Olson came to see Pound in just that sort of light, lamenting in his notebooks that Pound remained “a fascist, the worst kind, the intellectual fascist, this filthy apologist and mouther of slogans which serve men of power. It was a shame upon all writers when this man of words, this succubus, sold his voice to the enemies of the people.”9 Supported by Italy’s Ministry of Popular Culture, Pound used his radio broadcasts to express his long-standing anti-Semitism and antidemocratic attitudes, allowing himself to be mobilized and transformed into an instrument by Axis-power Ahabs. Unlike Olson, who had resigned from the OWI rather than have his perspectives revised by his superiors, Pound had willingly engaged in Fascist propaganda that Olson found repellent (and had even dedicated himself against as a member of the OWI). Poet Anne Waldman views Pound’s “decline—the fascist broadcasts—as cyborgian, in that his anti-Semitic views were abetted by the power of the radio,” contributing to the creation of a “martial empire zone.”10 Through human-machine symbiosis, Pound’s voice had traveled over vast geographies with an immediacy of which print technology was incapable, making contact with a listenership greater in number than any readership Pound was ever able to maintain. But Waldman provides us with a second way of seeing Pound as a cyborgian (or as a technomodernist), and that perspective is equally important if we are to come to grips with Pound’s influence over Olson’s sociotechnological perspectives. According to Waldman, Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was incarcerated by the homeland he so palpably despised, is also a cyborgian performance because he melded with his typewriter to express his pariah status in a poetic mode that Olson would come to identify as projective. The Pisan Cantos are Cantos 74 through 84 of Pound’s epic Cantos, composed between 1915 and 1962. The initial drafts of the Pisan cycle were completed during Pound’s three-week incarceration in a detention camp after the Allied invasion of Italy. Pound had been under investigation for treason by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI since 1943, mostly on account of the nearly 120 speeches he had delivered on Radio Rome since 1940. In May 1945 he was seized by Italian partisans and handed over to the US military.11 In June Pound was transferred to the US Army Disciplinary Training Center near 22

Chapter One

Pisa, where he was housed with roughly thirty-six hundred other prisoners. Writing in his isolation cell, Pound conceived of The Pisan Cantos as a prison text expressing his forced marginalization, or what he saw as his unfair stigmatization and incarceration by dominative ideological forces within the US government who had violated his First Amendment rights. Much of the anguish encountered within the Pisan poems clearly seems to stem from Pound’s perception of having been defeated by bureaucratic forces he failed to see as his intellectual equal. Pound was the only civilian imprisoned in the camp. As Richard Sieburth has pointed out in his introduction to The Pisan Cantos, the camp’s other prisoners were predominantly African Americans who had been assigned there for “reprogramming” and “reconditioning” with the hope that they would eventually return to active service.12 Pound addressed these attempts at reprogramming the prisoners in his observation, early in Canto 74, that he had been sent to the Pisan detention center to have “his mouth . . . removed.” 13 The cantos to follow, we are to understand, represent Pound’s attempt at writing back against this imposed silence. Sieburth observes that in many instances Pound employed his situation in clumsy and offensive attempts to align himself with his fellow African American inmates; the prisoner-poet “casts his lot not with the American military victors but their victims, not with the masters but with their slaves.” In such instances, Pound often uses what he conceives of as African American dialect.14 But the poet’s condemnations of the inherent failures of American democratic claims are unfortunately couched throughout in what amounts to an elegy for both Italian Fascism and Benito Mussolini. In this way Pound once again became instrumentalized by fascist rationality within the architecture of The Pisan Cantos. Nevertheless, The Pisan Cantos won the Bollingen Prize for poetry after being published by New Directions Press in 1948. Upon being returned to the United States and subsequently declared psychologically unfit for trial in December 1945, Pound was interned in St. Elizabeth’s, where he continued to revise The Pisan Cantos. Although they did not appear in print until 1948, Olson saw Pound’s typescripts in early 1946 because he served as the courier between Pound and his publisher, James Laughlin. Burton Hatlen has argued that this was a formative experience for Olson, for he came to view The Pisan Cantos as a “proto-projective poem.” According to Hatlen, the formal innovations heralded by Olson in “Projective Verse” were in part inspired by his exposure to Pound’s Pisan cycle, which aided him in seeing poetry “not as a working out of prior intentions, thematic or formal, but rather as a direct

Starting with Olson

23

transfer of energy, an enactment that, in effect, invents itself as it goes. Olson wants to adopt as his own the projective methodology that he has found in Pound, but without the egoism that has, he believes, led Pound into intellectual error and personal disaster.”15 This is a critically important point. One of the tenets of projective verse, or poetry of the open field, spelled out by Olson in his 1950 manifesto is that you allow the movement of language to propel you, to project you forward into terrains of thought and expression that have not been predetermined. This aspiration is integral to the ethos of spontaneity and instantism that guides so much of the New American Poetry. Pound’s poem fell short of achieving those aims, however.16 According to Hatlen, Olson blamed hubris and egotism for Pound’s failure in this regard: Pound did ultimately fall into the groove of his prior intentions; despite his attempts to represent a range of voices and perspectives in The Pisan Cantos, including those of incarcerated African American combat soldiers, the poem still reads as an apologia for Italian Fascism and Pound’s significant entanglements with it. As such, the poem replicates the thematic intentions of the Radio Rome broadcasts in print form. Olson found these intentions abhorrent, which led to his breaking off contact with Pound before The Pisan Cantos appeared in print. Nevertheless, upon viewing Pound’s typescript in early 1946, Olson had been impressed by its kinetic qualities: the extent to which Pound’s idiosyncratic scoring on the page—that is, his willingness to utilize the entire visual field of the printed page as a typographical canvas—provided the poem with immediacy and propulsion.17 Composed in isolation, the sprawling typography of The Pisan Cantos mimics the transversing of communicative boundaries that Pound had experienced on the radio by violating the conventional margins of poetic expression on the printed page. These formal characteristics of the poem, Hatlen observes, deeply impressed Olson, even though the projective elements of the Pisan cycle collapse under the weight of Pound’s enduring Fascist sympathies. Despite Olson’s dismay over the cycle’s enduring Fascism, The Pisan Cantos stirred his technomodernist longings as they came to be expressed in “Projective Verse,” a critical analogue of electronic communication in which Olson elaborated on his poetic philosophy. First published in Poetry New York in 1950, “Projective Verse” was chosen as the lead selection of The New American Poetry’s sixth section, “Statements on Poetics,” in which Donald Allen collected aesthetic declarations or manifestos from fifteen of the writers included in the anthology. Much like Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” 24

Chapter One

composed in 1953 and published in Black Mountain Review in 1957, “Projective Verse” remains one of the definitive statements of the New American Writing’s commitments to open form, which Olson saw as a challenge to the antiquated notions of form inherited from print culture. Rejecting “that verse which print bred,” Olson claimed that projective verse is independent from “inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the ‘old’ base of the non-projective.” 18 That independence would discover its basis not solely in the opening of the poetic line across the space of the page, as Pound had done, but in dynamic intersubjective extension within a speedier, more dynamic information architecture. One of the principal components of “the machinery . . . of how projective verse is made” can be located in rapidity, the newly charged pace that characterizes the information society. Olson implored both citizens and poets to “keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, OH ANOTHER!”19 Operating within the genre of the manifesto, Olson employed print-based expression to implore his readers (and indeed the demos) to move beyond the temporal confines of print-based expression toward a diffusion of participatory potential across “all points” of a communicative architecture animated by speed, projecting an informatics liberated from time constraints into the realms of immediacy. “Projective Verse” declares that what “we have suffered from is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination.”20 The remedy for this problem is “the machine,” the typewriter, which possesses the potential to allow the writer to uniquely “voice his work” in nonmetrical ways, or beyond the inherited and orthodox expressive forms of nonprojective prosody.21 In emphasizing “the typewriter as the personal and instantaneous recorder of the poet’s work,” capable of replicating the unique vibrancy of the individual voice, Olson was engaging in a technomodernist longing for expressive liberation—for personalization and democratization—through human-machine symbiosis.22 Olson’s declarations resonate strongly within Mark McGurl’s description of technomodernist writing drawing “the machine to itself in the form of ontological prosthesis”; at the interface of the human and the expressive possibilities of the typing machine, newly liberated possibilities for the replication of unique voices emerge.23 Within Olson’s claims we encounter one of the principal

Starting with Olson

25

aesthetic traits of the New American Writing, in which the expansion of narrative or literary content was accompanied by a strikingly new relationship to the typewriter as a technology of liberation. Indeed, Hannah Sullivan explains that during the middle of the twentieth century, writers such as Jack Kerouac and Frank O’Hara transformed the typewriter into their “primary compositional tool,” partly in reaction to the aesthetic practices of the high modernists.24 Although she does not address Olson, “Projective Verse” seems equally culpable in this compositional shift, which Waldman identifies as cyborgian and rooted in the experimentation of Pound’s Pisan cycle. According to Sullivan’s accounting, modernist writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf used their typewriters mainly to transcribe fair copies of their handwritten manuscripts, and the decision to instead compose spontaneously on the typewriter was offered as an aesthetic rejoinder to the intricate reworking of text in works such as Ulysses (1922) and The Waste Land (1922). In fastening their yearnings for instantaneous, highly personal, and direct expression to personal typing technology, Kerouac and O’Hara rejected modernist compositional practices that had come to equate the possibilities of authorial revision with the realization of aesthetic refinement and allusive density (or with the realization of literary art itself, as still understood under modernist paradigms). As such, this transformative relationship to typing technology was based on philosophical and conceptual developments within the history of twentieth-century literary experimentation, which have most often coincided with technical innovations in print culture and other expressive media. Toward that end, Sullivan views the particular authorial choices of Kerouac and O’Hara as informed by a “future-oriented enthusiasm for the speed of the machine,” as was the case with Olson in “Projective Verse.”25 Although they may have been reacting in part to the compositional tradition represented by writers such as Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf, Kerouac and O’Hara simultaneously imparted the rhythms of immediacy and transience emblematic of mass media and telephony into their era’s print culture through their relationship to typing technology.26 In the case of Olson, we might add that his thoughts on manipulating the capacities of the typewriter toward the replication of unique and eccentric voicings extends the playfulness of modernists such as Pound and E. E. Cummings within an ethos of speed that favors direct composition onto “the machine.” Olson had thus found something of tremendous aesthetic use in The Pisan Cantos despite his consternation with Pound’s support for Fascism. 26

Chapter One

“The Kingfishers” as Cybernetic System According to Sullivan, composing a work directly on the typewriter anticipates a shift in general compositional practices that was “completed with the advent of the personal computer,” along with writing technologies and communicative machines such as tablets and smartphones.27 Word processing and the Internet have transformed many of us into self-publishers, demystifying print as a site of authorial accomplishment or privilege—or besmirching what Walter Benjamin termed the “aura” as the result of successive and ongoing renovations in the technologies of textual production. This transformation passed notably through Olson’s, Kerouac’s, and O’Hara’s dual call for immediacy and speediness in written communication.28 Ammiel Alcalay’s insights into the ways in which avant-garde poets and writers have employed the small press and performance venues as outlier networks are particularly clarifying in this regard, reminding us that “finding alternative forms of trustworthy communication and places to gather has always been a major factor in the formation of new cultural and political possibilities.”29 Little magazines and alternative (or “underground”) performance spaces provided the New American Poets with a shared nervous system (an informatics of liberation), binding together the aesthetic movements or “scenes” according to which Donald Allen arranged his contents in The New American Poetry to align his contributors within now recognizable coteries such as the Beat Generation and the New York School. Reminiscing about Olson’s relationship to Floating Bear, a mimeographed poetry newsletter founded in 1957 by Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka, di Prima explains that Olson was attracted to outlier distribution networks largely on account of

speed: getting the new, exciting work into the hands of other writers as quickly as possible. I remember that the last time I saw Charles Olson in Gloucester, one of the things he talked about was how valuable the Bear had been to him in its early years because he could get new work out that fast. He was very involved in speed, in communication. We got manuscripts from him pretty regularly . . . and we’d usually get them into the very next issue. That meant that his work, his thoughts, would be in the hands of a few hundred writers within two or three weeks.30



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Indeed, in “Projective Verse,” Olson’s aesthetic manifesto, he idealizes the new poetics as “an energy-discharge” transferred in its immediacy from poet to reader, a longing that no doubt gains some impetus from the increasing speed of information transfer in the age of electronic media. It also resonates with the desire for instantism in poetic communication, which Allen and others have consistently identified as foundational to the New American Writing. Olson saw new cultural and political possibilities—the liberated potentials of projective energy discharge—in the quickened editorial pace of little magazines such as Floating Bear. This realization supported what Joshua Hoeynck has identified as the “indefinite pluriverse” of Olson’s poetics, a dynamic ensemble of voices and perspectives resisting harmonization or synthesis.31 Unlike Pound, who performed a pluriverse in The Pisan Cantos only to retreat in the final instant into the ideological purity of Fascism, Olson’s poetics model a more fully democratized and multiform public sphere that resists the possibility of ideological canalization, thus auditioning countercultural networks of yearning, which might elaborate subjective and social longings foreclosed (and thereby necessitated) by the pieties of Cold War containment culture.32 This is particularly true of “The Kingfishers,” a poetic exercise in informatics, a meditative loop circling back over its own territory in provocative yet ultimately open-ended ways. Indeed, that open-endedness—or the poem’s lack of a telos, or end point—is a provocation all its own, casting an investigative light on the contemporaneous and internally incoherent claims of cybernetics as they emerged from the tumultuous 1940s. More has been written on Olson’s relationship to informatics and information theory than on that of any other New American Writer, precisely because of his explicit engagement with cybernetics in “The Kingfishers.” Cybernetics is the study of systems that store data and employ feedback mechanisms to govern or control the behavior of such systems; it is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry named from the Greek kubernetes (meaning “helmsman” or “governor”) by MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener. The claims and implications of cybernetics as both a social and an information philosophy captured the public and intellectual imaginations of postwar America in ways that have been influential and lasting. Analyzing Olson’s critically analogous relationship to cybernetics as expressed in “The Kingfishers” requires some initial recounting of the intellectual and technical history of cybernetics as it had begun to develop during 28

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World War II. The Macy Conferences were key to those developments. Organized by neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch and held in New York from 1942 to 1960, the goal of the Macy Conferences was to provide an interdisciplinary forum for some of the era’s most influential figures in the social sciences and hard sciences. McCulloch’s guiding hope was that fostering a space for collaboration and the cross-fertilization of ideas would allow for progressive and just visions of humanity’s future to emerge; this hope had been catalyzed by the great destruction of World War II, in which Western civilization appeared to many to be unraveling with great alacrity. Regular participants included anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, psychologists Lawrence Frank and Heinrich Kluver, and mathematicians Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and J. C. R. Licklider. One of the most enduring outcomes of these conversations was the development of cybernetics, which served as the topic for a number of Macy Conferences between 1946 and 1953.33 Daniel Belgrad has observed that “the image of a decentralized system held together by feedback loops,” such as that proffered by cybernetics, “can be identified as a key component of the democratic vista from the 1940s through the 1970s” that was initially mapped within the interdisciplinary engagements McCulloch fostered.34 Over the course of that engagement, Mead and Bateson were largely responsible for rendering feedback as a powerful symbol for democracy, an informatics of liberation capable of countering the top-down information economies and media architectures mobilized by militarized state power during World War II.35 For Bateson, Mead, and others, those information architectures represented the antidemocratic culmination of modernity’s dependence on centralized planning and mass social engineering in order to shore up the ideological validity of nation-states and their aims.36 In turn, some participants conceptualized cybernetics as a much-needed alternative to centralized information engineering, for it instead offered the promise of approaching information systems as signaling loops capable of dynamic adaptation—or as multinodal exchange networks engaged in feedback. Particularly for Bateson and Mead, the concept of feedback came infused with previously untapped democratic potential, for it held open the possibility that the output of information within communicational networks might return to the system (or network) through inputs instilled with unpredictable, unexpected, or unmanageable agency. Bateson noted, “Because the [feedback] system is circular, effects of events at any point in the circuit can

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be carried all around to produce changes at that point of origin.”37 Ultimately, feedback loops remain teleologically open in a radical and valuable way for Bateson, a characteristic he likened to “purposelessness” because we cannot predict how the agents that have been integrated into a given system will respond to that system’s outputs, conditions, or claims.38 If, as Mead suggested, in “working toward defined ends we commit ourselves to the manipulation of persons, and therefore to the negation of democracy,” then the diffusion of participatory potential—and thus authority—across an evolving communicational system can be potently democratic, for it potentially opens that system to unforeseen perspectives and variables.39 Democratic practice thus requires, for Mead and Bateson, some discarding of purpose within the “total circuit,” an openness to the notion that no single part or input within “an internally interactive system can have unilateral control over the remainder or over any other part.”40 Belgrad makes clear that Bateson and Mead located in cybernetics a compelling alternative to modes of social engineering in which information flow is directed toward a given purpose, or in which a predetermined pedagogical goal mechanizes group consciousness through its vulnerable malleability. But their idealization of cybernetics as an informatics of liberation met its adversative match in the theorization of cybernetics as an informatics of control, especially in the highly influential work of Wiener. Despite Wiener’s own proclamations of cybernetics as a negation of fascist and corporate rationality, both of which would “prefer an organization in which all orders come from above, and none return,” his writings on feedback tend to emphasize the desirability of bringing order and stability to the chaotic—or of bringing some sense of organization to the disorganized by discovering the predictability in what appear to be unpredictable deviations within a looped system.41 The goal of cybernetics, in much of Wiener’s writing on the subject, is to modify the behavior of systems by integrating their unpredictable or “purposeless” values into their functioning, or into their purpose. Wiener’s overall focus remains on adaptive control: systems that can alter their operating parameters toward greater efficiency and predictability in adaptation to input. Robert von Hallberg has explained that in Wiener’s cybernetic vision, “a method of steering, the goal of which is to control uncertainty by manipulation of information,” asserted significant influence over the development of organizational rationality and systems thinking in the postwar United States. Particularly appealing to corporate and other institutions was Wiener’s opti 30

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mism that systems appearing disordered and chaotic were in fact “complexly ordered” in ways that might be diagnosed, then coordinated, toward more efficient ends.42 One of the benefits of working on military technology for the US government during World War II, Wiener explained in his 1950 work on cybernetics and society, The Human Use of Human Beings, was that he came to realize the possibility of constructing “prediction machines,” in which feedback provided the structural logic for “controlling a system by reinserting” its previous outcomes into its subsequent courses of action.43 Indeed, as Michael Davidson has so succinctly explained, Wiener’s postwar theorization of feedback built directly on his sizable amount of wartime work on weapons systems, during which Wiener came to view radar as “the classic instance of feedback, a system whereby high-frequency radio waves are transmitted into space, bounced off an object, returned to the transmitting source, and sent out again to map the trajectory of a moving object.” An architecture of probabilities emerges through this sequential and experiential progression whereby the system being contemplated learns to “compensate for error and uses that compensation to refine its functioning” toward greater efficiency (which in this particular example means a higher ratio of hit targets to launched projectiles).44 When offered as a more general approach for organizing social reality, the behaviorist or instrumentalist overtones of Wiener’s thinking become evident: when Wiener declares that “the nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices which make decisions on the basis of decisions they have made in the past,” he is undoubtedly equating cybernetics with a new prescriptive diagnostics enabled by advances in thinking machines.45 Wiener’s contributions to cybernetic thought were grounded in the concurrent development of the first electronic general-purpose computers, such as the University of Pennsylvania’s hulking Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). The ENIAC was introduced to the public in February 1946 and was widely acclaimed throughout the popular press (including Time and Life) as a “giant brain” or “mechanical brain.”46 Although the ENIAC’s primary assignments were determined by the military exigencies of the Cold War, with the machine given tasks such as calculating artillery trajectories and computing the feasibility of thermonuclear battle scenarios, the ENIAC also came to symbolize a new propensity for the rational and efficient organization of societies and their resources. The gist of such arguments was that electronic brains would prove intrinsically impartial in their judgments,

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unlike the heated ideological actors who had ushered human societies to the apocalyptic edge during the recently concluded world war. The development of programmable multiuse machines, capable of carrying out an array of tasks far beyond the fixed behavioral range of the weapons systems Wiener had engineered during World War II, sent the mathematician dreaming about what he identified as the third revolution in automation. The first had been the industrial revolution, which automated physical labor. The second revolution had been clerical, forwarded by innovations such as the mechanical adding machine. In the third revolution, humans would surrender components of their cognition to more efficient, thinking machines operating according to cybernetic processes. Wiener envisioned machines like the ENIAC as dynamic calculative systems that might learn from experience in order to run industries, armies, and economies. Whereas Bateson and Mead saw cybernetics as potentially enhancing democracy through the participatory potential of feedback, Wiener more often than not likened it to a revolutionary revision of cognition and decision making guided by the dual ethos of precision and predictability. These notably different takes on the implications and applications of cybernetics are at the heart of Olson’s concerns in “The Kingfishers.” The collage of juxta­positions found within the poem include field notes of kingfisher nesting patterns, an engagement with Aztecan temple rites, commentary on Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution, musings on the mysterious E carved into the omphalos of Delphi, and clear allusions to postwar informatics in the form of cybernetics. The poem’s prismatic qualities led Edward Halsey Foster to liken “The Kingfishers” to “a poetry of continual unfolding or process” that is ultimately “not bound to absolute forms, mores, or truths,” but instead “hopes to keep oppositions in play,” to hold them in tension.47 Furthermore, Foster has likened the anarchic energy and intellectual dynamism of “The Kingfishers” to a feedback loop, and indeed the poem seems to model the sort of decentralized interaction of voices and perspectives that Mead and Bateson understood as cybernetic, with no component possessing unilateral control over the poem’s message. For critics such as Foster, the poem’s multiplicitous, decentralized thematic centers are indeed its point. Olson’s poetic field remains liberated and syncopated; he contrasts the vicissitudes of consciousness and the instability of social forms to notions of analytic precision and measurability. Indeed,

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attempting to bring the poem under strict interpretive control constitutes a dominative or tyrannical epistemological violation. In line with that reading, Hoeynk has observed that “The Kingfishers” is informed throughout by a palpable dialectical tension “emphasizing a universe of discontinuity versus measure, a cosmos of paradox against a mathematical universe in which things are known with clarity.”48 Although it might be painfully obvious, it is worth pointing out that one of the characteristics marking the maturation of Western poetics has been its release from quantification, as embodied within the formal strictures of rhyme and verse; for the most part, the New American Writers attempted to complete Walt Whitman’s revolution in free form, which involved the abandonment of the mathematical sense of line, and projective verse is instrumental to those attempts. In his introductory comments to The New Writing in the USA, Robert Creeley points out that the 1940s “were a hostile time for the writers here included. The colleges and universities were dominant in their insistence upon an idea of form extrinsic to the given instance. Poems were equivalent to cars insofar as many could occur of similar pattern—although each was, of course, ‘singular.’ ”49 In the nineteenth century Whitman had extended literary romanticism to its aesthetic limits, wedding his stress on free or open form to the diversification of content, thereby giving voice to experiences and lifeways (such as his own homosexual cruising) that were not previously considered of literary or phenomenological value. Comprehending the New American Poetry’s investment in what Allen termed civic consciousness requires that we understand the degree to which that investment was Whitmanesque in its comprehension of subjective or experiential constraints coupled with metrical constraints. That clearly shines through in the poetic openness and discontinuities of “The Kingfishers” and in Olson’s influential theorization of projective verse rather than metrical and quantified poetics. Contemporaneous longings for precision and measurability, identified by Hoeynk, are given voice within “The Kingfishers” in the paraphrasing of Wiener’s ideas. Sitting at the center of Olson’s poem is an allusion to cybernetics as an informatics of control, extolling the following possibility: “We can be precise. The factors are / in the animal and/or the machine the factors are / communication and/or control, both involve / the message. And what is the message? The message is / a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time.” 50 Paul N. Edwards has made clear that



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Wiener’s cybernetic model essentially conflates communication with control, asserting “that goals—including human goals and purposes—could be described within a formalizable, probabilistic, biophysical explanatory space . . . control and communication were computational processes susceptible to modeling in terms of devices and formal structures.” 51 But following upon this allusion to the idealization of control, measurability and predictive precision in Wiener’s theories, one of the “The Kingfishers”’s voices admonishes us that “the too strong grasping” of the intrinsic mutability of social forms and the human beings inhabiting them, “when it is pressed together and condensed / loses it / This very thing you are.”52 This very thing we are, Olson suggests, must remain in tension with attempts at canalizing our subjectivity through probabilistic modeling, a new engineering of social unity through adaptive control that Olson viewed as a possible outcome of Wiener’s ideas. Those ideas are ultimately enfolded and flattened within the kinesis of a system they belong to but cannot dominate. As such, the poetic voice of “The Kingfishers” ultimately refuses to have its motivations synthesized or categorized, and the poem ends in a yet unconsummated “hunt among stones.”53 Olson saw in cybernetics the possibility of algorithmic fascism; thus, within the fugue of “The Kingfishers,” Wiener’s conception of cybernetics encounters its contradiction. Such an interpretation finds further justification in Olson’s 1951 correspondence with Creeley, in which Olson likens cybernetics to fascist rationality, fearing its capacity for presenting the human in “the ‘image’ of the computing machine” inhabiting a field of calculable probabilities that might ultimately canalize and direct human behavior in one or another dominative direction through the tyrannical imposition of consciousness.54 Olson seems to resist such impositions from the poem’s first line: “What does not change / is the will to change.” 55 There are a few ways in which to read the significance of Olson’s placement of the slash in relation to the liberating and dominative tendencies that he considered the dual implications of cybernetic philosophy. The slash inserts a caesura into the line, suggesting Olson’s hesitance to forward a thesis or an unambiguous ideological position at the poem’s outset. We might also, however, think of the slash as a mark of negation. Although Olson’s poem sets up a dynamic system in keeping with this opening line—a statement that also seems closer in its connotations to Mead and Bateson’s take on cybernetics— the slash strikes it through its center just as it is offered, speaking again to the poem’s commitments to openness (or its aversion to ideological certain 34

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ties). Seeing the slash as a mark of negation might also be considered as a typographical representation of Wiener’s vision for cybernetics as it aspires to negate and control the mutability and kinesis to which the opening line attests. As such, Olson’s typographic decision presents us with a rather deft performance or dramatization of the dual implications of cybernetics as it was theorized at the Macy Conferences. Recently Paul Stephens has identified Olson’s 1951 correspondence with Creeley as proof of Olson’s own “conflicted embrace of cybernetics” within “The Kingfishers.” This conflict primarily plays out, according to Stephens, within the “persona Olson created—that of an ‘infovore’ struggling to process information continually within an outsized, ungainly body” that “insisted on a cybernetic subjectivity.” Stephens suggests that many of the representative works of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde “partake of, as well as parody, the information glut that characterizes modernity.” At both the level of form and content, avant-garde poetry—ranging from that of Gertrude Stein to that of Olson to that of Lyn Hejinian, as Stephens demonstrates— has been involved in an “ongoing engagement with changing technologies of information and communication” (or has been technomodernist).56 In turn, Stephens reads “The Kingfishers” as Olson’s cybernetic attempt at coming to grips with information glut, or the cognitive costs of the perpetual distraction that characterizes modernity’s expansive mediascapes. Thus, Olson’s poem demonstrates his attraction to cybernetics as a mode for processing this information glut; faced with such glut, Olson remained attracted to cybernetics as an informatics of control, even as he found himself repelled by the fascist overtones of Wiener’s formulation.57 My own interpretation of the stakes involved in “The Kingfishers” differs from that of Stephens: I do not see Olson as primarily engaged with or troubled by information glut, or more specifically the damaging cognitive costs of perpetual distraction within a swelling information economy—although I certainly view these as pressing concerns. Rather (with the aid of the other scholars I have cited), I understand “The Kingfishers” as primarily concerned with the canalization or mobilization of information toward imprisoning subjective, social, and commercial interests that stand opposed to networks of liberation—a new expressive home for the demos that Allen and others have identified as a central concern of Olson and the New American Writing in general. Understood from this perspective, the poem becomes a technomodernist analogue of a cybernetic system poised between dualities, balancing between the possibilities of canalization (within Wiener’s informatics of

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control) and the evolution of its thought forms toward a more dynamic complexity (within an informatics of liberation). Such a reading resonates in part with Anne Waldman’s views on the ways in which Olson’s ideas of projection within the open expressive field ultimately became realized or imbued within Internet culture. Alluding to a conversation with Allen Ginsberg, Waldman suggests that Olson’s “field” anticipated the sort of transnational intercultural contact—the growing roster of Ahab’s dreaded demos beyond nationhood and its borders—that is facilitated by the expansion of participatory potential within the technical capacities of the information age. Waldman states, “I remember how excited Allen Ginsberg was when he first traveled to China in the 1980s. He perceived it as a further ‘opening of the field,’ as China had essentially missed modernism, the New American Poetry, and beyond.”58 Waldman then extends Ginsberg’s observation to suggest that Olson’s theorizations of the field anticipated the Internet and its “shift of interconnectedness,” democratized and personalized communication architectures that “have greater facility, fewer boundaries. Speed. It all happens more quickly” enfolding in real-time “ ‘global’ projects.”59 In the years after World War II, Olson had begun to imagine and yearn for such an expressive space within paper-based literary culture, projecting a multiform public sphere that might oppose the subjective and participatory constraints of Cold War containment culture and other emergent modes of information domination. As we shall see, similar aspirations and longings were expressed throughout the New American Writing. Moreover, we continue to encounter such idealism—the democratic idealism of Bateson and Mead—in the persistent adulation of digitized interactivity in our current era, in which the expansion of computing potential among a growing multitude of networked participants continues to be equated with egalitarian progress.60 Certainly, however, we simultaneously continue to experience the legacy of Wiener’s thinking on feedback and the third revolution in automation within the data-mining and algorithmic-recommender systems we encounter on a daily basis within algocracy. Capable of aggregating and filtering tremendous scores of data across extensive networks of commercial and social interaction in milliseconds, digital recommender systems (or recommendation engines) provide us with search, product, friend, and story or news suggestions while appearing to race ahead of our own cognition—all while structuring our online experience by more efficiently assigning us to the correct set of affinities or essences, at 36

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the cost, perhaps, of unexplored alternatives that might inspire further revisions to our self-conceptions and our perspectives on sociality and culture.61 Olson was not alone among the New American Poets in aligning such technical possibilities with a continuation of fascist information engineering into the Cold War era.



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2

Humanizing the Network Noise!

In a 1998 Wired article titled “Cyberbeats,” David Batstone acknowledged the principal writers of the Beat Generation as forerunners of new media culture and social computing. He noted that the censorship trial surrounding the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956) anticipated widespread resistance to the state regulation of content on the Internet.1 In addition, Batstone hailed Jack Kerouac’s experimental prose works as the literary precursors to the “streams of consciousness that emerge with remarkable clarity in the digital age.”2 Kerouac’s decision to compose (or perform) his signature work On the Road (1957) on a 120-foot scroll established that novel, in Batstone’s estimation, as the spontaneously composed forerunner of e-mail, hypertext, and other digital literacies. It remains quite possible to view Kerouac’s use of his classic Underwood typewriter as a precursor to texting or instant-messaging technology, and to think of his scroll manuscripts (with their lack of pagination) as anticipating Web-based reading and e-readers.3 Indeed, in his 1958 novel Dharma Bums Kerouac has one of his protagonists, Japhy Ryder, describe a print-based analogue to digitized writing and reading practices. Ryder proclaims, “I’ll do a new long poem called ‘Rivers and Mountains without End’ and just write it on and on on a scroll and unfold on and on with new surprises and always what went before forgotten, see, like a river, or like one of them real long Chinese silk paintings. . . . I’ll spend three thousand years writing it, it’ll be packed full of information on soil conservation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, astronomy, geology, Huan Tsung’s travels, Chinese painting theory, reforestation, Oceanic ecology and food chains.”4 Not only does Ryder’s description of his poem sound like a rudimentary memory prosthesis (or repository) anticipating the diversity of knowledge forms circulating within Web 2.0, his assertion that “always what went before [will be] forgotten” resonates with the inherent disposability of our scrolling reading practices on social computing platforms

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such as Facebook and Twitter, where new entries push dated entries farther down the page and away from our immediate attention (until those dated entries are eventually archived off-page). A case can certainly be made linking Kerouac’s literary experiments with the aesthetics of computational media, although the impetus for those experiments should largely be attributed to Kerouac’s apprehensions about the information society and the existential dangers of algorithmic fascism, or ascendant algocracy. Thus Kerouac’s technological imagination, and his contribution to the aesthetics of computational media as addressed by Batstone and others, was catalyzed by his trepidation that computational advances would also advance a new and more efficient informatics of domination. Kerouac’s “Statement on Poetics,” in The New American Poetry hints at the writer’s concerns: he implores his fellow poets to “add alluvials to the end of your line when all is exhausted but something has to be said for some specified irrational reason, since reason can never win out, because poetry is NOT a science. The rhythm of how you decide to ‘rush’ yr statement determines the rhythm of the poem, whether it is a poem in verse-separated lines, or an endless poem called prose . . . (with its paragraphs).”5 Kerouac’s general concerns with rationality and science, as shall become clear in what follows, were in line with more specific reservations about cybernetics and information science—misgivings he countered with an aesthetic of spontaneity and unexpurgated excess that in turn proved symmetrical with the personalization of computing culture. Although popular characterizations of Kerouac’s writing style continue to identify it with jazz composition on account of its lyrical and melodic dexterity, we might discover an equally appropriate analogy for Kerouac’s authorial practices in the production of what cyberneticists and information theorists such as Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon have negatively identified as noise, offered within Kerouac’s aesthetic as a liberating antidote to the looming possibilities of algocracy. Kerouac’s midcentury concerns about computing culture and the cognitive effects of the emergent information economy resonate throughout his oeuvre, serving as motivation for the ethics of spontaneity embodied in his scroll compositions. This is especially true of On the Road, which Kerouac began working on during the very period in which Wiener and Shannon’s ideas started circulating within the dominative public sphere. Alongside the influence of bop improvisation, the philosophical implications of information engineering and calculative reasoning had a transformative effect on Kerouac’s notions of authorship and literary production. 40

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Anchored within the contexts provided by technical history, we might begin to envisage Kerouac’s relationship to his typewriter as technomodernist—that is, analogous to the information economy circulating through the networked teletypewriters and mainframe computers of the immediate postwar era. In his yearning to humanize or liberate networked information technologies—a yearning expressed by mimicking the teletype with his manual typewriter—Kerouac compelled narrative structure beyond the physical properties of the book-form and toward the scrolling expressive forms of computational media and digitized life writing. As such, while the On the Road scroll continues to pose timely questions about the experiential stakes of social computing in the era of digitized neoliberal capitalism, it also exemplifies the complex symmetry between expressive and technical cultures.

A Cybernetic Dystopia

Kerouac’s little-discussed short story, “cityCityCITY,” quite explicitly renders his anxieties about informatics and automated computing networks, and as such it provides a key to unlocking the author’s complicated aesthetic engagement with the technological transformations of his time. “cityCityCITY” was Kerouac’s lone contribution to science fiction and first appeared in Nugget (a soft-pornography publication) in August 1959. Composed in 1954, the story offers a bleak vision of the future in which humanity inhabits a sealed environment known as the Zone, a world-encompassing urban sprawl extending a hundred miles into the polluted sky. The Zone is also an information network, paved throughout with electrified steel plates and stripped of natural landscape. At times the authorities transform the electricity coursing through the Zone into a means of mass execution, electrocuting the portions of the population deemed eccentric or troublesome. Identified by alphanumerical identification codes rather than proper names, the citizens of the Zone exist ostensibly as roving nodal points within a planetwide information network centralized in Master Love Studios. Master Love broadcasts its messages through the Brow Multivision set, an immersive virtual-reality apparatus set on each Zone inhabitant’s forehead. Projected directly into the cerebral cortex, these messages traverse the entire sensorium. The signal involves “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and thinking [in] the sensation of the vision, which was being waved out of Master Center Love Multivision Studios.”6 Multivision also transmits commercial segments in which the residents

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might fully sample products such as 17-JX, or Jex, one of the psychotropic drugs employed to keep the population sedate in its kaleidoscopic dystopia. Much of the Zone citizens’ experience, then, comes prepackaged with perspectives they have inherited from the information environment encompassing them since birth, which has kept oppositional thought (or thinking beyond the networked content) almost entirely at bay. The conceptual parameters of this information environment, Kerouac tells us, greatly depend on automated reasoning, which has assumed an ontotheological status.7 The citizens of the Zone are tethered to the mainframe computer, along with Multivision, through their mechanical breastplates, which are riveted directly into their breastbones and which calculate and transmit biorhythmic information to the Computer of Infinite Merit. The Zone citizens have become, as Kevin Kelly predicted in his 2007 TED talk, the “extended senses” of the “single, global machine,” their biological information serving as raw data for the calculating or computing of human behavior within increasingly predictable inevitabilities.8 “cityCityCITY” describes this as follows: The Computer of Infinite Merit worked out supermathematically not only the amount of hours put in by everybody in the world paying attention to Multivision Love Broadcasts, but because of its contact with the various multibillion disks upon the breastbones of mankind, by a method of such high mechanical mystery, almost mystical in its far-reaching significance and political depth, it computed the intensity of the communicant’s attention to Love. These complicated figures were broken down by Data Divisions of the General Computer Command, and it was the sum of these figures that had to do with the Merit accumulated by both the individual of a Zone Block and the whole Zone Block together in common merit. When a Zone Block was chosen for Electrocution, Elimination from life, it was because of the low Merit Average of the whole 2,800-odd community.9 In Kerouac’s dystopia, Zone citizens provide the mainframe computer with data that enables it to compute the evolving experiential parameters of the social structure ever more efficiently over time; the maintenance of social cohesion relies on the elimination of those identified (through algorithmic calculation) as lacking sufficient belief or interest in the authoritative media spectacle.

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Kerouac’s concerns stand in stark contrast to postwar optimism about computing and automation—a new faith in data processing and statistical computation that was symbolized for the public imagination in the hulking form of the ENIAC, which occupied a thirty-three- by fifty-five-foot room at the University of Pennsylvania and incorporated 17,468 vacuum tubes and 1,500 relays.10 For many, the immovable solidity of the ENIAC came to represent the utopian potential of an automated future in which thinking machines, unimpeded by irrational prejudices, entrenched loyalties, or emotional volatilities, would objectively mathematize human affairs through the application of unprecedented electronic speed to problem solving. James Gleick has observed that both Time and Newsweek carried stories during 1948 on the ENIAC and the utopian promises of computing, with Time declaring that computers were not only “growing with fearful speed” but were also starting to solve “mathematical equations with flashof-lightning rapidity. Now they are beginning to act like genuine mechanical brains.” 11 Kerouac describes the Computer of Infinite Merit as “one of the most, if not THE most complicated mechanical brains ever put together; its central secret feature obtained around a mathematical principle.” This suggests that in his intrigue with the postwar buzz around computing, he had quite likely read the Time article in question.12 Indeed, the article’s assertions that cyberneticists such as Norbert Wiener envision “no reason [computers] can’t learn from experience” and that “one such mechanical brain, ripe with stored experience, might run a whole industry, replacing not only mechanics and clerks but many of the executives too” find explicit fictional embodiment in the self-modifying behavior of the dense and “mysterious” computational structures piloting Kerouac’s dystopian future.13 Wiener’s cybernetic conception of information architectures as dynamic— or as capable of eliminating error as they accumulate trustworthy data through circular causality—finds particular expression in Kerouac’s Computer of Infinite Merit, which has been programmed to calculate a more cohesive or efficient social structure from the data accumulated through the Zone’s network of Multivision sets and breastplates (all of which constitute a feedback loop tuned toward the refinement and regulation of the social structure). George Dyson recently observed that the cybernetic goal of discovering a system’s predictable elements or proclivities through feedback was largely “equivalent to the distinction, in communications theory, between



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signal and noise,” and this distinction ultimately allows us to contextualize the development of Kerouac’s aesthetic securely within the technical philosophies of his time.14 One of the theories Dyson has in mind was expounded in 1949 by a former student of Wiener’s at MIT, Claude Shannon. A brilliant mathematician in his own right, Shannon (who like Wiener had been a frequent participant in the Macy Conferences) developed his outlooks on information transmission while working as an electronic engineer at Bell Labs, where he had zeroed in specifically on the problem of noise as it related to telecommunications. Although Shannon’s efforts were originally focused on improving the sound quality of the human voice upon being converted into the electrical signals of telephony, he soon came to employ noise as shorthand for that which becomes embedded in any transmitted signal to no ultimate communicative benefit. At the level of applied science, noise might consist of audio static, unexpected fluctuations in volume or image consistency (in the case of television), sonic distortion, or other unanticipated glitches and abnormalities that jeopardize the clarity or precision of a signal as it passes from its information source to its destinations. (This would soon become an increased concern for the fledgling US space program, driven by its need for reliable models of deep-space communication.) Shannon asserted that eliminating uncertainty or noise from a communication network required persistent technical refinement along with the active curbing of the possibilities of expression (on the sending end) and the possibilities of interpretation (on the receiving end). Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication provided the framing ideas for a philosophy of information built on the principles of technical exactitude, or information literacies lacking in semantic ambiguity. In retrospect, Dave Mindell has described this book as “a less ambitious and more technical work than Wiener’s (but equally profound) that calculated the basic information capacity of generalized ‘channels,’ and articulated a theory of codes that reframed all communications as symbolic exchange. Shannon crystalized a half century of thinking at [Bell Labs] about how sounds, images, and text could be extracted from humans for coding as numbers and transmission through channels, the conceptual foundations of today’s networks, where computer screens attached to digital networks bristle with equivalent forms of ‘content.’ ” 15 As such, Shannon’s influence over the logistics of networked computational media cannot possibly be overstated. His foundational contribu 44

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tion to postwar information theory includes an appendix written by Weaver that further distills the philosophical, aesthetic, and technical implications of Shannon’s assertions at their very source. It begins with a conscious nod toward Wiener’s wartime work on weapons systems, explaining that both Weaver and Shannon remained interested in formulating an approach to communication that “would include the procedures by means of which one mechanism ([such as] automatic equipment to track an airplane and to compute its probable future positions) affects another mechanism ([such as] a guided missile chasing this airplane).”16 Furthermore, Wiener’s work in ballistics provided a foundation for what Weaver described as “effectiveness problems,” which involve honing signal accuracy in order to produce the desired level of predictability within the receiver’s conduct. Weaver states, “The effectiveness problems are concerned with the success with which the meaning conveyed to the receiver leads to the desired conduct on his part. It may seem at first glance undesirably narrow to imply that the purpose of all communication is to influence the conduct of the receiver. But with any reasonably broad definition of conduct, it is clear that communication either affects conduct or is without any discernible and probable effect at all.”17 Weaver believed that modifying the behavior of communication systems toward greater efficiency through the elimination of what Shannon called noise was one way of eradicating effectiveness problems within self-correcting systems. Weaver’s revision of his appendix appeared in the July 1949 issue of Scientific American, helping to popularize Shannon’s (and to some extent Wiener’s) ideas among the American reading public while affixing the ideas with a broader conceptual relevance. Whereas Shannon tended to approach noise solely as a technical problem for telephony and other electronic media, Weaver suggested that the contrast between noise and information might also be utilized for thinking about everyday conversation, literary creation, musical composition, and other modes of artistic creation and performance. In Weaver’s view, Shannon’s theory applies to “all of the procedures by which one mind can affect another”; thus Weaver equated the elimination of randomness, chance, or the aleatory from human systems and expressive practices as the elimination of various manifestations of noise, thereby increasing the effectiveness of communication by enhancing or clarifying information content.18 The Zone residents marked for elimination in Kerouac’s “cityCityCITY” are the behavioral equivalent to what Shannon and Weaver deemed noise; they are glitches detracting from the efficient circulation of the authorities’

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intentions, or anomalies within the feedback loop or communicative channel. Eliminating them raises the system’s predictability and rate of effectiveness. Indeed, concerns over protagonist M Eighty’s conduct—and whether his cognitive powers have been sufficiently “deactivated”—eventually contribute to his entire block being electrocuted. M Eighty’s fellow citizens constantly murmur about his lack of cognitive conditioning, or his failure to completely adhere to the collective media hallucination. M Eighty “has got too many ideas of his own,” they protest, and in turn “he certainly complains a lot.” 19 As such, M Eighty serves as a symbol of the social marginality and outsider experience that remained central concerns of the New American Poetry (and the American avant-garde more generally), often expressed in Beat literature in the form of homosexuality, same-sex hustling, polyamory, and explicit drug use—equal affronts to the era’s mores and conventions, which were conceived as obstacles to expressive and experiential liberties. Like other fictional avatars for Kerouac and his circle of friends—cast throughout the author’s sprawling Duluoz Legend—M Eighty often finds himself besieged by the demands of social ascription, and wonders “if he would ever escape. If there was such a thing.”20 M Eighty’s final offense, though, is simply this: he notices and admires a small pool of water that has inexplicably seeped through the Zone’s vacuum-sealed defenses. “Wow!” M Eighty exclaims, approaching the pool, observing how “marvelously it reflected the blue perfect sky, with a little ripple only.” 21 Although the boy encounters what we might think of as an incredibly mundane vision of the natural sublime, it is nevertheless a sensual alternative to the signals projected into his sensorium through Multivision, the slightest hint that other theaters of experience (or objects for consciousness) indeed exist. The authorities inevitably come to fear that his consciousness has been dangerously altered (or “activated”) by his sensual equipment being engaged in a novel and unexpected way—or outside the calculated experiential loop that constitutes life in the Zone. M Eighty, that is, has now become an effectiveness problem, and his block is chosen for elimination shortly after his discovery of the puddle is reported to the authorities by his well-intentioned father. The technological implications of “cityCityCITY” suggest that despite the glowing assessments of publications such as Time and Newsweek, cybernetics and information theory had begun to generate their share of cultural anxi­ eties. Mindell has explained that one result of the growth of the computer sci 46

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ences and accompanying disciplines such as cybernetics in the decades after World War II was that “industrial dramas of mechanization became anxieties of automation, threats to bodies became threats to minds,” and Kerouac’s short story represents an early (and perhaps underappreciated) iteration of this transition.22 Moreover, nowhere does this transition make a more indelible cultural mark than on the evolution of twentieth-century speculative fiction, wherein authors had long been concerned with various notions of “thoughtcrime” and authoritarian interests in “effectiveness problems.” The first significant strand in that tradition runs through works such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and in part it found its inspiration in industrialization and the factory system (what Mindell calls “industrial dramas”). As such, those works were primarily concerned with the external surveillance of bodies and their movements in space—or with the regimentation of physical activity on a mass scale. Discipline and conditioning, in these instances, assumed the form of old media intrusion: raw visual and audio eavesdropping, enabled by the camera eye and the hidden microphone, which extended the sensual reach of the authorities into bourgeois conceptions of privacy. Orwell’s omnipresent telescreen was an obvious manifestation of this tendency, as was Charlie Chaplin’s portrayal of a similar telepresencing device within the factory surveillance system of his film Modern Times (1936). The turn toward cyberpunk within the continuum of speculative fiction was inspired by the evolution of computing (and Mindell’s “anxieties of automation”) during the second half of the twentieth century, when concerns over surveillance were eventually recast within the realms of cognitively intrusive information technologies. In William Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981), Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash (1992), and the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix film trilogy, factorylike surveillance is superseded by computerized, intersubjective networks capable of crossing the body barrier to interface directly with consciousness. Such works give fictional life to Kevin Kelly’s prediction that we will eventually provide “the one” or “the machine” with a body—or that we shall inevitably become webs of information and algorithmic reasoning made flesh—an eventuality that Kerouac’s short story also renders allegorically: “cityCityCITY” anticipates Kelly’s “McLuhan reversal,” in which humans become the sensual extensions of the machine, a technological transformation also imagined in the evolution of the dystopian genre from Orwell to Gibson.

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Spontaneous Prose

In advance of Gibson and his cyberpunk peers, Kerouac offered a critical appraisal of the ascendancy of automated reasoning and ubiquitous computing within the genre confines of science fiction.23 According to the standard narrative of Kerouac’s authorial life, his interest in spontaneity and the unexpurgated represents an aesthetic rebellion against novelistic form and plot convention that coincides with his rebellion against Cold War structures of social and political normality at the level of content. More specifically, critics such as Morris Dickstein have rooted Kerouac’s aesthetic motivations in a generational rebellion against the “conservative culture of the fifties” as represented by the suburbs, the nuclear family, and the Cold War consensus— or as set against the dominant modes of social ascription (a point previously affirmed in my discussion of M Eighty).24 Kerouac’s own lifelong attempts at establishing an aesthetic affinity with bebop as the underground soundtrack of America—seen clearly in documents such as “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”—undeniably joined the Beat rebellion against the Cold War mainstream to the spirit of improvisation and instantaneity that animated postwar jazz.25 That rebellion, however, which Dickstein has identified as a “vehement expression of personal energy” foregrounding “fluidity, energy, and subjectivity,” might be simultaneously attributed to anxieties about emergent computing and communication paradigms.26 Toward that end, we might consider the recent work of Tim Hunt and Daniel Kane, which highlights the extent to which the influences of electrified media imbue Kerouac’s philosophies of spontaneous composition. Hunt points out that during the late 1940s Kerouac began experimenting with wire recorders and tape recorders—experiments preserved in the “Frisco: The Tape” section of 1951’s Visions of Cody—as a way of rendering the “rushing tremendousness” of natural, instantaneous language in opposition to excessively crafted and edited literary expression. Hunt claims that Kerouac, because of his growing familiarity with recording technology and his relationship with recording engineer Jerry Newman (a founder of Esoteric Records), began to conceive of his typewriter as a “type-recorder” that might approximate the eccentric flows and unique qualities of natural language.27 Indeed, Hunt has made great strides in asserting that Kerouac’s interests in spontaneity and immediacy were inseparable from the changing technological and mass media paradigms of his time, that his work was responding “to 48

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the impact of contemporary mass media—film, radio, recordings—not just as content but as new media in competition with writing. Kerouac sensed, I believe, not only how these media threatened print’s hegemony as the dominant medium for creative work but also how they demanded new understandings of what writing itself is (or could be) and new writing practices—much as print’s advent destroyed the hegemony of manuscript culture, altering writing as a medium and the nature of literature with it.” 28 In turn, Kerouac’s scroll manuscripts might be approached as information relics that condense or concentrate these histories in the most exceptional ways. The scroll version of On the Road, for instance, not only continues to inspire a level of veneration equivalent to that expressed for ancient texts from the age of manuscripts, it also mimics the formal qualities of many such manuscripts in its scrolling quality. Simultaneously, the scroll beckons us to consider print culture’s anticipation of the digital realm, where scrolling through text on various screens (rather than turning pages) has become the dominant mode of textual encounter. Likewise, Daniel Kane has suggested that Kerouac’s spontaneous, scrolling aesthetic was influenced by expressive media other than the period’s jazz playing—namely, the object qualities of film. Kane offers this insight based on interviews he conducted with Alfred Leslie, the abstract expressionist painter who collaborated with Kerouac and Robert Frank on the 1959 film Pull My Daisy, a loose adaptation of the third act of Kerouac’s play The Beat Generation (1957). Leslie observes that Kerouac’s literary aesthetic bore the influence of American film culture in a number of ways. It is difficult, for instance, to think of Kerouac’s panoramic descriptions of the western landscape without thinking of the location shooting of John Ford; Leslie suggests that we might see the scroll on which Kerouac composed On the Road as a literary film reel.29 Kane develops Leslie’s assertion into the suggestion that the scroll writings are “materially analogous” to a strip of celluloid or acetate and that Kerouac’s typewriter thus became an “instrument” that allowed him to free his prose writing from conventional narrative structure in a fashion similar to the aims of experimental filmmaking during the same period (spanning the works of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Bruce Conner). Ultimately, in Kane’s estimation, the scroll manuscripts blur “the various mechanisms of typewriter, film projector, and saxophone.”30 Hunt and Kane have already opened interpretive avenues that allow us to consider the multiple ways in which technical and media history became

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implicated within Kerouac’s scroll writings and experimental works such as Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax. Networked teletype printing should also be counted among the influences. Indeed, the perception remains that Kerouac composed the scroll manuscript of On the Road on actual teletype paper, a legend largely of his own making, traceable to his 1959 television interview on The Steve Allen Show. During that appearance, Kerouac claimed that he had typed his scrolling narrative of April 1951 on a teletype roll, when in truth the manuscript was composed on a roll of vellum paper that Kerouac had himself assembled with tape so that his Underwood might function as if it were a teletype machine. Moreover, Lucien Carr claimed for many years that he had provided Kerouac with the roll of teletype paper on which the original scroll version of On the Road appeared—adding to the enduring public conceptions of the manuscript’s genesis and dimensions. Kerouac certainly had a familiarity with teletypewriters, given his brief stint as a sports reporter for the Lowell Sun during the 1940s (his first paying job as a writer), and he had a close relationship with Carr, who worked for United Press International (UPI) from 1946 until 1993 as head of the general news desk. In “cityCityCITY” Kerouac envisaged a planetary architecture of real-time information exchange, and the teletype would have been one of the delivery systems available to his imagination at the time of the story’s composition. Teleprinters were often networked into the real-time exchange systems that enabled the “newswire” upon which the Associated Press (AP) and UPI depended; they played a central role within a twentieth-century media architecture that had integrated the nation’s news services into a more uniform mediascape, serving as a prototype for the digital Internet. At the same time, that proto-network was not viewed as a medium for contemplative subjectivity or artistic display. Teletype transmission was most often associated with the efficient communication of bare facts in the spare, noneditorial style of the AP and UPI—or as a technological ensemble resistant to personalization or lyrical modes of self-elaboration. Wiener’s and Shannon’s engagements with their era’s information culture were guided by an ethos of disambiguation; they both aspired toward providing data with resolute meaning within trustworthy communicative structures. Such aspirations also provide the basis for the The Associated Press Style Book’s attempts, beginning in 1953, to establish uniformity in teletypewriter communication. The introductory passage to the inaugural edition foregrounds the notion that the “efficient operation of Teletypesetter circuits 50

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requires some reasonable standard. And, in the interest of those receiving news over various circuits, it is necessary also to apply the same standard to Teletype circuits insofar as it is practical.” Those standards offered a technical language of information compression based on the reduction of redundancy, as seen for instance in the stylebook’s explanation for using abbreviations: “Abbreviations serve to facilitate reading, avoiding dull repetition of cumbersome spelled names.”31 Aside from being a style guide for journalists, the AP stylebook offered technical instructions for the coding and filing of stories over the newswire, providing some initial guidelines for using teletypesetter forms for copy transmission—including the proper placement of keyword identification (another form of data compression) so that stories could be efficiently categorized and routed upon their receipt. These guidelines continued to evolve over the decades into a more detailed technical language of category codes and priority codes aimed at formal consistency and the efficient handling of copy; these codifications have most often been modified to correspond with changes in technological capacity (such as the emergence of the fax machine), along with changes in libel law and language conventions, necessitating new editions of the stylebook every few years or so. Shannon theorized that data compression involves encoding information in fewer bits for more efficient, swifter, and less ambiguous transmission, and The Associated Press Style Book has been committed to realizing these principles since its first pressing.32 The On the Road scroll is a critical analogue of the automated modes of information generation and dissemination theorized by Shannon and codified in the AP stylebook. A symbiosis of technical and artistic practice, Kerouac’s manuscript figuratively asserts teletyping as a medium of artistic creation and self-elaboration offered in the spirit of insubordination; Kerouac had begun to imagine networked technology as a site for inscription rather than ascription, or for simply being prescribed upon. His purported ability to touch-type between ninety and one hundred words per minute significantly outpaced the teleprinters of Kerouac’s time (which averaged sixty words per minute), establishing him as a sort of John Henry of the teletyping age. The prose he created within this medium diverts wildly from the technical aspect of languages developed specifically for data accumulation and organization, for the scroll often revels in the human propensity for the lyrical, the redundant, the tangential, and the unpredictable—all of which we might identify with the cybernetic conception of noise, rendered within an infor

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matics of liberation. As shall become evident, this is simply another way of saying that the object qualities of the scroll notably exceed the developmental needs of plot; it is not that the scroll’s excessive qualities are necessarily uncommunicative but that they are at times too much, according to Shannon’s and Weaver’s paradigms of communication. Inevitably, then, the scroll dramatizes the expressive object’s excessiveness not only to itself but also to critical and other modes of description, including authorial intention. Moreover, these qualities might be obfuscated by focusing too much on the catalyzing aspects of jazz aesthetics at the cost of technical history as an inescapable aesthetic paradigm. In one of On the Road’s more memorable and amusing scenes, Kerouac catches up with Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg in Denver, and Ginsberg quickly informs his newly arrived friend that “Neal and I are embarked on a tremendous season together. We’re trying to communicate with absolute honesty and absolute completeness everything on our minds.” Kerouac soon witnesses this narrative experiment firsthand as Cassady and Ginsberg sit facing each other on Ginsberg’s bed and attempt to hash over all that had been occurring in their lives within the past few days. Kerouac warns them that what they are attempting is “too much for anybody,” but his warning comes in the midst of his own long descriptive sketch of the Denver scene, which is marked by the repetitive and seemingly unexpurgated details of several days of partying (dissolving at times into mere goofiness and slapstick).33 Consider the following passage, which appears in the very middle of Kerouac’s recounting of Cassady and Ginsberg’s narrative experiment: Three o’clock came. Neal rushed out for his hour of reverie with Carolyn. He was back on time. The other sister showed up. We all needed a car now, we were making too much noise. Bob Burford called up a buddy with a car. He came. We all piled in; Allen was trying to conduct his scheduled talk with Neal in the backseat but there was too much confusion. “Let’s all go to my apartment!” I shouted. We did; the moment the car stopped there I jumped out and stood on my head in the grass. All my keys fell out, I haven’t found them since. We rushed shouting into the apartment. Allan Temko stood barring our way in his silk dressing gown. “I’ll have no going on like this in Ed White’s apartment!” “What?” we all shouted. There was confusion. Burford was rolling in the grass with one of the nurses. Tempko wouldn’t let us in. We swore to call Ed White and confirm the party and also invite 52

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him. Instead we all rushed down to the Denver downtown bars and nothing came of it.34 Kerouac is thus accusing Cassady and Ginsberg of failing at the level of narrative economy within a stretch of prose that also seems bent on saying “everything” at the cost of thematic weightiness (and, in the case of this example, that involves his cohort making “noise” and causing “much confusion” of which “nothing” particularly noteworthy comes). In Denver, the pacing of Kerouac’s first journey across the states gets notably stalled in tedium and narrative dead ends, such as his mention of lost keys that have no further significance to the plot and are never heard of again. Even so, Kerouac declares his friends “amazing maniacs” for attempting to translate the minute details of their lives into narrative form without allowing the proper time for editorial reflection or the structuring influence of craft. Their communicative experiment realizes a poetics of immediacy that Kerouac consistently valorized in his aesthetic statements, including the statement composed for Allen’s New American Poetry. Readers of On the Road, if we are being true in our assessments of the book’s characteristics, should readily admit that the energy and intensity so often attributed to Kerouac’s prose frequently coincides with periods of palpable dullness in which the text bogs down in inanity and redundancy (and “alluvials” that set our tires spinning in place), and we wish that Kerouac and his characters will begin moving again. In line with that reading, Timothy Hampton has recently observed that On the Road is “always threatening to disintegrate into aimless confusion.” 35 As such, the scroll realizes the aesthetic philosophy that Kerouac would formalize in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Composed shortly after his completion of The Subterraneans in 1953, the essay prodded aspiring writers to “speak in their own unalterable way or forever hold tongue—no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes).” Counter to the cybernetic disavowal of noise in favor of efficient, unambiguous and compressed communication, Kerouac’s legendary defense of the unexpurgated aesthetic gesture disavows “ ‘selectivity’ of expression” while privileging “free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on subject seas of thought.”36 Kerouac’s essay, which helped inspire the composition of Allen Ginsberg’s epochal “Howl” (1956), also explicitly links spontaneity and instantaneity with noise, such as when Kerouac imagines “swimming in a sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, list a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang!” 37 When Kerouac

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further encourages us not to “pause to think of the proper word” but to glory in “the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained,” he mimics the enhanced speed and immediacy of his culture’s evolving information architecture without being invested in the literalness of every word or in compressing the contents of his transmission. Or we might say that the aspirations of Kerouac’s prose necessarily run excessive to the codified or preestablished capacities of teletyping, compromising the quality of his signal with what Shannon would identify as noise.38 Moreover, inexactitude or ambiguity lurks within the very object of On the Road’s questing, Jack and Neal’s search for the elusive it—the third-person singular neuter pronoun that might serve as shorthand for the ecstasy of pure being, the ultimate orgasm, or perhaps an advanced state of spiritual enlightenment. Ultimately one cannot be completely sure, for Kerouac leaves the concept of it hovering in the ineffable. Or, as Cassady says when pressed for a more precise definition, “now you’re asking me im-pon-de-rables.” 39

Human-Machine Symbiosis

The narrative innovations realized in Kerouac’s scroll manuscript meld aesthetic with technical practices in a synergistic fashion. Just as Cassady fuses with the automobiles he drives, the scroll models a human merging with contemporary information technology. And much in the same way that Cassady meanders through Kerouac’s narrative—“digging” the world randomly, acting most often without purposes we might assign to reason or a defined set of probabilities—Kerouac pledges his aesthetic allegiance to the unexpurgated, the spontaneous, and the profligate, presenting us with a critical analogue of technical modes of communication as realized through teletype machines. To extend this point a bit more, we should remain mindful of the fact that at the time in which Kerouac composed the On the Road scroll, the teletype also served as the primary input-output device for mainframe computers such as the ENIAC, the existence of which was first publicized to the world as a “giant brain” in 1946 (and fictionalized by Kerouac in 1954). The teletype’s history within computing practices helps account for alphanumeric programming languages such as Basic, in which the symbols and figures of code were generated from the typing keys available. When Basic was developed at Dartmouth College in 1964, users and programmers “worked not at screens but at print terminals, initially Teletypes.”40 Executed within its original technical 54

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ensemble, the print command caused something to be printed on a teletype, but by the time of the Commodore 64 the print command resulted strictly in monitor display and thus represents “a change in the standard output technology. Video displays replaced scrolls of paper with printed output, but the keyword print remained.” 41 Nick Montfort has explained that “early interactions with computers happened largely on paper: on paper tape, on punch cards, and on print terminals and teletypewriters, with their scroll-like supplies of continuous paper for printing output and input both.”42 Both descriptions provide ample support for linking the scrolling materiality of Kerouac’s manuscript to the teletype’s centrality within early computing practices. Kerouac’s scroll compositions document technical transformations in the possibilities of written expression, and these transformations were infused into the object qualities of the literary artifacts he left behind. Consider Kerouac’s compositional relationship to the teletype in terms of Vilem Flusser’s gloss on the evolution of transcription technology from the sixth through the mid-twentieth centuries: “Quills must be removed again and again to dip them into the inkwell. Even a typewriter, technically relatively advanced, must have its ribbon changed from time to time. No stream of ink, however advanced, is exempt. Even the surfaces to be covered are not without limits, for a new page must be inserted when the first one is full. Only when notation is replaced with teletype does it become technically possible to write in an uninterrupted stream.”43 Teletype technology actually encourages—or opens the formal pathway toward—the streaming and unregulated expression antithetical to Shannon’s and Weaver’s ideas. Kerouac dramatizes this, revealing the teletype as an unregulated medium of human expression, demonstrating potentialities that transcend its regulated use, and making spontaneity (or “projection,” in Olson’s vocabulary) thinkable for literary artists working in word-based media. Indeed, this might be the most original insight or contribution of Kerouac’s work, as he employs scroll composition to render human-machine symbiosis as an informatics of liberation. In 1960’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis”—a foundational computer science document from the cybernetic era—J. C. R. Licklider (another Macy Conference participant) declares that men are “noisy,” in the sense that “they naturally speak redundant languages . . . employing 20 to 60 elementary symbols,” unlike computers, which “ ‘naturally’ speak nonredundant languages, usually with only two elementary symbols,” the 0 and 1 of binary code.44 Kerouac’s aesthetic philosophy as performed in his scrolls valorizes this human

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propensity for noisiness or noninstrumental expression as an essential feature of cognitive liberty that intrinsically resists the automation or codification of experiential and expressive life—a resistance registered in the nonconformist cerebrations of M Eighty, along with the meandering and unexpurgated narrative course of Cassady and Ginsberg (mirroring the prose of Kerouac himself). At the same time, however, the On the Road scroll expresses a compulsion to move narrative beyond the confines of the book-form—to broaden the notion of authoring and narrative into new textual models (as was the case with Olson’s “Projective Verse”). As a critical analogue of the era’s technical modes, it simultaneously critiques and extends the assumptions embodied within the technological ensembles it mimics. In his introduction to On the Road, Howard Cunnell has explained that when Kerouac initially approached Robert Giroux in the hope of publishing On the Road at Harcourt, Brace (the publisher of The Town and the City) he did so armed solely with his scroll manuscript of the work. Giroux, “who had worked with Kerouac on The Town and the City, . . . asked Kerouac how could the printer work from that?” and quickly pressured him to edit his scrolling work into a more conventional form—a proposition that Kerouac originally refused.45 The manuscript as first conceived repudiated conventional technicalities of novelistic form as limiting enclosures of human expression; such conventions had necessarily emerged throughout the print era to promote efficiency in mass book production by honoring the training and expectations of typesetters. Kerouac’s own father, Leo, had labored for a great deal of his life as a printer and linotype operator, so his son would have been well versed in these conventions, which he then chose to break in Icarian fashion.46 We might go so far as to say that the dimensions of the manuscript as first presented to Giroux would have been most efficaciously reproduced and disseminated over a network of teletypewriters, the technological forerunner of the scrolling capacity of our computer monitors, e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. On the Road remains a work that romanticizes aimless wandering into unexpected social encounters and structures of experience, and this quality of the text continues to rub productively against the commercial imperatives coinciding with the democratization of expressive potential within contemporary social computing—commercial imperatives made technically possible by the theoretical work of midcentury figures such as Wiener, Shannon, and Licklider. On the Road gains its traction at the moment in which Kerouac abandons his attempt to meticulously map his initial journey across the states, 56

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dismissing such inclinations as a “stupid hearthside idea” that pales in comparison to “trying various roads and routes” not contemplated in advance.47 This remains one of the text’s most important lessons, conceptually joined to its embrace of “noisiness” through the conscious lack of narrative economy, and simultaneously mirrored within its ambiguous and unexpurgated elements offered as alternatives to the technical communicative practices of its time (tuned as those practices were to ideas of exactitude and signal compression). Ann Douglas has made abundantly clear that the “formlessness that attends Kerouac’s narratives” should be understood as an oppositional response “to a world in which there seemed to be too many reasons for things to happen as they did, in which events felt predetermined and overdetermined,” and it seems just as clear in retrospect that this defense against existential predetermination, or overdetermined social ascription, was in part a reaction to the ascendancy of informatics.48 On the Road expresses this opposition by placing significant value on drifting and idling as legitimate existential pursuits—or we might say that alongside its rendering of outsider experience it valorizes the role of the serendipitous and the chance encounter within the cultivation of what Kerouac deems authentic personhood and self-realization. During the same period, Wiener and Shannon contextualized information within mutable networks of exchange capable of ever improving functionality, paving the intellectual way for the more affective extraction of value in digitized capitalism. Many of us now actively live the legacy of cybernetics in our daily experiences of social computing, in which human-machine symbiosis has perhaps taken on less ominous (though still somewhat analogous) dimensions than those imagined by Kerouac in “cityCityCITY.” Licklider believed that the problem of the human-machine language divide would eventually be solved through inventive input-output devices, and the emergence of the graphical user interface navigable by mouse has helped accomplish this by replacing the typing of text commands with clicking on icons and images (voice-activated artificial intelligence programs continue to work with mixed results at this divide). The mouse and other modes of finger-touch navigation have curbed our dependence on human language at the symbiotic interface, offering a technological solution to noise (in the form of semantic problems) that simultaneously allows increasingly dense and intricate algorithms to structure our experience of computing through feedback loops capable of learning from our online habits and inclinations. The algorithmic interactivity with the mainframe computer in Kerouac’s “cityCityCITY,”

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enabled by biorhythmic feedback gathered through the breastplate, might beckon us now toward considering how our participation in social computing (through, for instance, registering our “likes” and “dislikes” or purchasing products through sites that algorithmically translate our search histories into trending data) amplifies our desires and aversions at an unprecedented speed or might actually enhance the instrumental aspects of our personalities with greater rapidity. Although Kerouac’s mimicking of contemporaneous information technologies in the form of the scroll implied the need to humanize or personalize ascendant technical ensembles, the democratization of the information economy accomplished by dividing computing potential among a greater number of users has actually streamlined the instrumental capacities of automated reasoning. Kevin Kelly has referred to those processes as a recentralization of computing, becoming more fully manifest in the algorithmic and data-mining architectures of the cloud. Kerouac asks us to consider whether such developments might represent a more elaborate threat to cognitive liberty as consciousness becomes more fully contained (or operational) within the prevailing interest structure in an extension of what Herbert Marcuse theorized as introjection. Yet Kerouac simultaneously partakes of the expressive capabilities of the technical in a gesture consistent with the New American Poetry’s concerns with outsider collectives as component parts of an oppositional demos committed to widening public expression and civic consciousness.49

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3

Dharmic Atomism On the Metaphysics of Extended Cognition

The art and design of the Cold War era speaks to the pervasive aspects of the nuclear dilemma. Engineers and scientists had largely determined the outcome of World War II, a technologically sophisticated affair from which emerged not only the rudiments of computing culture, information theory, and atomic science but also the synthetic wood materials and plastics that allowed for the symbols of postwar American abundance: Tupperware, domestic appliances, and the period’s organic design, which mimicked the shapes of kidneys and paramecium in everything from tabletops to swimming pools. During that era the atom, or atomism, came to occupy a central position in the culture’s iconography as an emblem of both impending destruction and futurist possibility. Paul Boyer has observed that atomism lent the postwar years a particularly “schizophrenic” quality as the ominous figure of the mushroom cloud came to subsist alongside claims for nuclear power as a cheap and alternative energy source and for radioactive isotopes as a medical advance allowing for innovative modes of diagnosis and treatment. Moreover, the theory of the Big Bang—a narrative asserting primeval atomism as the very cause of the universe—had achieved popular currency by the late 1940s. These “schizophrenic” conceptions were visually captured in what we might think of as the peaceful atom symbol—employed as the logo for the Atomic Energy Commission—which countered images of atomic destruction with its rendering of the atom as a moving system of balanced and swirling electrons.1 Atomism also provided a muse for a number of the New American Writers, in whose poetry representations of the atom similarly vacillated from terror to ambivalence to mystical revelation. The source of terror seems fairly obvious: atomic weaponry cannot discriminate among its victims; rather, it focuses on (or foregrounds) our planetary interconnections and dependencies through the possibility of mutual extinction. But that realization, though

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negatively achieved through Strangelovian nightmares of specieswide annihilation, also partly explains the emergence of interconnectivity and intersubjectivity as technomodernist tropes for alternative social experience during the initial decades of the atomic era—especially as conceptualized by pivotal figures within the Beat Generation and those whom they influenced in the subsequent counterculture. The atomic age represented a paradigm shift of signal importance, and a number of postwar writers, artists, and technologists ultimately came to comprehend the stakes of that shift through dharmic spirituality and the more generalized intersubjective longings of hippiedom. These generated influential approaches to collective consciousness, to distributed or extended cognition, and to the collaborative content generation that was eventually realized within agential and networked technologies. This chapter reconstructs one thread or story line within that genealogy, in which conceptions of the cosmos as an interdependent and transient network offered the initial tropes for thinking about collective consciousness and technically enhanced agency within electronic, then computerized, expressive networks. As early as the 1950s, the most influential members of the Beat movement had begun to conceive of the world as a holistic totality— as if all beings were One, a flattened ontology in which objects and entities could never remain fully identical with themselves (i.e., self-enclosed and not determined by networks of relations) because they were linked (and somewhat identical) with all the other manifestations in the network of existents (both organic beings and nonorganic entities such as technical objects) or actors in which they were situated. These perspectives in turn undergirded the conceptualization of media architectures that might better organize and allow for the electronic coalescence of distributed cognition or participatory intersubjectivity, modeled in part on the supernormal subjective states at the core of Eastern mystical striving as they became inflected within the growing insights of atomic science, then extended into the technical cultures of psychedelia. As we shall see, those new expressive modalities came to embody a countercultural architecture of yearning, an informatics of liberation grounded in the 1950s Beat musings of Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and others. These earlier poets and writers helped set the cultural stage, in postwar bohemian strongholds from San Francisco to Big Sur, for hippie explorations of networked cognition and collaborative content generation that remain internal to the Bay Area metaphysical outlook, which Timothy Leary provocatively termed psybernetic.

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Atomism and Buddhist Ontology

Anxiety about atomism resonates throughout Gregory Corso’s poem “Bomb”—or at least Corso’s opening pronouncement that the atomic bomb be seen as both the “Budger of history” and the “Brake of time.”2 A concrete or picture poem composed in the shape of a mushroom cloud, “Bomb” first appeared through City Lights Books in the form of a 1958 broadside, on which the visual contours of the poem could be captured in their entirety. The sudden eschatological crisis wrought by the possibility of atomic destruction animates the entirety of Corso’s poem, evident in lines such as the following: God abandoned mock-nude beneath His thin false-talc’d apocalypse He cannot hear thy flute’s happy-the-day profanations He is spilled deaf into the Silencer’s warty ear His Kingdom an eternity of crude wax Clogged clarions untrumpet Him Sealed angels unsing Him A thunderless God A dead God O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb.3 The interwoven end to our species and planet does not come about because the Christian deity instructs the archangel Gabriel to sound a trumpet blast as predicted in the biblical book of Revelation. Indeed, Corso employs rhetorical hyperbole in order to affix his warhead with an apocalyptic range far beyond that of the Christian creator (or indeed nuclear weaponry), beseeching his bomb to “Carrion stars charnel planets carcass elements” and finally to “Corpse the [entire] universe.”4 Nevertheless, the dualities of atomism, or its “schizophrenic” qualities, find expression in “Bomb” through a marked ambivalence to the Christian eschatology that Corso’s poem happily displaces within the ontotheological rupture of its times. While Corso’s bomb embodies astonishing destructive potential, it also manifests the elemental foundations of being itself, as evident in the following lines: O Bomb in which all lovely things moral and physical anxiously participate O fairyflake plucked from the

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grandest universe tree O piece of heaven which gives both mountain and anthill a sun I am standing before your fantastic lily door I bring you Midgardian roses Arcadian musk.5 In the end Corso declares his veneration for the bomb—or for the bomb’s sublimity—based on its harnessing of the elemental forces of the universe into a vision of the technonuminous, the fundamentally interlinking cosmic totality. Corso’s “Bomb” is a critical analogue of atomic weaponry, mimicking the ominous shape of the mushroom cloud so prevalent within the era’s visual culture yet simultaneously affixing the enabling revelations of atomic science with primordial and numinous qualities. Jonah Raskin has identified a similar ambivalence toward atomic culture, or atomism, within Allen Ginsberg’s poetry from the period, especially the poems published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956. Raskin attributes this ambivalence to Ginsberg’s serious engagement with Buddhism, beginning in 1955, for it enhanced his understanding of what Keats had termed “negative capability,” or the propensity of human consciousness to entertain opposite or contradictory thoughts at once (a trait also evident in Corso’s simultaneous rendering of the atom in terms of destruction and creation). Raskin explains, “Ginsberg would say he wanted a world without war and without the Bomb, yet he would also say that he loved the Bomb.” Raskin reads this as one of the implicit messages of “Howl.” The monstrous Moloch of wartime destruction and impending apocalypse discovers its opposite (or antithesis) in the poem’s “Footnote,” regarding the inherent holiness of the world in general, and Ginsberg’s evolving conception of Buddhist metaphysics ultimately leads him to declare that “the Bomb was holy too.”6 The dharmic religions offered Ginsberg and other Beat writers a pacifist alternative to the geopolitical and nationalistic hostilities animating Cold War life that could have led to the complete decimation of humanity in a nuclear war. The role of Beat writing in popularizing Buddhist ideas for the general culture, at the very moment of eschatological crisis mapped by “Bomb,” was pronounced. Grove Press and Evergreen Review were central to this popularization, with the Review publishing Buddhist writings by Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen beginning in the late 1950s and Grove publishing D. T. Suzuki’s highly influential Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, in 1961. Upon meeting at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in the late 1940s, Snyder, 62

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Whalen, and fellow poet Lew Welch became absorbed with the possibility of transforming the guiding principles of Indian and Chinese philosophy into the basis of an avant-garde or subversive poetics, especially since those philosophical traditions had been routinely ignored by institutions of higher learning guided by the American ethos of competitive individuation.7 Largely in pursuit of some livable mode of postindustrial consciousness more clearly in tune with the complex interrelationships constituting the natural world, Snyder and Whalen migrated down the coast to San Francisco, where their search for a conceptual and cultural space operating beyond the Cold War mainstream met its match in the scholarly efforts of Alan Watts, along with the early poetry of Bay Area figures such as Michael McClure.8 In venues such as Kenneth Rexroth’s salon and the Berkeley Buddhist Church’s Friday night study group, an antiestablishment Buddhist ethos continued to foment until, Snyder explains, “Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac came to town and catalyzed the energy already fully present [in the study groups and salons] into a more public poetics and politics.”9 An increased cultural awareness of Buddhism and Eastern mysticism materialized historically alongside an increased public understanding of the atom and atomic science. As we shall see, networked existence, extended or distributed cognition, and collaborative content generation subsequently became thinkable in expansive ways, especially within the Bay Area conceptual environment that bore the imprint of these Beat influences and longings. It was there, within the “public poetics and politics” described by Snyder, that Buddhist notions of dependent origination and the scientific assertion of the universe as a network of interrelated atoms and quanta achieved its most influential synthesis, with dharmic spirituality softening the sinister edges of atomic science, or helping to pacify its destructive implications. These attributes of Bay Area bohemian culture (and their partial rootedness in the Pacific Northwest) feature prominently in the Kerouac novels Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, which both fictionalize the same life event: the author’s experiences working as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak within the Cascade Mountains, with Kerouac’s time alone on the mountain serving as a reflective testing of dharmic conceptions of the universe and existence. Both novels contain Kerouac’s most explicit statements on atomism; in Desolation Angels his considerations of the atom mingle in revealing ways with a Buddhist outlook on being, allowing a glimpse into the evolving Bay Area mindset regarding the dualities and nuances of atomistic theory and thought.

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In Dharma Bums, atoms remain affiliated with angst-inducing weaponry. Upon hitching a ride with an interstate truck driver in the New Mexico desert, the narrator Ray Smith informs us that they “took the cut through Las Cruces up to Alamogordo where the atom bomb was first blasted and where I had a strange vision as we drove along seeing in the clouds above the Alamogordo mountains the words as if imprinted in the sky: ‘This Is the Impossibility of the Existence of Anything.’ ” 10 That outlook discovers a notable contrast in the first part of Desolation Angels (composed, like Dharma Bums, in 1956), in which protagonist Jack Duluoz experiences the following revelation during his mountain hermitage: “Meanwhile in all directions, in and out, of the universe, outward to the never ending planets in never ending space (more numerous than the sands in the ocean) and inward into the illimitable vastnesses of your own body which is also never ending space and ‘planets’ (atoms) (all an electromagnetic crazy arrangement of bored eternal power) meanwhile the murder and useless activity goes on, and has been going on since beginningless time, and will go on never endingly, and all we can know, we with our justified hearts, is that it is just what it is and no more than what it is and has no name.”11 Duluoz’s realization can be paraphrased as follows: we are at one with the elements that constitute us and the other forms of the composite world, for all remains grounded in the atom. Counter to the nationalistic Cold War encampments capable of manipulating atomism toward world destruction, the universe is portrayed as a pacifistic medium of transpersonal dimensions. Rather than serving merely as a catalyst for existential terror, atomism becomes for Kerouac, and others, the site of fortifying metaphysical yearning expressed through a nonhierarchical conception of being, a horizontal rendering of the world’s existents as the most elemental expression of the demos. Such yearning expresses itself powerfully through the notion of sunyata, one of the principle organizing concepts of Buddhist ontology. Buddhism views the universe as a dynamic self-regulating organism—a composite, interdependent, and ever changing network of being. The Sanskrit term sunyata (or shunyata) is most often translated as “nothingness,” “emptiness,” or “the void” and expresses the Mahayana Buddhist belief in the “absence of substantiality or inherent existence of the self and all phenomena,” as phenomena (or dharmas) arise “only through the dependent origination of causes and conditions.”12 Nothing can be said to exist independently of its interrelationships and conditions, which means that existents lack “self-validating natures, and their existence and identity are regarded as valid only within a relative 64

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framework of worldly convention.” 13 Philip Whalen expresses the concept as such in “Sourdough Mountain Lookout”: “A void, an empty figure containing / All that’s multiplied.” 14 Kerouac also gives voice to the concept in the “211th Chorus” to Mexico City Blues, in which he writes the following: All the endless conceptions of living beings Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness Throughout the ten directions of space Occupying all the quarters in & out, From supermicroscopic no-bug To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell Illuminating the sky of one Mind—.15 Belief in the ego, or in one’s unique individuality, as an enclosed and selfvalidating phenomenon must ultimately be rejected by this outlook; indeed, the core principles of Buddhist doctrine as expressed in the Four Noble Truths identify the continued belief in a unified and ontologically distinct ego as the principal cause of human suffering. The enlightened find their way beyond suffering and angst by acknowledging the transient and interdependent nature of reality—or the kinetic impermanence relating all dimensional things within a fecund connectedness—much as Duluoz does on Desolation Peak.

Introjection and Psybernetics

The Human Be-In of 1967 has already been canonized as the event at which these conceptions entered public awareness in a memorable and influential way. Held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in January, the Be-In was an organized gathering of the hippie tribes and a precursor to the Summer of Love that year as well as to the Woodstock festival in 1969 and rockfestival culture in general. It was at the Be-In that Timothy Leary unveiled his most famous slogan, “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” which he later attributed to media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who had evidently offered it to Leary as an advertising slogan for LSD. It was also at the Be-In that many of the Beats openly embraced a central role within hippie culture. Gary Snyder sounded the invocation for the Be-In on a conch shell, and Ginsberg, Michael McClure, and Lenore Kandel not only performed poetry but also helped plan

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the focus and dimensions of the event. Dennis McNally has pointed out that the attendees of the Be-In were instructed to see themselves as “a free-form human mandala in which the audience was the creator,” an organically evolving network of intricate and complex interconnections.16 Snyder’s own reflections on the Be-In in his short manifesto “Why Tribe” provide further credence to McNally’s interpretation. In his rendering, Snyder and the other attendees of the Be-In “unintentionally linked ourselves to a transmission of gnosis, a potential social order” whose contours were necessarily alternative to “abstract centralized government, taxes and Advertising-agency-plus-Mafia type international brainwashing corporations.” Those collective longings, Snyder insists, were rooted in notions of the “non-self Self ” imbibed from dharmic teachings possessed by “a view of the ultimate nature of the universe which is almost identical with the most sophisticated thought in modern physics.”17 Indeed, these countercultural conceptions of transcendent intersubjectivity—or evolving forms of networked, cosmic consciousness—came to inform much of that era’s most recognizable vernacular. Phrases such as “tuning in” (inherited from radio and television), “being on the same wavelength” (inherited from physics), and “catching vibes” or “vibrations” (inherited from the dharmic religions) all imply an evolving network of minds operating in some space beyond the body barrier, with distributed cognition figured as a transcendent cosmological reality within a discursive knot of influences. For Ginsberg, telepathic connections, psychic mobility, and other modalities of networked cognition provided a democratic alternative to the monolithic and top-down media architectures of the Cold War era. Ginsberg’s misgivings about centralized media as an informatics of domination are made clear in his early essay, “Poetry, Violence and the Trembling Lambs,” in which his thoughts anticipate Herbert Marcuse’s influential 1964 writings on introjection in One-Dimensional Man. Originally published on the cover of the August 26, 1959, edition of the Village Voice, Ginsberg’s essay opens with the declaration, “Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind.” The interest-laden tools of mass communication, the essay continues, strive to suppress not only “contemplative individuality” but also the eccentricities not in keeping with the buttoned-up culture of the Cold War mainstream.18 Ginsberg’s assertion that “systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality” sounds an identical alarm to Marcuse’s concerns about introjection, the accelerating conformity of thought and desire under a central 66

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ized information architecture as consciousness becomes more fully contained (or operational) within the prevailing capitalist interest structure extended through electrified media. Both Ginsberg and Marcuse understood mainstream media as an informatics of domination invested in the transmission and attempted universalization of conventional modes of Cold War authority. This perspective, for both Marcuse and Ginsberg, was shaded with residual anxieties about propaganda and cognitive conditioning as carried out in Nazi Germany, where media and spectacle became instruments of dominion, mechanizing group consciousness toward deadly ends. These concerns largely dovetail with, or extend, the Frankfurt School’s diagnosis of the culture industries (in works such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment) as a fascist collection of entities, mobilizing bodies and minds into instrumental cogs who somehow persist in believing that their choices possess agency—including as consumers of postwar electronics and gadgetry. For all these authors, this perspective was characteristic of a soft totalitarianism, but totalitarianism nonetheless, as it imposed existential limitations within the precincts of the subjective.19 According to Marcuse, the “private space” of individual consciousness had been “invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual. . . . In the process, the ‘inner’ dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down.”20 Writing “Poetry, Violence and the Trembling Lambs” in 1959, Ginsberg predicted that the antidemocratic proclivities of introjection might be remedied by a widening “crack in the mass consciousness of America” through the emergence of “a vast national subconscious netherworld” aided by vision-producing psychedelics such as peyote.21 During that period other members of the Beat Generation had developed a special interest in entheogens—drugs that they believed might approximate the sort of inner journeying and transpersonal insights that Kerouac claimed to experience on Desolation Peak. LSD and other hallucinogens increasingly became understood as mediums of avant-garde or vanguard thought because they reportedly possessed the ability to facilitate transpersonal connections and a deeper relation to the otherwise recalcitrant elements of the cosmos (or to those underlying structures of reality and being that remained unknowable to unaltered perception). Leary, who initiated the Harvard Psilocybin Project with Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass) in 1960, was clearly guided by similar aspirations, in which

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the perspectives of physics and the dharma might converge in liberated realizations of the transpersonal. Writing in 1968, for instance, Leary asserted that his experiences had assured him that twentieth-century revelations about the atom would prove pivotal to the evolution of Western consciousness toward democratizing modes of extended cognition and dynamic collaboration. Psychedelic experience, according to Leary, had given a generation vivid contact with the ontology of the new physics—the theories of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr rather than those of Isaac Newton—enabling that generation to witness “the breakdown of macroscopic objects into vibratory patterns, visual nets, the collapse of external structure into wave patterns, the awareness that everything is a dance of particles.”22 Nearly from the outset, Leary, Ram Dass, and their Harvard colleague Ralph Metzer grafted their psychedelic revelations to the complex renderings of consciousness and the cosmos contained within Buddhist thought. Ram Dass recalled that Leary and Metzner had begun to read The Tibetan Book of the Dead together in 1962 or 1963, after having been told about it by Aldous Huxley, and they found in its contents “a very close description of a number of [our hallucinatory] experiences, . . . perfect descriptions of sessions we were having with psychedelics.”23 Those confluences led to their 1964 work, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a guidebook for the exploration of alternate states of consciousness by potential psychonauts. In its pages, Leary and his colleagues wrote about psychedelics as if these drugs made phenomenologically valuable perspectives more easily available, as if entheogens contained vital gnosis. Those consuming them “must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond the range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.”24 Extending into the transpersonal might involve the unsettling perception of either “the wave-vibration structure of external unity” or “the vibratory waves of external unity.” In the first experience, according to the authors, one realizes that all consists of “shimmering energy patterns. . . . The subject staggers around, grasping at electron-patterns, striving to freeze them back into the familiar robot forms.” In the second instant, one might experience “the state of radiant unity,” the sense “that there is only one network of energy in the universe and that all things and all sentient beings are momentary manifestations of that single pattern.” 25 68

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In his 2007 introduction to The Psychedelic Experience, Daniel Pinchbeck observes that the three Harvard psychiatrists had articulated an emergent countercultural conviction that the “exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness through chemical means could induce a radical transformation of the individual and the society.” The manual equates mystical revelation with liberation, suggesting that the ingestion of psychedelics reveals “multitudinous levels of awareness and secret domains of psychic activity,” enhancing empathy and the intellect.26 According to Pinchbeck’s analysis, people became drawn to these countercultural renderings of consciousness, which promised to enhance empathy and the intellect, largely on account of the acute crisis of Cold War hostilities that very nearly reached the level of planetary disaster during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. But in the process of offering cognitive extension and trans­ personal holism as alternatives to dangerous Cold War geopolitical bifurcations—an extension of the Beat’s dharmic aspirations toward an informatics of liberation—Leary and his colleagues framed intersubjectivity in ways that would eventually be “given visceral form through the continued development of the Net and ‘Web 2.0.’ ”27 Indeed, Leary’s reflective introduction to the 1998 edition of The Politics of Ecstasy remains particularly instructive on the genealogy of psychedelic and technical modalities. Conceived between his years at Harvard and the Summer of Love and originally published in 1968, The Politics of Ecstasy comprises Leary’s most provocative essays and indeed reads as the American version of Aldous Huxley’s 1954 The Doors of Perception. Leary’s 1998 introduction—composed as the Internet was becoming a central public domain— characterizes the new “cyber-society” as “the culmination of the mystical, transcendental spooky, hallucinatory dreams” of the “LSD generation” that Leary had undoubtedly inspired.28 The dawning era of personal and creative growth heralded by the counterculture, Leary now claimed, would be brought about not by the hallucinatory effects of psychedelics but by linked computers involved in information exchange—a development that had nevertheless been anticipated by the sizable shift in Western notions of collective consciousness announced at the Human Be-In and then again at Woodstock. The young people attending and performing at those festivals represented the “first psychedelic-cybernetic generation” (or “psybernetic” generation) whose use of “mind-expanding drugs” represented a nascent longing for more advanced forms of “cybernetic-electronic technology” and “mind-linking quantum appliances.”29

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Leary in turn attributed the generational longing to collaborate ecstatically within nonossified avenues of thought as an attempt at democratizing an information economy that had been lorded over by gun-obsessed governments since the industrial revolution. This need was felt first and foremost by the original television generation, frustrated by the medium’s unresponsive nature (which contributed to its ideological utility) and its ability to facilitate what many in the counterculture saw as the mass ideological hypnosis (or introjection) culpable for social inequity, mindless consumerism, ecological destruction, and the imperialistic violence being broadcast from Vietnam.30 According to Leary, the group of US intellectuals originally responsible for rendering these longings were the Beat writers, who “hung out with avantgarde painters and jazz musicians. They stood, of course, for the ecstatic vision and for individual freedom in revolt against all bureaucratic, closeminded systems.”31 The belief in the transpersonal and ecstatic vision—as explained by Ginsberg in “Poetry, Violence and the Trembling Lambs”—was an attempt at conceptualizing an antidote to monolithic information architectures, an idealization of the democratizing distribution of media and computing capacities among the general public. In such idealizations, democratized media would foreground choice and journeying within responsive modifications to expressive forms and cultural aesthetics, extending the components of our central nervous system (as McLuhan was fond of saying) into innovative and agential technical objects. Although it may go beyond saying, this is what we mean in popular parlance when we claim that contemporary media forms have become not only interactive but smart.

Feedback Extended

For Leary, Bay Area conceptions of networked cognition and collaborative creativity would ultimately be realized through a melding of the mental capacities of “free individuals using camera lenses, computer screens, and electronic networks” to bring about a more fully liberated, participatory, and “post-political” age.32 The avant-rock experimentation of the Grateful Dead, who also performed at the Be-In and long served as the Bay Area’s countercultural house band, remains deserving of serious consideration in this regard. Bassist Phil Lesh’s characterization of the dynamic group improvisations of the Dead as “bleshing,” a term he borrowed from Theodore Sturgeon, speaks to the countercultural realization of collaborative creativity 70

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through technical networks and the agential objects occupying them.33 Sturgeon had employed the term “blesh”—a portmanteau combining blend and mesh—in his 1953 novel More Than Human as shorthand for the intersubjective processes through which his protagonists fuse their singular talents or eccentricities (expressed as paranormal abilities) into a new form of group mind: a gestalt consciousness that propels human civilization toward a more advanced state. Lesh likens that fusing to the extended improvisations of the Dead, in which the exceptional musicianship of each of the band’s players coalesced into a signature blend of jazz, psychedelia, blues, bluegrass, and space rock. The Dead created openings within every live performance for the spontaneous and collective generation of soundscapes, making each concert performance unique in a way that remained distinct from both programmatic corporate pop and the highly choreographed arena-oriented rock that came to dominate their times. The Dead spent decades of collectively “searching for the sound,” as they would sing in “Unbroken Chain” (1974). The band’s 1968 album Anthem of the Sun, along with the live performances at the Fillmore West from February to March 1969, represent seminal moments in that searching.34 A psychedelic masterpiece, Anthem of the Sun fully embraced the experimental opportunities afforded by multitrack studio recording, including the interlacing of different takes of the same composition; connective, blurred segues between tracks; droning sounds; and extreme reverb, feedback, and other distorting or noise-producing effects. It was on this record, in other words, that the Dead embraced studio technology as another band member while also adopting facets of avant-garde classical music such as prepared piano, a technique the modern American composer John Cage had been exploring since the late 1930s. Moreover, the Anthem of the Sun sessions produced two songs that served to anchor the Dead’s aesthetic journeying for years to come: “Dark Star” and “That’s It for the Other One” (also known as “The Other One”). “Dark Star” did not appear on Anthem but was instead released as a single in 1968, with a playing time of two minutes and forty-four seconds. The Dead would perform “Dark Star” live more than 230 times, stretching the duration of the song from just over five minutes to as long as twenty-five minutes. Much the same can be said of “The Other One,” performed close to 600 times, each version a unique take on the original studio version, varying widely in duration and content. In the case of both songs—which remain two of the most

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revered examples of psychedelic jamming—the studio versions served merely as opening salvos for a field of possibilities for improvised group composition as the band kept rewriting its songs for decades. The teleological openness allowing for the substantial reconceptualization of song structures during a performance (through bleshing) bears notable similarities to Olson’s concept of the projective, which explains why Lesh identifies Olson (along with Snyder and Whalen) as among the band’s literary influences.35 There were also spaces established in the Dead’s live sets, titled “Drums,” “Space,” and “Feedback,” for spontaneous and collective composition, and the form, content, and duration of those improvisatory exercises varied widely across performances and the years. In such moments the Dead occupied a shared nervous system, a networked technical edifice of instruments, amplification, and effects pedals. The 1969 Fillmore shows exemplify what the band was up to during this period, its performances testifying to the expressive possibilities of free-form electrified jamming, characterized by bleeding edges between songs, extended murky transitions in which the music seems on the verge of melting away, of dissipating, and then coheres once more. Much like Cage’s explorations, those of the Dead marginalized the will of the composer through chance and instantaneous expression, neutralizing the ego in a way that resonates with the notions of transpersonal holism addressed by figures such as Snyder and Leary. The composer’s will had long been sacralized in Western music in the material form of the paper-based score, its markings infused with the aura of intentionality and the demand for virtuosic exactitude on the part of musicians. Cage’s sheet music for 4'33", the blank score for his infamous silent composition, expresses the marginalization of compositional will or intentionality through outright visual erasure, just as the Dead’s spontaneous and collective jamming accomplished a similar marginalization through an egalitarian “network of energy,” the sonic analogue of Leary, Metzer, and Ram Dass’s “vibratory worlds of external unity.” Avant-garde aesthetic impulses traveled a distinctly musical pathway through the American rock culture of the 1960s and 1970s, as many performers fully embraced feedback and other modalities of sonic manipulation, realizing a new symbiosis between artists and electronic expression within the confines of the creative act and advanced audio engineering. This was typified at first by the 1966 album The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (the 13th Floor Elevators) and the 1968 albums Anthem of the Sun (the Grateful Dead) and Electric Ladyland (Jimi Hendrix). This psychedelic sound palate provided a sonic accompaniment to the counterculture, severing the 72

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rock era rather decisively from the 1950s rock and roll of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis (or what might be referred to as pre-Beatles rock and roll). Moreover, the use of feedback to generate nonteleological noise art—as in the live “Feedback” experiments within Grateful Dead shows—foregrounded the difficulties of human intentionality through the unpredictable qualities of electronic expression.36 Audio or acoustic feedback—in which an amplified sound or signal is looped back through amplification—produces cacophonous screeching of a largely unpredictable nature, the reverberating electronic metaphor of cybernetic processes resistant to artistic intention or oversight (and to the listener’s attempts at discerning patterns of compositional development). As an expressive form, feedback ultimately poses serious problems for critical analysis, although it undoubtedly attempts to dramatize a profound yet indeterminate shift within human and technological relations in ways that seem increasingly relevant. Paul Edwards has observed that Norbert Wiener’s conception of cybernetics, as it evolved during his work on weapons systems during World War II, included “the amplification and insertion of soldiers’ bodies inside electromechanical systems.” Much the same can be said of the Dead’s improvisations and use of feedback within the shared technical system that is their music, even though that music, in the words of Snyder, ultimately aspired to imagine a “potential social order” alternative to Cold War nationalism and militarism enabled by electronic and computational architectures.37 Indeed, the sonic experimentations of the Dead emerged from within a postwar technical context in which human cognitive life was becoming newly elaborated, or more actively externalized, within networked information architectures that the Dead identified as potentially liberating, or as an informatics of liberation. Ultimately, bleshing is a mode of dynamic, extended cognition that fastens and unifies the thinking or creative capacities of human actors with the expressive capacities of objects (instrumentation and sound technology) within a responsive, teleologically open technical architecture. As such, the Dead’s technomodernist compositional practices embody modes of distributed or extended cognition that came to be theorized in “The Extended Mind” by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, a signal essay in the philosophy of mind. Spurred by developments in personal computing and gaming technology, Clark and Chalmers argued persuasively for a model of cognition operative at the interface between human choices and the proclivities of technological prostheses, imploring us to understand cognition as

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distributed across technical and expressive structures not internalized within the human agent. Human cognitive capacities have evolved by leaning heavily on “environmental supports,” which have allowed individual brains to perform some operations “while others are delegated to manipulations of external media.” In such cases, “the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right. All the components in such a system play an active causal role, and together they govern behavior in the same sort of way that cognition usually does.” 38 What Clark and Chalmers are getting at here is the extent to which human cognitive operations tend to become embedded within “active externalisms.” Bleshing represents such an active externalism. The sonic experiments to which Lesh refers are an expression of group thought, brainstorming within an actively coupled system (an information architecture) in which the expressive propensities of linked instrumentation comes to serve, or be understood, as a participatory entity, an actor that spurs human creative capacities into unplanned territories of collective expression. Indeed, this is exactly what Clark and Chalmers mean by their suggestion that the active externalism enabled by technicity supports the “cognitive properties of collectives of agents,” some of whom are not human organisms per se. They are granting cognitive status to networked processes, ushering the notion of cognition into posthuman and transhuman terrains (by decentering it from the human subject and the internal contents of the human skull, thus freeing consciousness from anthropocentrism).39 The philosophical stakes of such processes, which involve active externalisms that by their nature dispute anthropocentric models of consciousness and cognition, have been exhaustively explored by Bruno Latour’s work in actor-network theory (ANT), animated as it is by the notion that everything exists in constantly shifting relational networks and that nothing exists outside them. In the hope of rendering a social theory of objects, Graham Harman describes Latour’s social theory as “a flat ontology in which anything is real insofar as it acts”; that is, Latour’s theory tends to “integrate nonhuman elements into its picture of society” in which “objects are chaperoned by human beings rather than existing outside human contact.” 40 Harman cogently observes that the principal contribution of ANT is its insistence that “objects have ‘agency,’ meaning that they are important when they are involved in some sort of action.” 41 That is certainly the case in the Dead’s use of instrumentation, feedback, and sonic effects, in which there is more at stake than object-mediated relations between human agents or musicians. 74

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Rather, we are confronted with objects that act with human actors, helping to set both limits and possibilities within a technical edifice that those objects in part make possible, not at all unlike Kerouac at his teletypewriter or Cassady at the wheel of a Hudson. In granting cognitive status to networked processes, we come to acknowledge the extent to which interactive expression tends more heavily toward process than toward an end point (or telos), for it distributes authorship or agency through unpredictable fields of content, harnessing the collective will of actors (human or not) with different capacities for agency and expressive activity within technical arrangements antithetical to the hierarchical arrangements of introjection. Within the Bay Area intellectual and artistic community, Sturgeon and Lesh’s conception of bleshing, or of extended mind, came to resonate powerfully within John Perry Barlow’s efforts at liberating the expressive possibilities of social computing for the members of countercultural or alternative social networks. Evidence of Barlow’s admiration for the interlinking bohemian ethos of principled marginality, extended cognition, and transpersonal holism can be discovered within the early lines of his influential 1996 manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” He claims to be writing in defense of the “global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us,” echoing the implied antistatism of Kerouac’s reflections on Desolation Peak and the more explicit antistatism of Snyder’s “Why Tribe.” Barlow’s manifesto associates those tyrannies with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first telecommunications law to include the Internet in spectrum allotment, a development that signaled to Barlow the threat of continued media consolidation extending into cyberspace. As such, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” echoes Ginsberg’s and Marcuse’s concerns about introjection, although Barlow’s longtime association with the Grateful Dead also influenced his outlooks on the liberatory promises of social computing—of computing networks involved in an informatics of liberation. Barlow had been working as a lyricist for the Dead since 1972, collaborating mostly with guitarist Bob Weir. His idealization of cyberspace as “the new home of Mind,” and as a “world that is both everywhere and nowhere” inhabited by fluid identities that “have no bodies,” echoes the Dead’s musical search for transpersonal and collaborative cognitive extension. Overall, Barlow valorizes discarnate collaboration within newly available computational architectures in a cyberlibertarian vein, arguing that governments have no legal jurisdiction over what he views as the

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Internet’s immateriality, or lack of physical territory and thus of a corresponding logic of enforceable borders.42

Technogenetic Contentions

Starting with the Buddhist metaphysics that guided Snyder, Whalen, Kerouac, and other New American Writers—explorations partly catalyzed by the terrifying yet inspiring revelations of atomic science—the intellectual and artistic culture of the postwar Bay Area helped to articulate and promote a pivotal transformation in Western conceptions of consciousness within the terrains of the sociotechnological. Dreaming of a different media ecology, a new informatics of liberation, the figures discussed in this chapter aided in conceptualizing the Internet as a home for utopian social networks, an open and liberated structure that might provide a habitat for user communities whose affinities and interests transcended the longstanding Cold War paranoia of their time. For Leary, Barlow, Ginsberg, and others, that would ideally involve wresting power from the military technological complex so as not to allow institutions such as the Pentagon to define the destiny of emergent computing and communication technologies; rather than fretting over an impending techno-apocalypse, Leary and others had begun to dream of a “post-political” age in which the sole purpose of government would be to protect individuals and communities from forces or interests that would limit cognitive exploration, or what might come to be understood about the technological possibilities of human consciousness and its further evolutionary development.43 For some, such as technology writer Evgeny Morozov, the jury is still out on the achievements of the Bay Area metaphysics. Morozov cautions that these cyber-utopian views have not only assumed “the importance of community and shared experiences” but also “viewed humans as essentially good, influenced by rational deliberation, and tending towards co-operation. Anti-Hobbesian at heart, they viewed the state and its institutions as an obstacle to be overcome.”44 Cyber-boosterism, Morozov further asserts, discovered an ideological match of sorts in Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and other venture capitalists of the neoliberal moment, who were also interested in minimizing state intervention and involvement in economic affairs, and who in turn “helped to assure the public that the internet was not just a hangout for Bay Area hippies—it was also a serious place for doing business.”45 According to Morozov, then, the legacies of hippie communitarianism expressed in 76

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the dream of realizing dynamic, transpersonal, and liberating spaces within Internet culture, within networks, shall remain forever compromised by this early alliance with entrepreneurial interests, for that alliance has ultimately led to online experiences that degrade our notions of personhood through corporate-sponsored forms of “trivial information sharing” on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Morozov suggests that both commercial interests and agencies of bureaucratic administration (such as the National Security Agency) have colonized the liberated digital spaces imagined by techno-utopians like Leary and Barlow and have transformed them into new and more extensive territories of surveillance and canalization. Morozov explains, “The widespread feeling of emancipation through information that many people still attribute to the [Silicon Valley idealism of the] 1990s was probably just a prolonged hallucination. Both capitalism and bureaucratic administration easily accommodated themselves to the new digital regime; both thrive on information flows, the more automated the better.”46 According to Morozov’s reasoning, then, democratizing or humanizing the computational information economy as Barlow and others imagined simply opens up new possibilities for social engineering—or for paternalistic, orderly, and efficient modes of algorithmic behaviorism offered in the guise of compassionate personalization embodied by intelligent personal assistant applications (or “software agents”) such as Google Now and Microsoft Cortana. This compassionate behaviorism—a trait of algocracy—is also the guiding ethos of the quantified-self movement advocated by Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, in which self-improvement is linked to the quantitative and tracking abilities of networked computational gadgetry within the evolving “network of things” (of which Kerouac offered an embryonic rendering in “cityCityCITY”).47 One of the chief points of contention in Morozov’s view is the role that algorithms come to play as actors within human-machine systems; in his perspective, cybernetic feedback enables an informatics of domination through agential computing objects in the form of smart devices and recommender systems and applications. Morozov’s pronouncements are undoubtedly guided by legitimate and weighty concerns about the informatics of domination, which he quite obviously shares with several of the figures discussed in this book. But the work of other philosophers and theorists of technical life (including that of a number of the artists treated in this chapter) asks us to consider that despite the confident pronouncements of Morozov, there can ultimately be no technogenetic

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telos—no strictly charted use or unproblematic narrative accounting for the adoption of technical prostheses into the future. Mainly associated with the work of Bernard Stiegler, technogenetic arguments assert that the evolution of technology and hominid lifeways is entwined with the fundamental symbiosis explored by Clark and Chalmers in “The Extended Mind” and by Latour in his social theory of objects. According to Stiegler, humanity “and technics are indissociable. The phenomenon of hominization is the phenomenon of the technicisation of living.”48 Humans are technical life, for technics is a component of human species-being in the same way that speed is a component of the gazelle’s. According to Stiegler, this is precisely where Martin Heidegger erred in posing technological modernity as the antithesis to Dasein (existence), for there can be no experience of being particular to humans without the technological or tool-based prostheses that ushered our hominid progenitors into the evolution of human consciousness.49 In her own concise interpretation of Stiegler’s thought, N. Katherine Hayles observes that new technological forms bring about epigenetic changes, which were “initiated and transmitted through the environment rather than through the genetic code.” Alterations to technical life inevitably modify human expressive and cognitive life, including what we in turn come to expect or desire from not-yet created technical objects that might further amplify or magnify consciousness in a particular direction. This constitutes what is known as a self-amplifying loop (of which electronic feedback is a sonic manifestation).50 The course of those changes or amplifications, however, cannot be reliably charted, for the evolving symbiosis between the gene-based human and its adaptive technological prostheses remains largely undecidable, or of an indeterminate telos. This indeterminacy is attributable to the fact that things—including technical and aesthetic objects—might be possessed by a reserve of unexpected tendencies or proclivities.51 In their role as actors, objects become capable of modifying their environments and the behavior of other entities in their networks of influence in ways that cannot be fully anticipated.52 This notion of excess—of the indeterminate telos of objecthood—is again dramatized in audio feedback, when Jerry Garica’s amplification system not only screeches indeterminately but also generates vibrations that bound off his strings, creating yet more sound. Such moments of machine-based improvisation pre­sent serious problems for hierarchical, anthropocentric notions of intentionality embodied within aesthetic production or technical design, for they ask us to consider the possibility that objects are possessed by qualities exces 78

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sive to their preconception—that they can augment or remediate reality and human lifeworlds independent of their origination in human intentionality, or beyond our ability to rationally account for their future. Contextualized more fully within US technical history, the evolution of the expressive forms addressed in this chapter also ask us to thicken our scholarly narratives on the emergence of chance, or the aleatory, as an aesthetic gesture during the Cold War era. What I have in mind here is Steven Belletto’s provocative study of Cold War aesthetics, in which he quite convincingly argues that American artists of the postwar period helped politicize the concept of chance, largely in response to “the popular American sense that the Soviet Union, totalitarian in both theory and practice, sustained itself by crushing individual will” so that “what passed for objective reality was managed so completely that even chance itself seemed not to exist.”53 Within the discursive and cultural forms enabling the geopolitical bifurcations of the Cold War era, democracy and freedom in turn became equated with the continued possibilities of chance, and influential artists such as John Cage and William Burroughs began to program chance into their aesthetic designs (many of which still might appear, at first glance, as apolitical gestures). Belletto’s account might be enhanced by the further assertion that many US artists simultaneously saw chance and its existential possibilities as a site of aesthetic meditation on America’s own increased reliance on automation, electronic communication networks, and the subjective demands of containment culture, and they therefore responded by foregrounding the coincidental and aleatory possibilities of evolving expressive forms within human-machine architectures (or coupled systems).



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4

Secondary Paradise The Surrealist Immersion

Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1969 Woodstock festival remains one of the most riveting moments of electronic aesthetic experimentation to emerge from Cold War America. Performed on the festival’s final day, Hendrix’s rendition presented America’s assembled hippie tribes with an adaptive mutation (and a critical analogue) of their suspect cultural inheritance, his electrified guitar swelling toward the explosive though ultimately synthesizing realizations enabled by the symbiotic circuitry of human-technical expression. Without the sonic manipulation afforded by distortion, feedback, and other electrified effects, Hendrix’s otherworldly rendition of the US national anthem would have never been possible. Within the noise-based embellishments of Hendrix’s rippling performance, many heard the bombs and munitions of advanced US weaponry on murderous display in Vietnam. Still others heard his rendition as a definitive generational statement of civil unrest as his nation struggled not to come apart at the seams. Certainly, Hendrix’s controversial performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” sounds at times like an advanced technological culture spinning out of control—or like a civilization that despite its technical achievements has somehow lost its way. In the end, however, Hendrix manages to hold it all together, guiding the anthem toward a recognizable conclusion through the adept manipulation of the technical ensemble encasing it. And in the muddy fields before him, the exhausted hippie tribes, our psybernetic forerunners, continued to move and dance—not yet exhausted by their collective dreams of a new social medium, a secondary paradise. David Mindell has remarked that Hendrix’s “feedback-drenched” guitar performance “brought cybernetics into the counterculture.”1 Although the tendencies of hippiedom have often been romanticized as pastoral and antitechnological—or as having been fueled by Edenic longings in naturalist sympathy with “flower power”—the opposite was simultaneously true,

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which should be evident from the cultural genealogy presented in the previous chapter. Just as Hendrix’s interpretation of the national anthem pushes through technical and possibly annihilating uncertainty toward a synthesizing balance between human expressive proclivities and electrified media, the futurist longings of the psychedelic era were also animated by a high degree of techno-utopianism. Avant-rock experimentation with the sonic palate coincided with experimentation in other electrified or electronic media, most often within the confines and venues of live performance; that is, the aesthetics of psychedelia were indeed intermedia or multimedia, and they tended toward incessant and encompassing titillation within an alternative, immersive experiential realm. Audience members were now expected to respond to (and often participate in) multiple and overlapping stimuli, an expectation that came to be imbued across computational media experience—witnessed, now, within the demands of just a single Web page, pulsing with blinking banners, widgets, hyperlinks, and embedded video clips, or even as we drive our local highways, eyes simultaneously on the road and the GPS representation of it, our fingers and ears working our smartphones within the encasing media environment of the contemporary automobile. Indeed, psychedelic cultural aesthetics left an indelible mark on our technologies of sensual and cognitive immersion, blazing a countercultural pathway toward the secondary worlds and augmented mediation enabled by interactive and agential computing. In part, those sizable transformations were facilitated by the conceptual and perspectival influences of European surrealism as they came to animate intermedia experimentation within the precincts of Bay Area psychedelia. Reconstructing a portion of that cultural and conceptual history through the work of American surrealists Philip Lamantia and Gerd Stern is my principal aim in this chapter. Despite his significant role in the genealogy of cultural resistance as it developed throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Jack Kerouac publicly denounced the counterculture in 1969’s “After Me, the Deluge,” which proved to be the last essay he would publish during his lifetime. In that essay Kerouac’s impulsive and inconstant attitudes toward electronic expressive forms are on full display: he bemoans the dawning of “psychedelic multi-media,” likening the hippie rock scene to “retardate happenings inside of giant plastic balloons” and in turn dismissing them as the harbingers of mass illiteracy and the death of book culture.2 Obviously, the drug- and music-centered festivity of events such as the Human Be-In and Woodstock had been anticipated 82

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by the participatory jazz poetry readings popularized by postwar American bohemia, and like those earlier events—such as the much mythologized Six Gallery reading of 1955, with Kerouac in attendance—psychedelic performance functioned through webs of interaction and collective experience operating across the proscenium (or within immersive “plastic balloons”). Moreover, the emergence of the immersive and ecstatic “retardate happenings” lamented in “After Me, the Deluge” owed a huge debt of influence to the perspectives of Bay Area surrealism elaborated within the work of Kerouac’s friends and associates such as Lamantia and Stern.

The New American Surrrealism

Philip Lamantia was born in San Francisco in 1927 and had dedicated himself to writing poetry by age fifteen, shortly after experiencing the retrospectives of Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1942. The alternative visual worlds presented in those exhibits resounded with Lamantia’s growing captivation with the mystical and occult scenarios he had already encountered in Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. As a child, Lamantia’s fascination with the fantastical had been fed a diet of mass media programming such as The Shadow radio serial and comics such as Mandrake the Magician, leading Garrett Caples to remark that Lamantia’s “interest in the marvelous predated his interest in poetry” and might be traced to a diversity of cultural sources (print and otherwise).3 Early on, according to Garret Caples, Andrew Joron, and Nancy Joyce Peters in “High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia,” Lamantia had learned to associate “what the surrealists called ‘the marvelous’ ” with “manifestations of the uncanny, the sublime, or the impossible, that resist or exceed rationalization,” discovering those manifestations in pop cultural characters who “powerfully resonated in all media: comics, movies, and radio.”4 In the manner of the critical analogue, then, Lamantia’s poetic notions of the marvelous and fantastical arced outward from the mainstream media of his times toward an engagement with marginal and outsider subjectivities that ultimately called the assumptions embedded within dominative media technologies into question. Lamantia’s earliest poetry emerged under the direct and pronounced tutelage of André Breton, the founder of surrealism; Lamantia was published in the surrealist magazine VVV while still a teenager in 1944 (by which time he had already met Breton and the other exiled European surrealists in wartime New York). As such, Lamantia represents a direct link between prewar

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surrealism and the postwar artistry of the Bay Area, where, alongside figures such as Gerd Stern, he fashioned a surrealist aesthetic tradition that helped lay the foundations for psychedelic culture. In advance of that culture, Lamantia and Stern shared an interest in the numinous and in mystical exploration, including the entheogenic use of various drugs such as psilocybin and peyote (which each man had imbibed in shamanic and other religious rituals throughout Mexico and the American Southwest). Those explorations, along with what the men came to expect from their art, were guided by the ethos of what Lamantia termed the marginal, a concept that came to characterize the artist’s “precarious existence outside societal norms.”5 As Caples further explains, Lamantia experimented with entheogens and surrealist aesthetics in denunciation of “a postwar American culture whose self-congratulatory patriotism and naïve faith in technology [he] flatly rejected.”6 Indeed, Lamantia approached psychotropics and other drugs as a point of egress—a conduit into the fantastical or into realizations of the ecstatic—considered more appealing than the existential alternatives provided by American technocracy or the utopian claims of Soviet communism and its own drab bureaucratic and technocratic institutional structures. Nevertheless, although entheogenic modes of visionary experience were initially approached by these artists as alternatives to postwar technological innovation, dominative media experience, and technocracy, their work concurrently rehearsed and advocated for conceptions of the virtual that have proved central to the historical evolution of computational media.7 “Terror Conduction,” authored by Lamantia in 1959, reads as a printbased analogue of a surrealist or expressionist film and thus provides an avenue through which we might begin to further survey the motivations of Bay Area surrealism in relation to its cultural and intellectual sources. The poem’s opening lines, “The menacing machine turns on and off / Across the distance light unflickers active infinities” seems an apt description of film projection—the flickering movement of celluloid or acetate before the projector’s light, generating phi phenomena. While mimicking the cinematic, Lamantia asks us to consider what appears to be a crowded and bustling city scene: the lines “disgorge / towers for the dead” refer to skyscrapers, the construction of organized and regimented space by corporate interests from which exit “THE CROWDS MENACING” with their eyes set on “NOTHINGNESS” at the conclusion of their workday.8 In the poem’s final moments, Lamantia likens the “FACES / FACES / going by” to “mechanical toys” (or automata) and a torrent of “RAINING 84

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/ SWORDS!,” betraying his devotion to experiential terrains alternative (or “marginal”) to the regimentations and ascriptions of straight life in Cold War America. Lamantia had anticipated the guiding motifs of “Terror Conduction” as early as 1946. In his poem “A Simple Answer to the Enemy” he declares, “The people walk as if in a movie-dream / And work in the terrifying order / Of a chaos their bodies reject, / But their fear compels them to accept.”9 In both poetic instances, Lamantia offers a disturbing vision of ideology lived as a form of passive mechanicity, or as a systematized modality of media spectatorship akin to the submissive spectatorship of the cinematic audience (subject to Marcusian introjection). The description of automata directed through a “terrifying order” secured through the mass placation of their intellect echoes not only the revolutionary leftism of the European surrealists but also their longing for experiential realms not yet reified within the logistics and expressive media of capitalist or bureaucratic rationality. That longing is addressed more explicitly in poems such as 1962’s “High,” which alludes to both drug-induced intoxication and the poet’s characteristic seeking out of the marvelous on the heightened margins of normative human experience. Rather than attempting to break the code of Lamantia’s associative transitions and non sequiturs in too confident or self-assured a fashion— this is, after all, surrealism we are talking about—I think it appropriate to say that “High” remains particularly alive to the problems of imaginative perspective and creative agency dramatized throughout Lamantia’s poetry. The opening line submerges us immediately into ontological questioning—“where have I flown to?”—as the poetic voice of “High” reports on its detachment from the earth amid the “flight of birds.”10 Subsequent references to eagles and to peering down at forest fires suggest that we are dealing with the imaginative projection of human perspective beyond its gravitational bounds—or perhaps we are looking at the world from within the perception of a bird in flight. Both scenarios evoke the viewpoint of a winged avatar set momentarily free from its grounding in conventional human experience, liberated instead into the margins of the marvelous. What perhaps remains most striking about Lamantia’s poem, however, is its opposition to the passive absorption of experience required by spectatorship within reified mainstream media. Lamantia’s intentions in that regard come most clearly into focus in the poem’s final lines, in which the declaration that “You can not close / You can not open / you break yr head / you make bloody bread!” suggests that should our poetic avatar cease flapping its wings—by holding them either open or closed—it will crash to the earth

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in a bloody heap, for the maintenance of a vantage point, or of an imaginative perspective, requires the active investment of the avatar’s energy or labor within its theater of experience. In “High,” Lamantia grants his avatar a level of perspectival agency absent from the mechanistic, clonelike observers of “Terror Conduction” and “A Simple Answer to the Enemy.” Operating within the surrealist vein, “High” gestures us toward an immersive erotics yearning for fuller—or more agential—sensual participation within alternative experiential theaters as long imagined within surrealism’s sculpted and pictorial counterworlds. A similar yearning underscores the development of interactive media into the secondary worlds of gaming and the responsive architectures of social computing.11 To a large extent, Lamantia renders this yearning in a predigital aesthetic, searching for alternatives to the passive consumption of narrative and meaning within entrenched expressive forms, be it the distanced framings of film and television or the paintings consecrated on so many gallery walls, transfixing vision at a distance by banishing the possibility of touch (and especially the tactile experience of depth across a third-dimensional axis). Moreover, it was partly in opposition to the reigning aesthetics of passivity and irresponsiveness that Lamantia’s mentor, Breton, had initially offered his politicized notion of an artificial paradise in 1924’s “Manifesto of Surrealism.” Breton’s first manifesto valorizes instinct, chance, and dream imagery in the hope of liberating human thought from the grips of reason and rationality, for he blamed the rationalist tendencies within modern thought for drab industrialism and the wide-scale destruction of World War I. Putting his hope instead in the Freudian unconscious and the aesthetics of human dreaming, Breton prophesied that “the human explorer will be able to carry his investigations much further, authorized as he will henceforth not to confine himself solely to the most summary realities.”12 Like Lamantia’s poetic avatar in “High,” Breton likens the liberation of consciousness and being to the promises of secondary experiential realms, an aesthetics of the “artificial paradise.” According to Breton, this desire for the “marvelous” and “fantastical” has intensified alongside, or within, industrialized modernity and can initially be glimpsed in the existential search for alternative worlds or realities in the drug experimentation and “opium images” of the French symbolists.13 In other words, the surrealist approach to imagery as exemplified in the paintings of Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico extended the symbolist interest in dream states or secondary inscapes while fortifying what we might think of as 86

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the avant-grade’s protracted interest in transforming subjective life in opposition to industrialism, militarism, social ascription, and technicity. Accordingly, a great number of Lamantia’s poems—especially the prose poetics of 1950s works such as “This Room Is My Cosmos,” “Descent,” and “Inside the Journey”—plunge their reader into immersive worlds whose semifamiliar, dreamlike contours replicate the strange or marvelous canvases of Dalí and de Chirico. Michael Saler makes plain the significant inspirational and conceptual debt that virtual worlds such as Everquest, World of Warcraft, and Second Life owe to literary culture as it existed in the age of print, although he focuses much of his attention on fantasy fiction. According to Saler, the fantasy worlds created by writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, H. P. Lovecraft, and J. R. R. Tolkien engaged a knowledgeable fandom in ways that anticipated the fantastical immersive environments of contemporary gaming and the centrality of role-playing within the virtual social forms of Web 2.0.14 Moreover, Saler provocatively suggests that fantasy genres, which developed across the twentieth-century divide between print and digital culture, are “best explained in terms of a larger cultural project of the West: that of re-enchanting an allegedly disenchanted world. Fantastic worlds of the imagination emerged at the turn of the century not to replicate the everyday, as was the case for realist fiction, but to complement it—to secure the marvels that a disenchanted modernity seemed to undermine.”15 Saler identifies Max Weber as one of the principal theorists of modern disenchantment, for Weber’s work elaborated upon neoromantic critiques of the Enlightenment “emphasis on reason and science at the expense of other ways of apprehending and being in the world.”16 Much like the romantics, Weber in turn valorized the human imagination as the storehouse of illogical wonder and inexplicable surprise that would discover in literary fantasy one of its primary avenues of expression. But the surrealism of Breton, according to Saler, also made a notable contribution to this principled defense of enchantment—even though Saler ultimately provides only a one-page gloss of the surrealist effect on our understanding of the virtual, expressed so notably through surrealism’s yearning for sensual and cognitive immersion within fantastical dreamscapes excessive to ordinary or quotidian experience.17 David Rubin offers the equally helpful observation that the artistry of psychedelic experience was markedly inspired not only by the surrealists but also by the visionary aesthetics of Hieronymous Bosch and William Blake, all of which constituted a collective longing

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for “realms of higher consciousness” foreshadowing the secondary worlds realized through computational media.18 Moreover, Rubin explains that while the term psychedelic might have first been coined in 1956 “by the British psychiatrist Dr. Humphrey F. Osmond as a scientific reference for hallucinatory experiences,” one did not necessarily need to imbibe LSD or other hallucinogens in order to experience the “psychedelic aesthetic sensibility” of the late 1960s, for the “light shows, posters, [and] lava lamps” so central to the era’s rock culture helped democratize or popularize that sensibility—as did “the set designs for movies such as the 1967 cult film The Trip.”19 That sensibility developed alongside installation art and happenings (art-related events), both of which also extended aesthetic expression into dimensional space in ways that foregrounded interactivity and the generative capabilities of audience perspective and participation. Intrigued by the possibilities of immersive, alternative worlds, a broad collective of writers, artists, musicians, and engineers sought to collapse the representational distance that had long stabilized the ontology of Western aesthetics within two dimensions. Especially in the case of psychedelic aesthetics and the genealogy of fantastical secondary worlds examined by Saler, we find ourselves retrospectively confronted with this longing for immersive virtualities, an aestheticized augmentation of our sensual lives realized more fully within the evolution of computational media.20 Twentieth-century conceptions of virtuality and immersive aesthetics emerged in part from a nexus of literary influences, which included Lamantia’s poetry. Lamantia at times idealized his own lifelong commitment to surrealist aesthetics and the fantastical as a principled reaction to the outsized influence of Ezra Pound over the linguistic evolution of twentieth-century American poetry. In short, Lamantia’s reproach of Pound was a defense of surrealism as the true and proper impulse of the twentieth-century avantgarde. Although Lamantia published very little in the way of prose, his 1976 manifesto “Poetic Matters” makes particularly vivid his long-standing disagreements with what he understood to be the poetic and aesthetic legacies of Pound. Published in Franklin Rosemont’s irregularly appearing journal Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, Lamantia’s essay defines poetic imagination in a fairly conventional surrealist sense. Asserting that closely replicating or approximating human sense perception is not imaginative, Lamantia instead associated authentic creative expression with puzzling and enigmatic imagery, an unexpected union of visual forms or linguistic descriptions. The imaginative, according to Laman 88

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tia, is that which challenges and/or releases us from the precincts of our base perceptions, or that which is capable of widening our notions of experience and consciousness beyond the confines of their habituation in dominative thought forms. Above all, Lamantia was after imagery “unfettered” from realist or naturalistic attempts to replicate or describe the world of sense perception—or from that which merely asserts a rational and well-ordered augmentation of the immediately recognizable—in order to open a new “conduit for thought” beyond the “slavish reductions” of the reality principle.21 Lamantia believed that the pursuit of these revolutionary aesthetic ideals had largely been abandoned by postwar American poetry, for its practitioners had become preoccupied with the acquiescence to the debasement of language, characterizing its reification by “technicians and mind-managers of latter-day capitalism.” This direction is glorified specifically in those false poets who pride themselves on a formalized ‘“handling” of “ordinary American speech” which is, in effect, nothing other than a rhetorical camouflage for the betrayal of poetic exigencies in the service of cultural chauvinism and the oppressive “reality principle,” reflecting a pitiful need to be recognized by socially conditioned imbecility.22 Lamantia directs this critique of ordinary-language poetry (so prevalent within the poetics of what he terms the “Charles Olson branch of the New American Poetry”) at what he views as the long-standing, tragic influence of Pound’s work in imagism, epitomized in Pound’s collection Ripostes (1912). Pound’s imagism stressed clarity in language and precision in imagery, favoring stripped-down descriptions of the world over what Pound viewed as the discursive and metaphoric excesses of the romantic era. For Lamantia, though, confining oneself to describing the real world in ordinary language represented a failure of poetic imagination—ultimately in league with the language of advertising, banal political sloganeering, and the prosaic pronouncements and motivations of the technical class. Moreover, in terms of the poetry of Charles Olson, Lamantia noticed a pronounced adoration for technical language and process, including “misappropriated scientific jargon,” working to reduce our notions of the poetic “to ‘energy’ and ‘energy-discharge.’ ”23 Of course, Lamantia’s negative assessment goes against the grain of Olson’s influence, established within Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, in which Olson’s poetry appeared first and had the greatest number of pages allotted to it. Nevertheless, Michael Davidson’s reading of Olson, and especially of “The Kingfishers,” provides a context for Lamantia’s charges against the language of technical process. As we have

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seen, “The Kingfishers” clearly mimics the feedback structures theorized in the work of Norbert Wiener and other cyberneticists: “feedback becomes a model for the kind of process-based or systems-based thinking that the poem endorses, a speculative interrogation of an unknown form (the inscrutable E on a stone, the feathers of a bird) not only to understand it but to understand forces that have participated in occluding its meaning. Furthermore, feedback implies using what one has learned to construct further knowledge.” 24 The poem’s effort to understand the mysterious and possibly ancient referent E—or to pin the symbol to its precise origin and definition—not only represents a central tension of “The Kingfishers” but undoubtedly echoes Shannon’s interests in the disambiguation of communicative symbols. But the mystery of the E is never solved within the investigative space of the poem, which suggests that despite their markedly different approaches to poetics, Lamantia and Olson are disputing the same thing—namely, precision and control as the basis of social and cultural organization. Much like Lamantia’s surrealism, “The Kingfishers” is ultimately about resisting the technological canalization of perspective or consciousness, with Olson’s poetic field serving as an open and liberated communicative edifice within which multiple ideological forms and methods circulate (including Wiener’s). Although Olson’s approach to language differs notably from Lamantia’s attempts to eschew referential linguistic function in favor of subjective immersion within the ambiguities of the surrealist fantastical, Olson’s poetics nevertheless offers us an equally raucous and unsettled poetic space—a teeming, contested field—featuring discursive forms that do not function together with precision or under the directive of some dominative other than their own disorder.

Acid Tests

Despite his own rootedness in twentieth-century aesthetic experimentation, Lamantia remained seized by the notion that much of the postwar poetic avant-garde had been compromised by its relationship to “Ezra Pound’s glib slogan ‘Make it New,’ a recipe which had been translated into the advertising, architecture, and designs of ‘the administered life’ as we know it under monopoly capitalism.” 25 Lamantia’s consequent defense of surrealism as the quintessence of twentieth-century aesthetic experimentation, a much-needed alternative perspective on what he viewed as the canalization of subjectivity and being in late capitalism, became highly influential over the intermedia work of fellow Bay Area artists such as Gerd Stern. Thus, in spite of Laman 90

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tia’s impassioned critique of the corporate information economy as a mode of systematized servitude and imagination-sacrificing despair, his artistic longings nonetheless exerted a conceptual influence on the immersive aesthetics of computational media as they emerged around the San Francisco Bay. Were he alive today, Lamantia would undoubtedly cringe at this suggestion, especially given his identification of Olson’s poetics with the dominative discursive tropes of the information society. As shall become evident, the Bay Area surrealist and psychonaut Gerd Stern was perfectly comfortable in the role he played in the technical transformations bemoaned by Lamantia, although he too possessed deep roots in bohemian culture and the avant-garde. Born in Saarbrucken, Germany, at age eleven Stern migrated to the United States with his family, which settled in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. During his teens Stern moved to what is now the East Village and soon found himself entangled in the milieu of street-level criminality (or the life of the “marginal”), which proved so attractive to the Beat writers and many other American artists of that generation. Stern met two of those artists, Allen Ginsberg and Carl Solomon, while all three were patients of the Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (a stay that inspired Ginsberg’s epoch-making “Howl”). As a result of his relationship with Solomon—whose uncle, A. A. Wyn, was the owner of Ace Books—Stern worked during the early 1960s as Ace’s West Coast representative. It was during the same general period that Stern cemented influential relationships with West Coast literary figures William Everson (also featured in The New American Poetry) and Paul Goodman, along with Lamantia and fellow surrealist poet John Hoffman.26 Deeply rooted within the outlaw fringes of postwar literary culture and the New American Writing, Stern admits being “really turned on to [the] audio-visual, electronic use of words in media.” 27 One of Stern’s primary influences in this regard just happened to be literary scholar and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose written work Stern began copying by hand in his personal notebooks, since he lacked access to photocopying technology. Combining his experiences on the experimental fringes of American poetics with the paradigm-shifting expressive possibilities of electronics discussed by McLuhan, Stern “started developing a concept called the Verbal American Landscape,” which involved “cutting . . . words” from magazines, posters, road signs, and advertising messages, then recontextualizing them in collage poems and eventually projected mash-ups—“a landscape of words which

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were not necessarily linear.”28 Reaching beyond linear expression, an aesthetic development that Stern attributes to the influence of McLuhan, simultaneously resonates with Lamantia’s surrealist conceptions of language, or what Lamantia saw as the potential liberation of human consciousness when confronted by words taken out of their entrenched signifying contexts and associative structures. Much like Lamantia, Stern understood his own experiments with signification as “somehow compatible to the ‘high’ state of mind in which you tend to [free-]associate more than to just build from grammatical sentence structure.”29 Approached within the analytical terms provided by McLuhan, Stern’s experimentation replicates the experiential qualities of the electronic world that McLuhan had termed “acoustic.” Ostensibly, McLuhan had argued in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) that as reproducible language (or text) came increasingly unstuck from its visual moorings upon the printed page of the Gutenberg era, manufactured information would become ubiquitous and immersive. Set free from the visual coordination and reproduction of information enabled by the formalities of the printed page, human thought and expression might instead assume the form of environmental phenomena engaging multiple senses simultaneously, enclosing participants in an all-at-onceness capable at last of overturning the rational fixity of the typographical (which had long encouraged readers to follow a single narrative or line of argumentation encased within the contoured visual coordinates of the solitary book-form). On account of this analysis, so influential to Stern and others in his milieu, McLuhan became an object of Kerouac’s critical scorn in “After Me, the Deluge.” In any case, many of Stern’s most memorable intermedia efforts came under the auspices of USCO (the Company of Us), a Bay Area media company cofounded by Stern. USCO played a sizable role in generating the stylistic elements of the modes of conceptual art and rock performance that we now think of as psychedelic. Stern’s initial experimentation with language in the form of collage poetry (or text-based mash-ups) printed on posters and silk screens soon assumed electronic form as USCO employed film, slide projection, and amplified spoken-word performance as the components of an encompassing and kaleidoscopic intermedia environment. Increasingly disenchanted with the restraining conventions of traditional poetry and moved by a more general restlessness regarding genre boundaries, Stern committed himself to developing an aesthetics of “multimedia experience—multimedia, mind you, wasn’t a word that was known in those days.”30

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To this end, Stern recruited the high-profile Beat poets Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg to participate in a 1963 intermedia event, titled “Who Are You and What’s Happening?” and staged in an auditorium at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art under the sponsorship of USCO. Stern described the electronic poetics of that event as follows: “We had transparent isolation booths onstage [from] which [the participants] were able to broadcast[,] and [we were able to] switch the signals from the various booths onto a series of speakers.”31 USCO’s electronically engineered audio mosaic was accompanied by slides originally produced by Stewart Brand and others for use in Stern’s Verbal American Landscape project. Those images were now accompanied by broadcasts on closed-circuit television, creating a dynamically variegated and immersive experience designed to emulate an acid trip. Taking LSD had given Stern “an even more precise idea of the kind of mixture that I wanted to create. Mixed media. Between that and [the influences of] McLuhan and et cetera,” Stern was making his way from his surrealist and literary roots toward a contemporary, multiform aesthetic.32 USCO had clearly begun to realize the fantastical longings of surrealism within electronic media, forging an explicit link between earlier European avant-gardes and American psychedelia. For a time, USCO became synonymous with the cultural aesthetics of the psychedelic era, creating media backdrops for both Leary and McLuhan and having one of its largest installations appear on a 1966 cover of Life.33 Furthermore, Stern’s linking of aesthetic experimentation with drug-based exploration laid the creative foundations for what became known as the Acid Tests, initiated in Santa Cruz in November 1965 and held thereafter in Muir Beach, Palo Alto, and Portland (Oregon), with the first San Francisco test occurring in January 1966. In what would become a late 1960s cultural mainstay of venues such as the Fillmore West, the tests typically included live music from the Grateful Dead (who would play at one end of the hall) along with music from a loose affiliation of Ken Kesey’s musician friends (played simultaneously from the opposite end of the hall). The Dead’s legendary audio engineer, Owsley Stanley, provided much of the technological architecture on which the milieu of the tests was constructed. Having briefly studied engineering at the University of Virginia, Stanley had a fondness for technical gadgetry and underground chemistry that allowed him to transform halls such as the Fillmore into alternative sensual environments by stringing together amplifiers, film projectors, monitors,



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oscilloscopes, liquid light projection, microphones, and closed-circuit television technology; attendees would also be provided with LSD, often concocted by Stanley himself.34 He was frequently joined in these endeavors by the sculpture artist Ron Boise, who was known primarily for his work in metal. Boise’s chief contribution to the experiential environment of the tests came in the form of what he called Thunder Sculptures, metal-based sculptural works in which attendees might momentarily and completely immerse themselves. Charles Perry, for instance, recalls a thunder machine “shaped like a seashell that you could crawl into and get lost in.”35 Transformative submersion remained the guiding rationale of the Acid Tests, and Perry describes the chaotic and multimodal scene at the Fillmore as follows: Kesey’s “Pranksters were able to wire the place up with microphones and speakers in unexpected places, so you might be downstairs watching somebody make a fool of himself on the closed-circuit TV and suddenly hear something you’d said upstairs a few minutes ago broadcast all over the hall. The floor was littered with electronic boxes and skeins of electrical cable.” 36As such, the Acid Tests were inter­media art happenings that aestheticized experience in fantastical ways at its source while anticipating the social computing platforms (such as Twitter) that allow our life events to be powerfully augmented by transmission technology as they occur. The amplification of sound and the networking of visual experience expanded our territories of intimacy, enhancing our ability to traverse communicative distance in transpersonal, and perhaps world-altering, ways. Fred Turner has provocatively referred to the immersive and interactive media environments produced by Stern and other artists affiliated with the counterculture as surrounds. Explaining their rationale, he writes, “Since mass media prevented precisely the sorts of encounters with multiple types of people and multiple points of view that made America and Americans strong, the shoring up of the democratic personality would require new, democratic modes of communication.” Reacting to containment culture and the dominative media’s culpability in introjection, spelled out by Ginsberg in “Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs,” countercultural artists in turn “advocated a turn away from single-source mass media and toward multi-image, multi-sound-source environments.”37 Turner points out that figures such as Stern, happenings artist Allan Kaprow, and experimental and electro-acoustic musician John Cage embraced the aesthetics of the surround partly in response to Nazi Germany’s top-down deployment of media tactics 94

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as well as the continued threat of such mobilizations of collective will under Soviet Communism and American Corporatism. In other words, the counterculture attempted to counter what it viewed as an informatics of domination with an informatics of liberation, a collective aesthetics marked by horizontal (or egalitarian) participation and perspectives that were not bound by the entrenched realities of Cold War life.

Postsymbolism (and the Predicament of the Book-Form)

Both the multiperspective canvases of the cubists and the multiple narrative perspectives animating high modernist literature pointed Western aesthetics toward the kaleidoscopic, just as surrealist writing and dream­ scapes anticipated psychedelic alterity. The twentieth-century avant-garde thus augured the kaleidoscopic demands and fantastical possibilities of semi-ubiquitous computational media decades before the psychedelic era had arrived (as had literary fantasy in Saler’s convincing account). Indeed, what we have long called the psychedelic might ultimately account for the pronounced migration of the aesthetic concerns of Europe’s modernist avantgarde into postwar electronic media and amplified expression. That is, the European avant-gardes of the early twentieth-century exerted a tremendous influence on the postwar avant-garde in the United States, because American artists had a generation to digest European experimentalism. Lamantia’s relationship with Breton makes this intergenerational and international influence quite plain, and the immersive environments created by Stern and others actualized surrealist ideas in tangible (if particular) ways. Kerouac’s dismissal of these developments, and what he saw as McLuhan’s complicity in the flourishing of electronic culture’s “plastic balloons,” ultimately speak to a gathering crisis surrounding the continued salience of traditional literary culture (organized around the paper-based book). Western expressive practices had begun to elaborate themselves more convincingly and eagerly within other media objects or in their own ongoing tangible revolution in formal capacities and reach—an expressive revolution in which Kerouac, despite the vitriol of his final years, played a significant and influential role. Kerouac’s reservations aside, the psychedelic aesthetics of the counterculture undoubtedly fed the development of what we now think of as the virtual; in fact, that might have been psychedelia’s most significant contribution to contemporary cultural aesthetics, thanks to the multidecade impact of surrealism.

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The influential work of Jaron Lanier makes this genealogy exceedingly evident. On its own, the title of Lanier’s first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010), announces his indebtedness to the twentieth-century avant-gardes and their manifesto traditions. Lanier’s book also clearly operates within the surrealist tradition of agitation, arguing that the very same wave of digitized automation that Lanier helped catalyze as a gaming and software designer has now come to pose a significant threat to the future of contemplative personhood. Ostensibly, You Are Not a Gadget defends humanistic models of subjective and collective life in a fashion similar to surrealist and Dadaist reactions to industrialized mass production and warfare. One of Lanier’s most consistently argued points is that the original commercially available World Wide Web facilitated contemplation, inventiveness, and eccentricity by requiring users to create the content and layout of their own pages. The emergence of template software in Web 2.0—from Facebook and Twitter to blogging platforms such as Blogger—now works to rein in creative potential through preimposed avenues of expression. We must increasingly make ourselves and our ideas conform to the obstinate and preexisting contours of the program, jeopardizing the democratic claims of social computing through our engagement in digitalized mass contortion, which is a mode of self-canalization. Despite these recent concerns, Lanier has been widely and fairly acknowledged as one of the pioneering forces behind virtual reality and the cultural aesthetics of the digital, and he continues to be viewed as a Silicon Valley visionary of significant influence. Although he was born in New York City and raised in New Mexico, Lanier’s Northern Californian roots run deep— including longtime friendships with Stewart Brand, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, and a slew of others associated with Wired and TED. His attachments to the mores and expressive modalities of the 1960s counterculture run equally deep. Indeed, in You Are Not a Gadget, Lanier makes explicit reference to his “uproariously messy hippie apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the vicinity of MIT,” from which emerged his prototypes for virtual reality just as his roommate, the software activist Richard Stallman, was formulating the philosophical and technical basis for the open (or free) software movement in the form of the GNU operating system.38 It was during this period of 1980s bohemianism that Lanier moved to California to work as a lead programmer for Atari. Along with being considerably accomplished in computer science, Lanier is a gifted musical composer with an interest in rare instruments such as the oud, and his “experimen 96

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tal performances” have often included virtual reality technology in ways that recall the liquid light shows and Acid Tests of Bay Area hippiedom. Using “shape-sensing optical fiber bundles” and “magnetic field generators . . . to track parts of performers’ bodies,” Lanier’s live performances have recreated the multimodal theater of the psychedelic era, revealing the direct causal link between Bay Area traditions of the fantastical and contemporary notions of the virtual within computational media.39 To push that assertion even further, Lanier closes You Are Not a Gadget by offering what he terms “post-symbolic communication” as a possible solution to the creative and contemplative malaise he locates in Web 2.0 template culture. Inspired in part by the adaptive ability of cephalopods to camouflage themselves, Lanier wonders, “Suppose we had the ability to morph at will, as fast as we can think. What sort of language might that make possible?” He swiftly answers his own question by gesturing toward what he calls “pheno­ tropic computing,” or the development of immersive virtual environments that might escape the expressive limitations of entrenched symbolic systems, effectively realizing a postsymbolic communicative realm. For clarification, Lanier provides the following example: “For instance, instead of saying, ‘I’m hungry; let’s go crab hunting,’ you might simulate your own transparency so your friends could see your empty stomach, or you might [transform yourself] into a video game about crab hunting so you and your compatriots could get in a little practice before the actual hunt.” When Lanier goes on to “imagine a virtual saxophone-like instrument in virtual reality” on which he might improvise “golden tarantulas,” the influences of Bay Area surrealist and psychedelic culture on his work become strikingly evident—including, of course, Lamantia’s veneration of the marvelous and its unexpected visual juxtapositions in contradistinction to what he viewed as the strictly referential language use of his poetic contemporaries.40 Lanier offers phenotropic computing within biomimetic information architectures as an alternative to the prevailing notions of the singularity, in which human consciousness eventually becomes marginalized within the realms of the virtual or the fantastical secondary, a scenario in which superior artificial intelligence integrates our hominid brain function into an immersive and incorporeal information environment obviating our longstanding circumscription within biological planetary life. In Who Owns the Future? (2013), Lanier has described such outlooks as a dangerous pining for cybernetic totalism in which “we anticipate immortality through mechanization. A common claim in utopian technology culture is that people—well, perhaps

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not everyone—will be uploaded into cloud computing servers later in this century, perhaps in a decade or two, to become immortal in Virtual Reality.” 41 Lanier views the singularity—and rightly so—as a heaven-analogue through which some, especially Ray Kurzweil, have come to believe we might conquer our mortality through digitized transhumanism. This desire for immortality materialized earlier in Western Christendom in what might be termed the aesthetic machine of the cathedral, a fantastical immersive architecture of stained glass, wafting incense, and towering domes gesturing toward the possibility of a secondary paradise (not coincident with its building materials). Lanier remains particularly concerned about the singularity’s tendency to deemphasize the possibilities of virtual human expression in order to imagine a parallel reality in which consciousness merely circulates as data (stored without agency) within a deitylike information architecture lorded over by highly advanced computing machines—a situation in which agential artificial intelligence trumps the limitations of human biology and cognitive life once and for all within an informatics of domination. Rather than waiting for the artificial paradise of a digitalized afterlife, Lanier offers his notion of postsymbolic communication as a mode of experience design more optimistic about human potential and the possibilities of creatively engaged personhood.42 Experience design is principally concerned with embracing the futurist specter of ubiquitous computing—the “Internet of things,” which involves the ongoing weaving of digital, simulated components and interfaces more and more seamlessly into the objects and precincts of experiential reality, without simultaneously devaluing the cognition and agency of yet embodied human operators. To a large extent, the distinction Lanier makes between Kurzweil’s singularity and postsymbolist culture replicates the distinction Lamantia makes in “Terror Conduction” and “High” between a scenario in which the human subject becomes completely swept along as a “mechanical toy” within the systematized impositions of the machine and one in which avatars become capable of imposing their capacity for agency and authoring on the events that constitute their unfolding environments. What is ultimately at stake, then, in the comparative analysis of Lamantia’s poetry, Stern’s intermedia productions, and Lanier’s conceptualization of virtual reality and phenotropic computing is an oppositional Bay Area genealogy of authored experience design, ensconced within historically differentiated yet continuous technical and media affordances.

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5

Surveillance as Pleasure

In transforming the paper-based version of the Verbal American Landscape into a theater of immersive secondary experience, Gerd Stern fomented an erotics of collective, simultaneous transparency. While rooted in Lamantia’s surrealist notions of principled marginality, the aesthetic efforts of Stern and those involved in the Acid Tests led to the wiring of venues such as the Fillmore West into interactive media environments that mingled pleasure with collective and participatory surveillance. It appears safe to assume that the software innovations of Web 2.0 and mobile computing technology will only continue to universalize the underlying experiential, communicative, and technical longings of Stern’s USCO and the hippie-era Acid Tests as we find ourselves poised to leave behind the most transparent and accessible public record of ourselves and our activities in human history. The sheer volume of that networked, multimodal archive shows no sign of abating, leading Lev Manovich to remark that it seems “only a matter of time before the constant broadcasting of one’s life becomes as common as email.”1 Certainly, for those involved in lifelogging (self-tracking) and sousveillance (inverse surveillance), advances in wearable computing and biometric sensing technology continue to make Manovich’s prediction a daily reality, a possibility recently explored to great effect in Dave Eggers’s dystopian novel The Circle (2013). Inhabiting the extreme edges of our swelling cultural compulsion toward self-reporting and ceaseless data collection, lifeloggers and those in the Quantified Self Movement have made theoretical concerns with panopticism seem suddenly antiquated at the moment of their heightened relevance and must in turn have something quite profound to tell us about the ways in which our conceptions of personhood and our narratives of social belonging are evolving within newly immersive theaters of the self across the arc of technological modernity.



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Over the past several years my curiosity about the origins and assumptions of voluntary self-tracking as a source of fulfillment and pleasure sparked an avid fascination with the poetry of Frank O’Hara, for I began to suspect that his poetics might somehow be implicated within the past half century of that history. At the very least, I believed, O’Hara’s ability to transform the details of his life into an involved and involving poetics of the self might help engender a series of pertinent questions regarding the emergence and qualities of life narration within social media (or as a mass social form). His poetry struck me as particularly suited to this purpose for two reasons. The first reason might be discovered in O’Hara’s own description of his poems—in “Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)”—as “I do this, I do that” poems, which appear to simply chronicle the events of his life and of those around him in a way that is roughly equivalent to a Facebook update or tweet.2 Benjamin Lee has similarly noted that the recent scholarly resurgence of O’Hara’s popularity might be attributed not only to the interests of queer theory but also to the “era of text messages and social networking. This is, after all, the poet who claimed to have invented his own poetic philosophy when, one day after lunch with a friend and while writing a poem for a lover, he realized that ‘if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem.’ ”3 O’Hara offered this insight in 1959’s “Personism: A Manifesto,” composed at the request of Donald Allen for inclusion in The New American Poetry. Allen immediately deemed “Personism” a faux manifesto, compromised by O’Hara’s affinity for humor, and requested a new poetic statement that eventually took the more conventional form of “Statement for The New American Poetry” (1960). “Personism” eventually appeared in the Amiri Baraka–edited journal, Yugen, in 1961, and to this day O’Hara’s mock manifesto remains the more intriguing document precisely because of his quip regarding the telephone, a witticism that speaks to the ways in which the information and communication technologies of the electronic age had begun to radically restructure our expressive practices and our conceptions of social life. The offhand, conversational style of O’Hara’s poetry bears the imprint of such transformations, as does his standing as a coterie poet highly dependent on a collective of fellow artists and friends for both personal support and creative inspiration. This is the second reason for O’Hara’s increased pertinence; in responding to what they understood as conformist or herdlike tendencies within 1950s containment culture, O’Hara and other members of the postwar avant-garde chose to inhabit particular or defined scenes, alternative venues 100

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of association that now allow us to glimpse a revealing example of what we commonly call social networking as it existed just before the technological transformations of the digital era.

Temporalities

O’Hara’s poetry was, of course, central to the pronounced autobiographical turn that occurred in American literature at midcentury, in which writers associated with the New York School, the Beat movement, the Black Mountain School, and confessional poetry (to name but a few) once again magnified the self as the primary site of narrative gravity and aesthetic departure. As O’Hara’s poetry simultaneously engaged the media transformations of his day, his work might be approached as an important signpost within a historical media continuum, registering concerns and proclivities that span the rift between the literary and the digital as O’Hara struggled at the limits of print media’s expressive capacities. That certainly seems to be the case with “The Day Lady Died,” which dramatizes our existential dependence on technical temporalities and media forms in ways that seem increasingly relevant. O’Hara begins his poem by recounting his lunchtime errands on July 17, 1959, which included going to the bank, having a hamburger, purchasing books for friends such as Patsy Southgate, and stopping at a liquor store and a tobacconist shop, all in preparation for traveling to Easthampton that evening. Then, in the final four lines of the poem, O’Hara relates his thoughts on seeing the news of Billie Holiday’s death in that day’s New York Post: “and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of / leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT / while she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.”4 These closing lines deftly register a shift in the temporal distribution of the poet’s cognition from the experience of technical time to retrospection, or the act of momentarily thinking back to Holiday performing at the Five Spot Café, a New York jazz club. We might say that her death caused O’Hara to consider his own mortality, an eventuality that looms in tremendous contrast to his midday bustle through Manhattan’s streets as he pauses to remember the moment in which Holiday’s artistry caused a roomful of people to stop breathing. Everyone, including O’Hara, stops breathing at the end of the poem. In a sense, then, O’Hara’s poem asks us to wrestle with the existential fact that death, and the momentary realization of its inevitability, ushers us into terrains of thought beyond our most basic needs or routines and

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temporarily beyond the demands and compulsions of technical time itself: the temporality of clocks and calendars synchronizing and coordinating human activity since the industrial era, its measured durations supplying shape and purpose to our sequenced days. O’Hara marked the dominion of these technical time frames within the first lines of his poem by registering that his errands on July 17 began at 12:20 p.m. News of Holiday’s death carved a chasm within technical temporality, an incision within his narrative of the everyday that opens toward a momentary confrontation with what Lewis Mumford termed “organic time”: the long “cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death” pulsing through nature and thus through O’Hara himself.5 Our mortality, O’Hara suggests, provides one avenue of liberation from the demands of technical time— although he evidently believed that poetic self-elaboration represented an alternative avenue that does not require our personal extinction or nihilistic longings for it. Anthologized in The New American Poetry, “The Day Lady Died” remains one of O’Hara’s most beloved poems from his 1964 book Lunch Poems. These poems discovered much of their content and creative impetus during O’Hara’s lunch-hour jaunts through 1950s Manhattan, where he was working in various curatorial capacities at the Museum of Modern Art. As such, the poems implicitly register the extent to which the imperatives of technical time continue to structure our experience of leisure. O’Hara was never truly off the clock, a predicament clearly captured in the hurried rhythms and compulsive tones that characterize so many of the works in Lunch Poems. True to the volume’s title, however, O’Hara asserts the lunch break as the temporality of the poetic as the poet attempts to preserve some semblance of autonomy and self-elaboration—or to resist the full regimentation of time and experience—by means of pen and Olivetti typewriter. The Lunch Poems, in other words, allow O’Hara to momentarily assert himself as the protagonist and author of his life events from within the persistent demands (or structuring proclivities) of technical time. The poetic in this instance presents itself as a condensed temporality of self-expression, not entirely unlike the 140 characters of the tweet, which also make it possible to engage in writing while frenetically involved in our quotidian demands—granting us a technological propensity that O’Hara’s poems long for and anticipate in a rudimentary (or low-tech) fashion. In a poetic reference to the telephone less renowned than O’Hara’s, Allen Ginsberg, in 1964’s “I Am a Victim of Telephone,” portrayed the invasive char­ 102

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acteristics of electrified communications technologies in a way that further illuminates the temporal and authorial stakes of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. Rather than serving as a poetic prosthesis, as the telephone does in “Personism,” Ginsberg’s poem depicts the instrument as an interruption technology, for its persistent ringing disrupts his sleep, intrudes upon his dreams and musings, and interferes with his writing schedule. In Ginsberg’s scenario, the poetic must defend itself against the increased proficiency of communication technology for filling all of our time with its concerns. Nevertheless, Ginsberg realized that his poetic heroism was incapable of confronting or reversing the influences of telephony as its pure antithesis. Well in advance of its cellular progeny, Ginsberg’s wall-mounted telephone had already renovated social interaction and the dynamics of personal disclosure to a staggering extent, linking him “to all the hearts of the world beating at once / crying my husband’s gone my boyfriend busted forever my poetry was rejected.”6 The ubiquity of interactive software within our current technological milieu has not only abetted the frequency of the disclosures bemoaned by Ginsberg, it has more convincingly eroded the barriers he struggled to maintain between the poetic and the demands of technical civilization, as self-elaboration within social media now occurs within our experience (and collective authoring) of technical time. That is, the temporalities of work activity, information exchange, and leisure have become increasingly relaxed into one another— or have become coterminous—leaving us progressively unable to maintain the state of contradiction (or distribution) that “I Am a Victim of Telephone” attempts to preserve in the face of what O’Hara’s works in Lunch Poems already experience as a more rudimentary moment of their collapse (or consolidation). In terms of our current moment, Sherry Turkle has helpfully identified the emergence of live-tweeting and other forms of synchronous self-narration (such as posting on Instagram) with a new “simultaneity of lives,” deeply unsettling to the spatiotemporal qualities of human experience. Networked technologies capable of interfacing with virtual worlds, social networking sites, and mapping software synchronize our activities in two or more spaces simultaneously, constituting what Turkle has characterized as a “sense of continual copresencing,” expressed within the coterminous (or casualized) time scales generated by social computing.7 O’Hara’s “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!),” also included in Lunch Poems, provides an uncanny rendering of these new qualities of experience. As is the case with “The Day Lady Died,” the thoughts composing “Poem

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(Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)” unfold in transit as the poet rushes through a wintry New York storm to meet a friend or acquaintance who remains unnamed but is addressed simply as “you” in the first half of the poem. The poem’s initial line—“Lana Turner has collapsed!”—explicitly mimics the news headline that occasioned the poem as O’Hara unabashedly conflates the poetic with the tabloid moment.8 What makes the poem even more striking in its concerns and structure, however, is its simulation of mobility or of mobile pondering; the poem reads as if O’Hara were responding to the news of Turner’s collapse in a poetic voice simultaneously on the move, or “trotting along,” or as if he were responding from within the very moment of the experience, a quality that constitutes O’Hara’s unique contribution to what Donald Allen and George Butterick identified as the postwar avant-garde’s “prevailing ‘instantism.’ ” 9 Although the identity of the “you” addressed throughout the first half of the poem remains mysterious, it becomes clear that the poet and his addressee have been playfully bickering about the day’s weather, with O’Hara finally exclaiming, “And you said it was hailing / but hailing hits you on the head / hard so it was really raining and I was in such a hurry.”10 O’Hara infused a sense of haste into this section of the poem with a run-on sentence that employs enjambment to stretch his disagreement about the weather breathlessly across lines two through ten. That sense of breathlessness abates, however, in the remaining lines of the poem as O’Hara establishes a contrast between his frenetic Manhattan scene of mixed wintry precipitation and Turner’s laid-back balmy California. The poem thus pulls itself together in line twelve, where each line suddenly becomes a complete sentence (“there is no snow in Hollywood / there is no rain in California”) just before the poet advises Turner to pull herself together and “get up.”11 In a fashion quite similar to the simultaneity of lives that Turkle has deemed “copresencing,” O’Hara’s poetic consciousness straddles two locations within the third space of the poem; it interweaves a brief and mundane episode from the poet’s day with his response to Turner’s collapse, directly addressing his unnamed companion and Turner simultaneously from within his poem’s complexly unified spatiotemporal coordinates.

Convergence

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undoubtedly resonates with the aesthetic motivations of the postwar action painting O’Hara so admired, in which the moment of the painting’s creation, preserved in the gestural arena of the canvas, serves as its primary content. Lytle Shaw has observed that O’Hara intended “to make his own writing like a gestural painting,” in the hope of discovering “a way of concretizing and contextualizing gesture, of grounding it in immediate circumstances” or in particular situations (rather than in the melodramatic abstraction of Jackson Pollock and others).12 Those intentions come across clearly in the 1961 Evergreen Review essay, “How to Proceed in the Arts,” coauthored by O’Hara and Larry Rivers. That essay humorously challenges the New York action painters to abandon abstraction for the concerns of “everyday life” so that they might foment an aesthetic based on “go[ing] out and having a hot pastrami sandwich with a side order of beans and a bottle of beer.” In advice that echoes “Personism,” O’Hara and Rivers prod the New York painters, known for projecting an image of art as noble suffering, to take a break from painting once in a while in order to “call a friend on the phone”—but reminding them that when they do, they should not “speak heavily about [their] latest failure.” 13 In this particular piece both O’Hara and Rivers seem to have grown weary of the introspective nature that characterized so much action painting, especially its concern with process (or the extent to which it becomes an exercise in painting rather than in the inevitable inanities of life). In turn, the poets gesture toward a breezier and more exuberant aesthetic centered in quotidian social interaction, revealing affinities with both pop art and the public aspects of happenings. According to Shaw, O’Hara’s gravitation toward a poetry of “empirical locations” and “literal environments” anticipated the place-based immediacy of Allen Kaprow’s happenings of the 1960s, along with the situationist attempt at realizing an urban poetry inscribed on the walls of Paris (in the form of New Left political graffiti).14 Shaw’s observations lay bare the extent to which O’Hara had absorbed contemporaneous influences from throughout the postwar art scene, becoming its most ambitious poetic interpreter. Resituating the era’s aesthetic interests in spontaneity and the gestural within literal environments no doubt accounts for some of what continues to seem so contemporary about O’Hara’s poems (i.e., what we might think of as their resemblance to situation-based microblogging). But in “The Day Lady Died” and “Poem (Lana Turner has Collapsed!),” O’Hara’s poetic space also becomes an extension of a newly experienced mass

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media event, suggesting again that O’Hara absorbed influences from expressive media other than painting. As such, both poems remind us that literary history represents a comprehensive record of human cognition and its operations, illuminating the evolution of our subjective and aesthetic concerns as they have emerged not only within the print technologies of the Gutenberg era but in response to multiple histories of media development and technological change across the arc of modernity. Henry Jenkins has offered the paradigm of convergence as an explanation for what happens when different information media and delivery technologies come into historical contact with each other, then begin to share proclivities and anticipate further renovations to our information economies in just this way—or in an intermedia and transitional fashion quite similar to that imagined by O’Hara in his quip about the telephone and postwar poetics (and as realized within the poetic space of the poems in question). Media history, according to Jenkins’s paradigm, is an uneven affair in which “old and new media collide” and find their concerns and tendencies refashioned as a result of such collisions.15 Thus, rather than replace extant expressive practices outright, new media technologies often work to refashion preexisting media within new protocols and networks of use; technological change enables the emergence of concomitant media of expression that alter the ways in which we organize our experience of the world through existent expressive forms— altering, in turn, our use of those existent forms. Jenkins’s ideas on media convergence offer intriguing new ways for thinking about the significance of the City Lights Pocket Poets series, which lists Lunch Poems as its nineteenth entry. That series was conceptualized as a lightweight alternative to hardback collections of poetry: sized to fit in the back pocket of a pair of denim jeans, the books afforded readers a greater ease in taking their culture mobile, an aspect that particularly suited O’Hara’s interest in poetry as an aesthetic of mobility and immediacy while beckoning toward media innovations in the era of computational and cellular communications technologies. Loren Glass points out that the avant-garde’s use of paperback publishing as a Cold War–era dissemination technology was inseparable from its renovation of literary content toward marginal and outsider subject matter. So much of the postwar avant-garde was organized into dissident networks of artistic and social exchange, and Glass’s work reveals the sizable role that famed publisher Barney Rosset’s entrepreneurial spirit (bolstered by his leftist sympathies) played in disseminating the perspectives of those artists into 106

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the cultural mainstream through Grove Press and Evergreen Review.16 At the time, obscenity trials against works such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (published by City Lights in 1956) and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (published by Grove in 1959) not only increased the notoriety of the authors involved but also helped foment a more general interest in experimental and outsider aesthetics. Glass makes clear that daring cultural works such as these first became available as a result of advances in the quality of paperback publishing—developments often referred to as the Paperback Revolution, which allowed publishers such as Rosset and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to make avant-garde works more affordable and available.17 Presses such as Grove and City Lights were thus aided and abetted by notable technical changes in print culture that opened alternative networks of distribution. Through these networks the bohemian and experimental perspectives of American artists inhabiting the Bay Area and New York’s downtown scene became increasingly popularized—or became more thoroughly absorbed over time into the culture’s general perceptions of itself. Paperback publishing was a primary technology of postwar experimental literature, a conduit through which the values and proclivities of that literature became infused within other media in tangible and consequential ways. Glass observes, for instance, that by “the end of the 1960s, the avantgarde had in essence become a component of the mainstream, and Grove Press, more than any other single institution, was responsible for this fundamental transformation of the cultural field, the consequences of which are still with us.” 18 Indeed, Grove Press occupied a central node within an avant-garde cultural network erected around quality paperback publishing and bookstores such as City Lights and Cody’s in San Francisco, commercial enterprises that anchored outsider brand loyalties while serving as the conduit for introducing experimental and bohemian ideas to the Bay Area student and youth population.19 As such, these print-based distribution networks aided in stimulating the ambient conceptual environment that I have called the Bay Area metaphysics, which continues to play a role in democratizing or popularizing the assumptions of the postwar avantgarde. Lacking the durability and production costs of hardbacks, paperbacks helped democratize reading while implying through their inexpensive production that culture was disposable, to some extent, or that it had become possessed by a sense of what Jacques Derrida terms “quasi immateriality”; in most instances, especially in regard to genre publishing, paperbacks were

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not designed with an eye on cultural posterity as were fine hardbacks or cloth publishing, which had long commoditized books as a luxury or an investment—and, moreover, as a mark of advanced social standing.20 For many, the hardback represented authorial competence and granted a seriousness or weightiness to the thoughts etched between its covers. We might say that readers (and nonreaders alike) tended to associate the hardback with pronounced intellectual and literary value. Thus an argument can be made that paperbacks altered the reigning conceptions of the gravitas or solemnity of print culture just as competitive media forms, such as radio and television, were becoming increasingly popular as vehicles of communication and more central to our cultural aesthetics. The paperback allowed literary culture to keep pace with these other media at the cost of the cultural authority once given material shape by the hardback codex. At the same time, the Paperback Revolution conceptually anticipated the disposability and the democratization of narrative practice as realized in Web 2.0—a more immediate and accessible medium for the widespread production and dissemination of narrative and text (including observations of the most fleeting kind, as encountered in social computing platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or more generally in the phenomenon of mobile texting). In retrospect the breezy spontaneity of O’Hara’s voice in Lunch Poems seems to anticipate these transitions in representation and distribution. As such, we might think of Lunch Poems and Kerouac’s scroll manuscripts as transitional objects, information relics that exceptionally condense histories of technical and communicative change. Although Jenkins’s writings on media do not enfold the predigital visual arts or print-based modes of literary expression within convergence culture, poetry such as O’Hara’s seems at times to demonstrate what convergence looks like within print-based media at midcentury, when film, telephony, radio, television and news media were reshaping the focus and form of the literary. Or it might be said that Lunch Poems provides a print-based space for intermedia convergence in advance of the democratization of the Internet and computational media. In incorporating the influences of other media and communication technologies, writers such as O’Hara and Kerouac in turn plunged literary form (as they had inherited it) into a taxonomic crisis. This crisis is still experienced by some of my students who, upon reading poems such as “The Day Lady Died,” would rather classify it as an extended tweet than as a poem.

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Making the Scene In terms of the postwar avant-garde, as the work of Glass and others makes clear, this symbiotic relationship with the media forms and technical ensembles of the cultural mainstream often corresponded with a refusal to sell out to mainstream cultural values and accompanying narratives of social and political normality. Artists such as O’Hara maintained this balancing act principally through the construction of the alternative or bohemian scenes they inhabited and memorialized in their literature. Much of O’Hara’s poetic content remains inseparable from the social scene of its composition and indeed seems most specifically addressed to the other inhabitants of that scene: O’Hara’s network of friends and collaborators. Donald Allen recognized early on that these webs of affiliation—or the creation of scenes around aesthetic activity—represented one of the principal characteristics of the New American Writers. Allen did much to formalize the borders between these poetic milieus in his editorial arrangement of The New American Poetry. In his introductory comments to that volume, Allen explained that he viewed the poets whose work he had included as inhabitants of five “primary alignments”—such as O’Hara’s New York School and Ginsberg’s Beat movement—but he also understood that the activities of these groups were not mutually exclusive, as O’Hara’s relationships with figures such as Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka attest.21 The particular scenes or milieus documented by Allen were constellated in many of the same journals, performance venues, and social spaces. In O’Hara’s New York, for instance, this shared cultural geography included the Living Theatre, the Artists’ Theatre, Cedar Tavern, the San Remo, and the Five Spot Café, all of which anchored a network of association and support. The work of O’Hara and his generation of experimental writers also fomented a significant alternative or underground print culture represented by journals such as Evergreen Review, Yugen, Big Table, Kulchur, and Floating Bear, as well as forward-looking presses such as City Lights and Grove Press (and eventually Black Sparrow Press and Allen’s own Grey Fox imprint). Indeed, when The New American Poetry appeared, very few of the writers had been published in mainstream literary publications. In important aspects, then, the New American Poetry represented a critical analogue of the mainstream media protocols it both mimicked and rejected, offering readers an alternative star system of authorial personalities. Allen understood quite well that the webs of affiliation in which their work

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circulated was essential to the self-conceptions and authorial personas of this generation of American writers—especially as these venues and publishing ventures anchored artistic and textual economies that had been conceived of as alternative information and social structures to the Cold War ordinary.22 Moreover, these textual economies serve as an example of how printbased networks cohered and persisted in the decades just before the digital era, allowing for the comparative juxtaposition of literary practices alongside more recent technologies of communication and group formation. David Lehman notes that because artists such as O’Hara experienced the prevailing social order as one “that strictly enforced its normative codes of behavior, the artistic act gathered a tremendous force,” especially as a mode of oppositional lyricism and as a facilitator of transgressive networks of association.23 The dominative social order—or the Cold War mainstream—found particular shape for O’Hara and others in the Jell-O molded world of gray flannel business suits, duplicate buzz cuts, compulsory heterosexuality, national security platitudes, atomic diplomacy, and unremarkable suburban homes (and their accompanying milieus). In his own discussion of O’Hara, Benjamin Lee points out that “we turn to intimate communities—groups of friends and close-knit literary allies—as a way of grounding our thinking about the self in social context, or about individual agency in relation to larger systems,” an inclination that must be understood in relation to the era’s dominative social and subjective demands.24 Rather than conforming to what they experienced as subjective norms and putative social expectations, coteries or scenes provided O’Hara and others with social and expressive spaces in which they might explore and develop new perspectives and transgressive conceptions of selfhood—or conceptions that mainstream demands for normality still could not fully accommodate. This goes a long way toward explaining the autobiographical strain that courses through the New York School, the Beat Generation, the Black Mountain School, and the San Francisco Renaissance. That strain often discovered its impetus in presenting uninhibited accounts of human consciousness and desire, including poetic accounts of outsider sexuality and social activity (as seen, for instance, in O’Hara’s “Homosexuality” and “In the Movies”). To return briefly to an earlier set of points offered by Shaw, this might also explain O’Hara’s need to transmute the abstract spontaneity and gestural qualities of action painting into a more literal engagement with his social scene and actual surroundings, since he simply cannot embrace (or afford) abstraction in the same way that the pronouncedly heterosexual Pollock can. 110

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In presenting subjects or observations that were often unflattering—or that remained shocking to the conventional morality of the time—the poetry of O’Hara and others represented a testament to thoughts and desires that refused to be tailored by the prevailing notions of normality and deviance. O’Hara’s “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” compellingly attests to his subjective investment in coterie life as the poet nodded toward members of the New York artistic scene, such as Kenneth Koch, Joan Mitchell, Norman Bluhm, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky, declaring that they “are all happy and young and toothless.” Indeed, the poem’s closing lines courageously assert that “we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible.” These lines identify O’Hara’s milieu as a subjective buffer that allows its members to freely elaborate who they are—or might yet become—within the safety of alternative solidarities or networks of affiliation (constellated in this particular poem between New York and Paris as O’Hara’s poetic voice once again “copresences,” or moves seamlessly between two locales).25 Lehman has explained, however, that O’Hara was particularly aware of the fragility of such bonds among the “herd mentality” of the 1950s. His awareness was expressed in the lines that directly follow, and immediately undercut, his declaration that everything is possible: “René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn’t it / I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don’t believe it.”26 According to Lehman, O’Hara ended his poem on this note of significant doubt because he recognized that the attempt at forging alternative solidarities at the tail end of the American 1950s remained “no superficial pursuit. It was a daring thing to insist on the happiness of the autonomous individual in the teeth of all that mitigated against it.” 27 Despite O’Hara’s poetic admission of disbelief, however, those mitigating forces compelled him and others to create textual economies that might support the ongoing elaboration of culturally devalued desires and expressive longings, and poems such as “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” remain documents of those efforts. As such, many of O’Hara’s poems are testaments that refuse to be closeted. In her study of postwar confessional poetics, Deborah Nelson links the “extravagant self-disclosures” and “the breach of social and poetic decorum” so prevalent in postwar poetry with the constricting modes of privacy imposed by the dominative mores of Cold War containment culture, and she offers a series of observations critical to understanding the stakes of O’Hara’s oeuvre.28 Consider, for instance, Nelson’s suggestion that “if privacy

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was supposed to symbolize the autonomy, freedom, self-determination and repose that the citizen of a democracy most valued, it became increasingly evident in the confessional writing of the period that privacy could also represent isolation, loneliness, domination, and routine. Moreover, it was newly obvious that these deprivations of privacy were unevenly distributed; categories of citizens—women or homosexuals—rather than unlucky individuals were banished to the deprivation, rather than the liberation, of privacy.”29 During a cultural moment in which many railed against McCarthyism and the nefarious activities of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI as violations of the long-cherished American tradition of privacy, poets such as O’Hara created a literature of extravagant self-disclosure. This is especially true of O’Hara’s love poems to James Dean, such as “For James Dean,” published in The New American Poetry, along with works such as “I Live above a Dyke Bar and I’m Happy” and “Vincent and I Inaugurate a Movie Theatre.” To a significant extent O’Hara refused privacy, for he refused to be closeted, and he indeed discovered pleasure in the aesthetics of disclosure, of rebelliously offering for scrutiny the events of his life and the lives of his compatriots.

Technological Romanticism

Such longings were not confined to postwar literary culture. Thomas Streeter has observed that in the dawning era of personal and networked computing, idealistic engineers and hippie-era utopians also “began to reinterpret the act of computing as a form of expression, exploration, or art, to see themselves as artist, rebel, or both, and to find communities with similar experiences that would reinforce that representation,” thus offering us a characterization that clearly resonates with the coterie or scene thinking of that era’s literary avant-garde.30 The figures Streeter has in mind—such as Stewart Brand, Fred Moore, and Doug Englebart—were the generational peers of O’Hara and saw the development of twentieth-century computing as inseparable from the dictates of instrumental rationality, expressed as the desire to call the world and its inhabitants to various forms of computational and predictable order (bolstered by the refinement of the algorithm and the expanded capabilities of the database, and represented in the popular imagination by the huge mainframes of the ENIAC era).31 In a collective attempt at democratizing the information economy by dividing computing potential among greater numbers of people—and thus fostering an informatics of liberation that might face off against a potential 112

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informatics of domination—these figures fostered an approach to computing that might properly be called Byronic, in the sense that it was guided by “a traditionally romantic sense of pleasure that mixed rebellion with a sense of individual creativity and expression.”32 Indeed, romantic conceptions of personhood tended to valorize the “outcast” (or Lamantia’s “marginal”), whose interests were authentic precisely because they remained out of step with the general cultural drift, placing intrinsic value on conscious self-authoring over standardizing ascriptions.33 The faith that you might confront the forces of bureaucracy, centralization, and conformity while armored in the potency of your selfhood—or from within the vigor of your unique and threatening persona—had initially announced itself in resistance to the calculative and standardizing tendencies of industrial modernity during the age of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and it resonated notably within the alternative social longings of the postwar avant-garde and the more romantic precincts of computer science. The literary longings of O’Hara and others, then, might be contextualized as part of a protracted push to democratize the information economy by expanding its narrative breadth through the tools made available by the print era. During that period the desire for participation, or enhanced modes of media interactivity, found eloquent artistic expression in Nam June Paik’s prepared television exhibits, such as 1963’s Participation TV and 1965’s Magnet TV (installations that chronologically straddle the 1964 appearance of Lunch Poems). Paik’s installations allowed viewers to actively manipulate and distort televised images through the use of horseshoe magnets and handheld microphones capable of voice-generated distortions, transforming the mass media spectacles of television into a rudimentary site of interactivity. In retrospect, Paik’s efforts are not unlike O’Hara’s attempt in “The Day Lady Died” and “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)” to extend the poetic space in dialogic response to media events. O’Hara experienced Holiday’s death as a media event transcribed across the front page of the New York Post, and his ensuing expressions of nostalgia and loss anticipate the mass outpouring of user-generated commentary that seems to appear online instantaneously in response to highly publicized celebrity deaths. Indeed, the reporting of such deaths has become central to contemporary media experience, as had the reporting of various celebrity indiscretions, and O’Hara’s poetry had begun auditioning the accompanying modes of interactivity now afforded by social computing just as other thinkers and artists were wrestling with media democratization.

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At first glance, many of us now seem to reside more comfortably in the sort of world O’Hara and others desired: we actively participate in an information economy that functions through the ongoing diversification and commodification of our perspectives, interests, and experiences. Facebook serves as a prime example, for it not only allows us to disseminate a running narrative of our activities and those of our “friends,” it also allows us to filter our social life through common interest groups and other things that we “like” (as does Meetup.com). In the digital era, social computing more convincingly allows for the public elaboration of the self as a collection of specialized or highly personal affinities; this explains why many of my students continue to see their contemporary experience reflected in O’Hara’s poetry, animated as it was by analogous impulses. Indeed, we have now come to assume that this is the way the world is supposed to work, and that assumption is quite understandable, given that the cultural field has seemingly become less monolithic and more responsive to a vast array of predilections or particularities. Obviously, a thick vein of life writing and self-dramatization runs through our canonized print cultures, in advance of similar narrative tendencies encountered in social media, and students often intuit these connections in ways they find both exciting and affirmative at a moment in which increasingly dynamic technical ensembles are heightening the authorial and reportorial aspects of their life experience. Indeed, the alluring prospects for self-authoring continue to pervade social computing platforms that allow for the mass aestheticizing and distribution of life narrative across a new array of screen worlds. Such platforms frame and disseminate our experiences across digitized distribution networks that play on our intense desire to have ourselves be seen and experienced by others, universalizing self-elaborated panoptic practices within the established conventions of screen-based celebrity. Brad Gooch has pointed out that O’Hara’s own tendency to poetically inflate the humdrum or quotidian events of his own life might be traced to his youthful enthusiasm for Hollywood cinema, for the “silver screen was a revelation to this young boy who was so prone to romanticizing reality.”34 Similar modes of self-projection and self-inflation now pervade social computing, and were foreshadowed by the cultural aesthetics explored and elaborated in Lunch Poems. As such, O’Hara’s poetry has much to tell us about the panoptic implications of democratized media experience, or the extent to which collective self-dramatization has evolved into a surveillance structure in the decades since World War II.

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O’Hara’s surveillance aesthetic anticipates the willingness to share information within expressive media that enable the narcissistic mirror structures that have grown so prevalent within social computing, providing both a medium and a veneer for algorithmic tracking. Certainly O’Hara’s works, such as Lunch Poems, show us New York as a pulsing and electrifying network of sociality and culture teeming forth into what we now call the information age, a quality uncannily captured in O’Hara’s 1959 poetic address to Kenneth Koch, “The Fluorescent Tubing Burns Like a Bobby-Soxer’s Ankles,” in which O’Hara identifies their particular New York scene as “a tremendous poetry nervous system / which keeps sending messages along the wireless luxuriance / of distraught experiences and hysterical desires.”35 Indeed, within the cultural aesthetics of computational media, software-based surveillance and tracking are often embraced not out of fear and/or habituation (as figures ranging from George Orwell to Herbert Marcuse to Michel Foucault imagined) but out of self-interest, out of a willingness to be experienced and shared as data in the cultural forms of cybercapital.



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6

Mirror, Mirror Thoughts at the Interface

“There is no profile in the massed days ahead.” —John Ashbery, “The New Spirit”

During the 1960s Andy Warhol began to extrapolate a cultural aesthetic binding one’s voluntary or willful participation in surveillance to the media protocols of celebrity—an aesthetic not unlike the poetics of Frank O’Hara, whom Warhol deeply admired.1 Consider, for instance, Warhol’s 1963 film Sleep, which invites us to tolerate poet John Giorno in the act of sleeping for 321 minutes. Or recall Warhol’s 1964 film Couch, a silent black-and-white film in which a series of vignettes focuses on the infamous red couch in his studio, the Factory. Each vignette consists of a single long take, framed by a stationary camera. One of the more notable sequences features Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky (each of whose work had recently been represented in The New American Poetry) lounging on and around the couch, smoking cigarettes, drinking canned beer, and animatedly discussing an unidentifiable book held by Corso, from which he sometimes reads. What emerges from efforts such as Sleep and Couch is a surveillance aesthetic anchored in an unmoving, dehumanized camera eye whose prying lacks narrative rationale or justification. The camera peers into space simply because it can, piercing the precincts of intimacy and domestic activity with cool indifference. Surveillance becomes a free-floating condition as the camera’s subjects are caught doing something very close to nothing over and over again. As with the poetic voice of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Warhol’s 1960s film work allows us to witness surveillance becoming imbricated with the willingness to share or author information within democratized expressive media— that is, these aesthetic developments helped prepare vast numbers of people to associate intimacy and domesticity with the expectation of scrutiny and spectatorship well in advance of Web 2.0. One of the most enduring contributions of O’Hara and Warhol is that they invite us to consider the relationship between participatory panoptic structures and the democratization of the

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alluring technics of celebrity: both constructed predigital information architectures that foreshadowed the ubiquity of data sharing within computational mediascapes. This rings particularly true in relation to Warhol’s Screen Test series. Whereas scholars of experimental cinema have tended to characterize Warhol’s work in film as an antagonistic response to Hollywood narrative conventions, others, such as Daniel Kane, have contended that Warhol’s Screen Tests, a series of short silent films shot in the original Factory between 1964 and 1966, “are perhaps the pithiest expression of how some avant-garde cinema looks to Hollywood sources to perform a complex blend of parody and what might be called cultural archaeology.” The 472 screen tests, shot with Warhol’s beloved Bolex H-16, parody or critically mimic “the typical Hollywood practice of ‘testing’ a potential actor by giving her a small scene to act out.” 2 The shooting time for each test was two minutes and forty-five seconds; though shot at twenty-four frames per second, they were subsequently screened at sixteen frames per second, and this deceleration might be read as suggestive of heightened scrutiny, a sustained investigation of the camera’s subject in which we become implicated as viewers. In the process the allure of Hollywood stardom collapses into Warhol’s surveillance aesthetic. Warhol instructed each of his subjects not to blink or move, and no one perhaps took these instructions more seriously than Ann Buchanan. In 1964 Buchanan, the wife of Beat writer and publisher Charles Plymell, served as the subject for two of Warhol’s more provocative screen tests. In the first, Buchanan’s unwillingness to blink leads to tears streaming down her face, a moving sight rife with implications. We might, for instance, read Buchanan’s tears as a response to feeling exposed under the camera’s gaze (which I admit was my first reaction). But we also might read her first screen test as a staredown with Warhol’s surveillance apparatus. It was a stare-down with a cost, however, for the human eye cannot match the camera’s tireless unblinking gaze. Such an interpretation finds support in Buchanan’s second screen test, in which she quite slowly and deliberately crosses her eyes. In both instances Buchanan’s engagement with Warhol’s Bolex seems intent on highlighting the mechanicity of the camera eye in relation to its human counterpart, or on presenting a critique of electronic surveillance. Something quite similar might be said of John Ashbery’s 1966 screen test. At first Ashbery appears intimidated, uncomfortable under the Bolex’s gaze, but then he suddenly rises to the moment and meets that gaze with an antagonistic, perhaps even a bellicose, gaze of his own. The testing situation again 118

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becomes a stare-down, although Ashbery’s “confrontational aura,” Kane has observed, is “quickly undermined by a rather rapid back-and-forth movement of his eyeballs.” 3 Clearly Ashbery found the conditions of the screen test distressing, and his vacillation between defiance and mild anguish perhaps has much to tell us about his attitudes toward privacy and the aesthetics of surveillance as they evolved through the late 1960s and into the Watergate era. Indeed, as I plan on showing in what follows, Ashbery’s celebrated poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” might be approached as a repository for those anxieties, for the poem ultimately vacillates between longing for new modes of interactivity and stressing the necessity of privacy to worthy notions of personhood. Thus, while Cold War longings for the democratization of public culture through innovative transformations to expressive media undoubtedly inform “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery’s work from the period also asks us to consider whether the transition from expressive modalities with tightly cordoned thresholds—or with more highly patrolled proscenia—merely refashioned the structures of control (or of social ascription) through the ubiquitous gazing of suddenly intimate others. As such, Ashbery serves as a sobering rejoinder to the expressive liberties dreamed of by O’Hara and other New American Poets, for Ashbery was questioning whether the social and aesthetic longings motivating Donald Allen and Cold War avant-garde poetics might come to function as new containment and surveillance structures, or what we now might call a more user-friendly informatics of domination.

Interactivity and the Aura

Ashbery’s 1975 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is the titular poem of a volume that won the Triple Crown of book awards: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. For the most part, the volume’s title poem has been read as a poetic meditation on the antiessentialist commitments of postmodern aesthetics and poststructural philosophy (or theory), and rightly so, for it certainly remains a peak moment in those schools of creativity and thought.4 An ekphrastic reflection upon Francesco Parmigianino’s 1524 painting Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery’s poem first and foremost scrutinizes our efforts at stabilizing a self-concept, or projecting a consistent sense of personhood, from within layers of mediation and textuality. Ashbery, much in the spirit of postmodernism and poststructuralism, saw these efforts beset by pitfalls.

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When Parmigianino painted his image as he saw it reflected in a convex mirror, he captured the unavoidable warping or distorting effects of self-projection, or self-imagining, by which I mean our inevitable inability to provide ourselves and others with a full accounting of who we are. In Ashbery’s poem, the optical aberration produced by the curvature of Parmigianino’s mirror stands figuratively at times for self-portraiture’s failure to reconstruct personhood in all its dimensions. As a result of the mirror’s convexity, Ashbery’s poem tells us, the painter’s face “swims” provocatively “toward and away [from]” the viewer simultaneously—both inviting and discouraging an engagement with its audience—as Parmigianino’s medium struggles to hold his “life englobed.”5 Constructing a unified image of the self, Ashbery’s poem points out, most often requires that the artist “rule out” all that is “extraneous” to that effort “forever.” We are subsequently left with an “otherness, this / ‘Not-being-us’ is all there is to look at / In the mirror.”6 Our efforts at self-representation are most often confronted by the irreducible ineffability of personhood—this not-being-us within the intrinsic convexity of expressive media—an insight that establishes Ashbery’s poem as emblematic not only of the poststructural and postmodern moment during which it was composed but also of the corresponding media histories imbricated within those schools of thought. Ashbery’s equally pronounced longing to convert the site of ekphrasis into a medium of intimate address—his desire to be able to address Parmigianino directly, which is expressed throughout the poem—should be considered in relation to the contemporaneous democratization of the user interface within electronic culture, affixing the concept of convexity within a site of notable tension throughout. During the period of the poem’s composition, television screens, still characterized by the convexity necessary to coax imagery from cathode ray tubes, were on the cusp of serving as the early monitors for personal computing systems such as the Apple II (1977), the Atari 800 (1979), and the Commodore 64 (1982). Implied within the design of these early personal computers was a yearning to interact in a more agential manner with television technology. This longing was also seen in the concurrent emergence of first-generation (1972 to 1977) gaming platforms (spearheaded by engineers such as Ralph Baer) and the celebrated prepared television exhibits of video artist Nam June Paik, who has been credited with coining the term electronic superhighway as the moniker for telecomputing as early as 1974.7 We might think of the interactive longings of Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” as indicative of and simultaneously contributing to 120

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these concomitant efforts at democratizing computing and the electronic information economy. Ashbery at times desired a more porous interface, or more fully interactive threshold, that would allow him to address the forward-looking mannerist painter and printmaker yet englobed within his unresponsive screen world—although Ashbery came to question the subjective ramifications of that intimacy or contact. In an important sense, Parmigianino’s painting is about the limitations of painting—especially the confining dimensionality of the painterly surface as he inherited it. This is why Ashbery’s poem, on more than one occasion, mentions Parmigianino as being “englobed,” or trapped, within the cramped and disingenuous space of personhood, his self-conception arrested in a wavering stillness pushing against the confining or sequestering surface of his medium, warping it outward toward the viewer. Ashbery went so far as to imagine that Parmigianino “would like to stick [his] hand / Out of the globe, but its dimension / What carries it, will not allow it.” He humorously reminds the painter, “Francesco, your hand is big enough / To wreck the sphere.”8 Thus at times Ashbery interprets the warping effect achieved by Parmigianino as representing an effort at asserting himself into a third-dimensional axis, just as Ashbery’s poetic language simultaneously grapples with its own confined dimensionality on the printed page, expressed most explicitly in his direct addresses to his muse as “you” and as Francesco throughout. Ekphrasis, I suppose, is always a rhetorical or dialogic exercise carried out between the work of one artist and that of another, but in this instance Ashbery longed to question and converse directly with the artist responsible for the object being described. This makes Ashbery’s effort markedly different from Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in The Iliad or from John Keats’s description of the urn in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—though more obviously akin to Frank O’Hara’s direct entreaties to actors such as James Dean and Lana Turner from within the space of his own poems. This longing seemingly presaged the interactive celebrity culture that has emerged so forcefully within the aesthetics of social computing. These longings for intimate exchange are more characteristic of the lyric mode, addressed as it is to an absent other, than of ekphrasis, so that we might say that Ashbery renovated ekphrastic poetry along lyrical lines. In her analysis of Ashbery’s poem, Helen Vendler has suggested just that, observing that in “its usual form, the lyric offers us the representation of a single voice, alone, recording and analyzing and formulating and changing its mind. Although no one else is present in fact, the solitary poet is frequently

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addressing someone else, someone not in the room.”9 As far as literature goes, the intimate yet invisible listener to whom Vendler alludes is a fantastical projection based on the expressive capacities of the privatizing bookform, or of its objecthood, in the sense that it remains aesthetically incapable of extending itself immediately to its addressee (across intrinsically formal spatiotemporal boundaries) in the fashion of today’s computer and phonebased communication platforms. Yet in addressing Parmigianino openly as “you” throughout, Ashbery’s poem emphasizes the attempt at communicating across the entrenched limitations of two-dimensionality, just as the painter struggles with being sequestered within the warping but uncooperative contours of his own medium. To that end Vendler has remarked that Ashbery’s poem addresses “Parmigianino not as someone dead but as someone alive and listening. In fantasizing new personal relations not available in the conventional present, [Ashbery intimates] a Utopia in which such closeness would be an accessible part of the known.”10 Whereas Ashbery momentarily imagined a communicative utopia, Walter Benjamin had already bemoaned the possible extinction of Western artistic culture, condensed into the form of the “aura.” What Benjamin famously termed aura in his landmark 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” ostensibly refers to the ability of the twodimensional mimetic surface to maintain an uncompromising distance, to hold our subjectivity at bay while the work being observed continues to exist solely in one time and place, or at a single sacral coordinate (as opposed to the culture of the copy already being realized across the twentieth-century mass media of Benjamin’s moment).11 Benjamin’s aura remains an essence that is not intimately available to us; it is suspended in its unique sanctification, a quality that “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” likens early on to the Western metaphysics of “the soul”: The soul has to stay where it is, Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane, The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind, Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay Posing in this place. It must move As little as possible. This is what the portrait says.12 According to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” aesthetic authenticity could continue to exist only outside the technical 122

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capacities of electrified reproduction and its distributive information architectures, which dissipate or tarnish the aura at the cost of art’s inviolability. That authenticity, however, only comes to exist as a mode of retroactive transcendentalism, for Benjamin cannot conceive of the aura until he has found himself confronted with the enhanced reproducibility of objects and texts within modernity. At times, Ashbery’s poem yearns for something other than the comforting dimensionalities of Benjamin’s residual romanticism, which was also clearly the case with Allen Kaprow’s happenings, the experimental street theater of the Black Arts Movement, psychedelic rock gatherings, and other participatory works from the postwar era that worked to obliterate the proscenium and long-standing conceptual distinctions between artist and audience (or the defining conditions of culture and who might create it). Vendler makes clear that Ashbery longed for what we now refer to as interactivity—a more immediate structure of intimacy—while remaining well aware that his address to Parmigianino must still take place in a site of tangible expressive blockage rather than transmission. Indeed, Parmigianino’s painting expresses a similar desire or longing to break free of its representational dimensions, and in that way it inspired (or served as one of the muses for) Ashbery’s longing for the more dynamic interface that the poem dramatizes or approximates within the limitations of paper-based expression. For Parmigianino, this longing for interactivity (or to no longer be “englobed”) appears to have been the logical outcome of the mannerist rebellion against earlier Renaissance portraiture, answering the clarity and balance of realist aesthetics with the mild visual instability and representational murkiness seen in Parmigianino’s portrait. But we might say that the expressive forms struggling at their communicative limits in Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” have now come to exist within the very same interface on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where images (including “selfies”) subsist in communicative relation with the varying textual responses of the viewer (or friends and followers), and these images can indeed respond and fluidly reinvent themselves in relation to those responses through a variety of communicative forms, including writing, hyperlinks, images, and audio files. Such platforms aid us in elaborating horizontal networks of intimacy in the immediate present, unfolding instantaneously in real time. They are cybernetic thresholds that enable a teeming social aesthetic capable of materializing a live, dynamic exchange of information and data that comes to assume one of the primary forms of our social relations.

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But “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” remains in tension with the interactivity it craves and foreshadows, especially in its closing moments, in which it suddenly reasserts the limited conditions of Ashbery’s and Parmigianino’s media forms, “beseeching” the painter to “withdraw that hand, / Offer it no longer as a shield or greeting, / The shield of a greeting, Francesco.”13 Again, the “shield of a greeting” refers to the realities of necessarily limited existential elaboration within the realms of the aesthetic, since a representative part always stands in for a whole. The phenomenology of German philosopher Edmund Husserl made clear that we can never know an object (or an “other”) in its totality, because even an object in our hand remains partly shielded from our sight and our touch, and Ashbery’s poem meditates on that realization throughout.14 Surrendering his longing to extend his expressive mode across the third-dimensional plane in order to interface with Parmigianino’s longing convexity, Ashbery closed the poem by admitting that he would much rather be possessed by the sensation of “looking through the wrong end / Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed faster than that of light to flatten ultimately / Among the features of the room.”15 In peering through the wrong end of a Newtonian reflective telescope (i.e., through the light source), one sees the world made minuscule on the other side of a concave mirror. As such, Ashbery seemed to reject the interactivity, or new structure of intimacy, that he and his subject had been craving all along, reasserting instead the qualitative differences between the printed page and painterly surface and thus sentencing himself and Parmigianino back into the alienation that allowed them to remain imaginary abstractions and unknown quantities. In the act of closing down the network between Parmigianino and himself in order to reembrace the object conditions or limitations of his paper-based medium, Ashbery seemingly contradicted what Vendler says about his ache to intimately connect, but the point of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is in this tension itself, of Ashbery teetering uncomfortably on the cusp between the communicative capacities of long-entrenched and yet evolving interactive media.

Surveillance Culture and the Politics of Opacity

“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” deliberates on the possibilities of interactivity versus the desirability of privacy embodied in traditional aesthetic forms, and that deliberation discovers a special impetus in the evolving quali 124

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ties of the surveillance society during the mid-1970s, though Ashbery already seemed leery of these qualities during his 1966 screen test with Warhol. Robert von Hallberg observes that Ashbery’s 1972 poem “The System” principally documents the poet’s unease and excitement amid the breakdown of the Cold War consensus; this analysis might allow us in turn to consider Ashbery’s anxieties about surveillance and emergent media. A poetic meditation initiated by Ashbery’s assertion that “the system was breaking down,” the poem (according to this assessment) registers the extent to which the counterculture and other social movements brought an end to the social order that had prevailed in the United States since the end of World War II.16 Then again, Ashbery’s poetry from the mid-1970s evinces an attendant set of apprehensions, concerns that a new surveillance society was emerging within the wake of the counterculture—that in some deeply disturbing way, the counterculture and other movements for social change had not won the day but had helped set the scene for a new informatics of domination, new canalizations of our subjectivities. Indeed, Stephen Paul Miller interprets “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” as a philosophical deliberation on the proliferating surveillance culture of the 1970s, especially as it was given public shape in the events of the Watergate scandal. Miller contextualizes his reading of Ashbery’s poem within a more general argument that an expansive or ubiquitous surveillance apparatus emerged in the wake of the turbulent 1960s, and this emergence (or reterritorialization of power) was engaged not only by Ashbery’s poem but also by Michel Foucault’s seminal work on panopticism, Discipline and Punish, which was published the same year. In terms of Ashbery’s poem, Miller points out that by the mid-1970s convex mirrors were increasingly employed “to maintain security in elevators, building lobbies, and commercial shops.”17 Miller also observes that if “one looks into a convex mirror at all, it is impossible not to see everything that is in the entire scene in front of that mirror. This includes the viewer her- or himself, forcing the viewer to be her or his own agent of surveillance.” Yet obviously the image captured within this rudimentary surveillance technology simultaneously distorts that which is before it, so consequently Ashbery’s poem “repeatedly returns to the basic issue of one’s existence in the context of a convex mirror that modifies one’s existence within a totalizing context”—that is, one increasingly encounters oneself as a distorted yet identifiable apparition within newly prevalent surveillance architectures.18 Paired with my analysis of the poem’s engagement with interactivity, Miller’s insights allow us to see the convex mirror as a

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composite symbol, for convexity comes to represent surveillance (i.e., the warping outward of Parmigianino’s private cell into public space) and new propensities for interfacing and interactivity at the same time. Furthermore, the Watergate affair resonates with the concerns of Ashbery’s poem. Both demonstrate the emergence of a new surveillance modality that even Foucault missed in his analysis of panopticism: the implication of everyone as participants and facilitators of surveillance, or as actors within an architecture of shared authority, not only condoning surveillance through their acquiescence (as in Foucault’s model) but willingly informing on themselves, posing for their security close-up, in a manner of speaking. Miller notes that “the subject’s placement of authority in, and eventual identification with, the image in the convex mirror replaces the hidden and nebulous observer as a surveillance mechanism’s linchpin”—at least as presented in Foucault’s notions of panopticism.19 This participatory mechanism is powerfully figured in the case of Richard Nixon, who became caught by the very surveillance architectures that he employed against others. Not only did Nixon’s administration engage in an array of clandestine surveillance operations against his political adversaries—including the Democratic National Committee— but his own fondness for surveillance technology led to the installation of a tape-recording system in the Oval Office itself. Recordings from those tapes eventually implicated him in a number of questionable activities that in turn led to popular condemnation and his resignation from the presidency. In responding to the revelation that Nixon had been secretly tape-recording his oval office conversations, Andy Warhol notably replied, “Everybody should be bugged all the time.”20 Indeed, “the system” had not fully collapsed but had been reconstituted in the wake of 1960s radicalism as a more extensive and participatory surveillance network akin to what Warhol had been imagining in his films from the 1960s—including his screen tests, in which Ashbery had been a surly and troubled participant in 1966. Certainly Warhol’s foresight could be witnessed in the 1973 birth of reality television with the airing of An American Family, in which the media’s annexation of domesticity became a form of popular entertainment, challenging long-standing notions about the value of privacy through the willful assent of those being filmed. 21 Moreover, by the mid-1970s Warhol’s Interview magazine had also entered popular circulation—or popular consciousness, as it were—publishing primarily unedited taped interviews with artists and celebrities. Interview had its beginnings in 1969 as a free underground publication cofounded by Warhol 126

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and British journalist John Wilcock. At first it circulated mostly among Warhol’s extended coterie and other habitués of the downtown New York art scene, although from the outset it had been characterized by Warhol’s fondness for the aesthetics of surveillance. According to Andreas Killen, “In the same way that the camera in Warhol’s films had recorded everything to the point of utter boredom, so the tape recorder that was the essential tool of Interview magazine registered absolutely everything no matter how trivial,” a description that continues to resonate today with characterizations of social computing platforms such as Twitter. 22 Coupled with Ashbery’s performance during his 1966 screen test, the continued emergence of participatory surveillance culture (documented in Warhol’s work from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s) helps clarify why Ashbery chose to resequester Parmigianino (and himself) at the conclusion of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Consider this: While Warhol’s Factory scene ostensibly parodied the Hollywood studio system with its stable of eccentric stars, that parody had also taken up the transgressive cultural project of the New American Writers, documented in Allen’s description of their use of coteries or alternative circulation networks. Indeed, in his screen test series Warhol included New American Poets such as Ashbery, Ginsberg, and Orlovsky with his outsider milieu of Factory regulars such as International Velvet (Susan Bottomly) and actress Edie Sedgwick, notable members of the prewar avant-garde such as Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp, and exemplars of the 1960s counterculture such as Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, and Susan Sontag. The screen tests represent a rogues’ gallery of sorts, a network of transgressive and underground icons, and in a powerfully insightful way Warhol’s gallery presaged the democratic extension of the mild sense of celebrity now experienced through blogging, social networking, and other media in which previously marginalized subjects roam the expanded and democratized cultural center of social computing in Web 2.0. Reva Wolf ’s influential scholarly work on Warhol helps bring that genealogy convincingly into the light when she suggests that Warhol’s Screen Tests replicates a Hollywood cultural economy anchored within the allure of flattery—or within the appeal to vanity. 23 The animating idea of Wolf ’s analysis is that film practices associated with Hollywood are encoded with the promise of posterity, the allure of being worthy of acetate-based preservation. And indeed, a similar promise continues to pervade social computing platforms that allow for the mass aestheticizing and distribution of life narrative across a new array of screen worlds. Such platforms not only continue to frame and

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project the inane and humdrum in the wake of home movie (and then video) cameras. They do so across digitized distribution networks that play on our intense desire to have some version of ourselves seen and experienced by others, further universalizing self-elaborated panoptic practices within the established conventions of screen-based celebrity. It was in response to these protocols in their embryonic stages that Ashbery took his stand against interactivity and surveillance, suggesting that what remains most valuable about the qualities of poetical space is to be discovered not in its marginal networks (as Allen had it) but in its embrace of opacity rather than transparency. Although the works of his fellow New York School poet Frank O’Hara largely rejected privacy for a public poetics that revealed quotidian and even unflattering details about those in his inner circle, eschewing closeting for an informatics of liberation (or for a more expansive and revelatory expressive network for Cold War marginality), Ashbery questioned whether O’Hara’s brand of confessional poetics might easily be absorbed into contemporary capitalism. In Ashbery’s 1966 Book Week article, “Frank O’Hara’s Question,” composed during the same year as Ashbery’s screen test with Warhol, the poet referred to 1960s America as a “supremely tribal civilization,” bemoaning the fact that “even artists feel compelled to band together in marauding packs, where the loyalty-oath mentality has pervaded outer Bohemia, and where Grove Press subway posters invite the lumpenproletariat to ‘join the Underground Generation,’ as though this were as simple a matter as joining the Pepsi Generation, which it probably is.” 24 Whereas Allen and others posited the New American Poetry on the margins of Cold War conformity—represented in cultural practices such as loyalty oaths—Ashbery identified the self-professed literary underground with outsider branding, with the type of niche marketing that has come to define online commerce. Moreover, in “The New York School of Poets,” a talk he delivered in New York in 1968 at the National Book Awards symposium, Poetry Now, Ashbery professed his dislike for the New York School as a moniker “because it seems to be trying to pin me down to something. That’s the trouble with all of these labels like Beat, San Francisco School, Deep Image, Objectivist, Concrete and so on. Their implication seems to be that poetry ought to be just one thing and stick to it.” 25 As early as the 1960s, Ashbery was suspicious about the rationales of marketing and branding as realized within coterie culture; he likened such efforts to niche capitalism, which diminished his poetic intentions and indeed his personhood rather than creating liberated personal space for the marginal 128

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or those deemed eccentric in one way or another. Ashbery rendered those suspicions ingeniously in his 1975 collaboration with Joe Brainard for Black Sparrow Press, The Vermont Journal, the collection he authored just before he wrote “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Throughout, Ashbery’s writing, which ranges from lists to prose to poetry, appears facing Brainard’s simple sketches. Most relevant in regard to Ashbery’s distrust of coterie culture or the notion of underground poetics is his list of contemporary poets, which appears undivided by school or region. While many of the New American Poets are on this list, so are Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and M. S. Merwin, all of whom appeared in the 1957 Meridian volume The New Poets of England and America, which was derided by both Donald Allen and critic Kenneth Rexroth.26 This list appears opposite a simple illustration by Brainard of eight human figures arranged in a circle on their backs with their arms outstretched, fingers nearly but not quite touching. The image seems to contradict Allen’s (and indeed O’Hara’s) romanticization or idealization of coteries as constitutive of the avant-garde (or new). In other words, this drawing advocates the dissolution of the network model of outsider poetry on behalf of a more extensive rendering of contemporary poetry that flatly rejects one of the editorial rationales of The New American Poetry. In the process, Ashbery and Brainard erased the boundary between establishment and antiestablishment poetics, or between academic and antiacademic writing. Here and elsewhere Ashbery simultaneously resisted the organizing logic of coterie and what he referred to as the overpowering culte du moi (selfcult) of O’Hara’s poetry.27 For instance, in a 1983 Paris Review interview Ashbery admitted that “I have always been averse to talking about myself, and so I don’t write about my life the way the confessional poets do. I don’t want to bore people with experiences of mine that are simply versions of what everybody goes through. For me, poetry starts after that point.” 28 Ashbery named “Litany,” the lead poem of his 1979 volume As We Know, as particularly representative of his poetic intentions: the dual columns of writing that traverse its length attempt instead to “reproduce the polyphony that goes on inside me. . . . After all, one is constantly changing one’s mind and thereby becoming something slightly different.” 29 This cultivated sense of obscurity, Ashbery suggested, not only coincided with his disavowal of confessional or autobiographical poetics based on some stable, or knowable, and thus expressible notion of the self, it also represented his attempt to write so discursively that his work cannot be easily rendered or categorized within the descriptive aims of critics wishing to restore its stable

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meanings. His poetry comes, in other words, with its dimensionless and meandering excesses preconceived. Perhaps no poem encapsulates this tendency more epically than Flow Chart (1991), Ashbery’s tour de force of roving lyricism, composed of 4,794 lines of psychic associations and reversals. The poem, one can only surmise, was ironically titled, because its content exists in explicit tension with the orderly, diagrammatic representation of the algorithmic process represented by a flow chart. Long-standing characterizations of Ashbery as “nonpolitical” hinge on this cultivated obscurity, for the references or targets of his poetry often remain ambiguous and vague. But it is precisely here that he made a provocative stance for the unique qualities of poetic expression. In “Poetical Space,” a talk given at Shirayuri Women’s University in Tokyo in 1989, Ashbery engaged poetics as a phenomenological practice, by which I mean he attempted to make explicit the unique ways in which poetry classifies and describes phenomena, chiefly objects and processes in physical space. Throughout this talk Ashbery suggested, as he did in works such as “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” that all expressive media necessarily distort the objects they represent. For Ashbery, what distinguished twentieth-century Western art, and especially poetics, from other architectures of expression is that art more thoroughly accepts this distortion as a given and in turn begins to elaborate creatively on it. Over the course of his comments Ashbery offered the embrace of distortion as an overriding ethos of Western poetry’s descriptive engagement with the world and its phenomena, proffering T. S. Eliot’s description of the Thames in The Wasteland as his primary example of what he terms “antidescriptiveness.” Ashbery summed up Eliot’s antidescriptive description thus: “Eliot’s ungrateful rhythms do convey something, something perhaps more to the point for us today: the blotchy, out of focus scene, the river refusing to roll, the awkwardly laid-on oil, tar, and sweat add up to a picture of crisis that is mental, but just as surely takes in the visual world, transforming it as it does so into a blurred copy that is all the more meaningful for being imprecise and out of focus—accurate in its inaccuracy.” For Ashbery this was poetical phenomenology, “a process of description and classification that succeeds in its twin tasks precisely by shirking them,” a poetics that remains in tension with categorization and the positing of knowable essences, or with confident renderings of things-in-themselves.30 Ashbery’s work rather consistently suggests that we come to discover the restless voluminosity of the self when we are confronted by attempts to call it 130

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to narrative order, leading to his realization in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” that “the surprise, the tension are in the concept” of personhood, “rather than [in] its realization.” 31 In other words, it is in the tension between essentialist modeling (aimed at social ascription) and subjective inconsistency that one might locate the experience known as living. Ashbery continued to engage this notion in late works such as “Image Problem” (2007), complaining that the “stakes” of living have become “spectacularly boring,” then asserting that the “solution may therefore be / to narrow the zone of reaction to a pinprick / and ignore what went on before, even when we called it life.” 32 Writing in the twenty-first century, Ashbery cautioned us that we should continue to keep our proclivities close to the vest, that we should reveal as little as possible to those forces and entities involved in profit-enhancing information aggregation, a point made quite explicitly in the poem’s contemplative close: Sure, their market research told them otherwise, and we got factored into whatever profit taking may be encumbering the horizon now, as afternoon looms. We should ignore the warning signs, but should we? Should we all? Perhaps we should.33 Undoubtedly, Ashbery’s late poetry continued to explore the palpable dread at being rendered as a determinate concept, of being ascribed as a factor in market research. Indeed, the systematic gathering of information subject to instantaneous analysis now suffuses the networked structures of Web 2.0 in ways that Ashbery’s existential concerns foreshadowed throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Code within Code within Code . . .

Today digital interfacing technologies make operational the dense and dynamic data structures concealed within the aestheticized information that constitutes the visual and textual surfaces of social computing (i.e., our digitalized cultures of visibility and self-imagining). In enabling new outlets of expression, cybercapitalism has come to function through honoring the networked manifestation of difference, or what we might now think of as our algorithmically determined niche in the world. In the social and political rebellions of the 1950s and 1960s, the demands for greater expressive freedom,

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moral license, and subjective leeway came largely in reaction to the turgid or stilted visions of mainstream normativity offered by centralized, entrenched media architectures. The exceedingly tangible outcomes of these rebellions included the emergence of postmodern and poststructural antiessentialism (or antifoundationalism) and the subsequent development of a more adaptive niche capitalism that was capable of transforming an exceptional quantity of outsider identities and marginalized cultural forms into profitable experience commodities. Despite accusations of solipsism and self-absorption, Ashbery in fact did not participate in the culte du moi as a mode of transgression, as so many of the New American Poets did. Rather, in the meditations on interfacing in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” the multimedia collaboration of The Vermont Journal, the projective and circuitous free associations of Flow Chart, and the dual columns of “Litany,” Ashbery created critical analogues foregrounding the evolving features of the information society that he rather deftly undercut. These technomodernist aesthetic experiments—mirroring a media environment built around interfacing, multiple information streams, and collaborative creation—simultaneously and intentionally resist the canalizing modes of analysis that have since become intrinsic to algogracy. Considered, then, against the backdrop of our computational present, Ashbery’s oeuvre anticipates the longing for new media-based intimacies while also demonstrating the impossibility of such intimacies as a result of the necessarily wavering, partial personhood capable of being established within expressive forms, along with corresponding code-based efforts at assigning us to our proper essences. Here the fluidities of experience and consciousness certainly take on an ethical hue—and perhaps even more so in retrospect, as they seem to be a prescient critique of the confessional and participatory experience economy so integral to the information society. As such, Ashbery’s poetics ushers us into a thicket of perspectival and perceptual questions that remain powerfully contemporary and increasingly urgent. In works such as “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” for instance, Ashbery expressed his obdurate desires for opacity while also modeling the inevitability of identities networked over panoptic mirror structures. That is, Ashbery’s poem ultimately eschews intimacy with a like-minded artist—a coterie of two—even as he remained enfolded within the network of its possibility. To an important extent, Ashbery’s concerns anticipated the apprehensions Jacques Derrida expresses in Paper Machine (2005) about the digitization of cultural practices. Faced with the ascendancy of computer-based writing at 132

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the close of the twentieth century, Derrida admitted his increasing unease about submitting “to the rules of a machine that basically I understand nothing about. I know how to make it work (more or less) but I don’t know how it works. . . . Not knowing, in this case, is a distinctive trait, one that does not apply with pens or with typewriters.” 34 Though insisting that we remain mindful of the ways in which digital culture merely adopts or extends the formal and narrative qualities of the book-form or paper-based literary experimentation—something I have attempted to do in this study—Derrida nevertheless remained anxious about what he identified as “the internal demon of the apparatus,” the new layers of technical depth and entanglement intrinsic to computing culture but absent from previous expressive forms such as the codex, sculpture, painting, or film. I would suggest that Ashbery ultimately expressed a similar apprehension throughout much of his work.35 Derrida’s work in Paper Machine has been invaluable in helping me to see Ashbery’s efforts in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” as internal to a monumental transformation in Western representational practices; Alexander Galloway’s recent work on interface cultures has also been helpful. Guided by the insights of the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser, Galloway suggests that two uniquely different modes of interfacing have come to characterize Western expressive practices. The first mode of interfacing—embodied in the traditional painterly surface, the paper-based book-form, the commercial radio signal, and the classic era of film and network television—existed ostensibly as “a two-dimensional plane with meaning embedded in it or delivered through it” in a fashion that we have now come to think of as “not user-friendly.” 36 The era of social computing, however, has since fully transformed the two-dimensionality long dominant in Western expressive culture into the responsive capacities of the agential interface. Galloway so lucidly explains that today’s “interface is not something that appears before you” like the untouchable painting in a gallery or museum space; rather, it serves as “a gateway that opens up and allows passage to some place beyond.” 37 The work of Ashbery, Paik, Warhol, and others from the 1960s and 1970s documents and conceptually facilitates this transformation from the inaccessible aura to the responsive interface as it was occurring. These interface cultures overlay algorithmic tracking and recommender systems, however, as the digitized lyricisms of our age become a new staging ground for the assertion of essences and predilections based on our histories of participation. These developments, conceptually anticipated by Ashbery, have led even dedicated technologists such as Jaron Lanier to declare that the “technical

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few” have become “very rich building giant cross-referenced dossiers on masses of people . . . put to use by financiers, advertisers, insurers, or other concerns nurturing fantasies of operating the world by remote control.” 38 Lanier suggests that the time has come for us to identify these efforts for what they are, to acknowledge that what we are dealing with in terms of Google, Facebook, YouTube, Equifax, Amazon, and others is capitalist information asymmetry in which online empires (monopolies, in the old vernacular) concentrate wealth through uncompensated value extraction in the form of user information, driven by what Lanier views as a delusional collective fantasy that technology is getting smarter and more prescient when in fact it is merely mining human activity for patterns through surveillance architectures embedded in code.39 From Lanier’s point of view, networked data extraction amounts to digitized spying, which is the animating concern of the information economy; it reveals algorithmic suggestion as an invasive mode of social engineering camouflaged by the banners of consumer choice, experiential liberty, and democratized participation in the realization or evolution of culture.40 Thus, contained within a new and yet evolving informatics of liberation is a new and yet evolving informatics of domination.

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Chapter Six

Epilogue Contextualizing Quantification

Not all who appear lost require directions, but on today’s Internet they will receive them anyway—and ever more frequently. Our enhanced ability to share something of ourselves with others, across spatiotemporal boundaries in real time, has become subject to new and complex predations. Those directions or recommendations represent the computational output of analytics embedded within and beneath the code-based, navigable, and vigorous self-projections enabled by the Internet—or from within an abyss of recursive mirroring and aggregating guidance data over which our liberated reflections now leave a lasting trail (or data shadow). Within that recursive abyss, mathematics comes to live out part of its intellectual history as a technical medium of global capital and information extraction elaborated as software, or code. The responsive, democratized interface allows for the cybernetic aggregation of tracking data in the age of algorithmic networks and perpetually attentive recommender systems that reflect quantified (and one might even say choreographed) versions of ourselves to ourselves through math-based likelihoods and probabilities, the density of its works masked, so to speak, within the representational or semiotic surfaces constitutive of the networked venues or platforms of self-performance. It is within this algorithmic context that the meditations composing Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” along with his thoughts on representational opacity, remain strikingly relevant. According to contemporary theorists of technology such as Evgeny Morozov, Alexander Galloway, and Jaron Lanier, many of us fail to see these computational processes as ideological, largely on account of the pervasive assumption that mathematics allows a deeper access to the user’s being and reality as it truly is. Indeed, this is one of the fundamental claims of algocracy, that the world can indeed be known, that the epistemological clarity inherent in mathematics keeps the possibility of certainty open. Moreover, math

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is seen as providing a social analytics that might possibly solve the human dilemma laid out so perceptively by William James in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”—namely, that however close we may feel to another human being, we can never fully penetrate the depths, contours, and contents of his or her consciousness. We can never completely trust our knowledge of even our most intimate relations, gathered through sensual data and language-based expressions of intention, motivation, and feeling.1 Operative at this Jamesian chasm, certain iterations of code have come to embody the conviction that mathematical rationality might pry beneath this performative armor of personhood—that we might peel away the opacity of freedom so deftly replicated in Ashbery’s shutting down the imagined channel of intimate address between himself and Parmigianino. We might in turn see recent trends in the digital humanities toward software-based reading and the mining of big data merely as institutional adjustments to the ascendancy of technical and algorithmic reasoning within cybercapitalism. Indeed, the ethical relativism and antifoundationalism so prevalent within humanities disciplines since the late 1960s may have contributed dialectically to this contemporary aching for ideas and expressive forms possessed by knowable or definable qualities. It may have engendered a new ontotheology animated by the authoritative grandeur of the absolute, welling up from within quantitative rationality and the precincts of algorithmic divination to seal the ontological and administrative chasm left in the wake of poststructuralism and postmodern thought (a chasm across which Ashbery’s work, as explored in the last chapter, appears poised). If we are willing to accept that we inhabit an age in which the quantitative and algorithmic have become ontotheological, we might in turn see recent trends in the digital humanities toward data mining and textual mapping— dependent, as they are, on machine-reading software able to extract particular information, data, or knowledge from a text—as institutional symptoms of that ontotheology. And indeed, these critical practices are gaining institutional traction alongside increased funding for and emphasis upon the STEM disciplines in higher education. Chapter 22 of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, detailing the epiphany of the fictional Chris Fogle at DePaul University, contributed to my own epiphany regarding the intertwining relationship between humanities-based relativism and ascendant computational certainty as it continues to unfold within our institutional and scholarly present. When Chris recalls his college years at DePaul, he complains that the inability of his humanities professors 136

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to assert anything as a usable truth or verifiable wisdom had transformed his literature and humanities classrooms into the breeding ground for “nihilists” and “wastoids” schooled merely in the opinionated lessons of a professoriate mostly interested in “connecting with students” over vaguely detailed political positions. Chris in turn becomes completely enamored with accounting because it provides a computational way of analyzing the world as capital and as a tax structure, verifiable through testing and stock formulas of advanced financial rationality. Accounting and other mathematical disciplines, he explains, supply a “diagnosis of the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated, and that now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling, and organizing that torrential flow of info.”2 Quantitative reasoning provides Chris with a comforting notion of ontological stability in the wake of antifoundationalism and antiessentialism. His experience points toward the ways in which the quantitative may have come to inhabit our “post-truth” era as its internal nemesis, its interpenetrating opposite, its syzygy. Chris’s abandonment of the humanities (and the disciplinary legacies of cultural critique) for the haven of quantitative certainty resonates within Alan Liu’s influential 2012 essay “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” on the lack of cultural criticism in the digital humanities. Liu’s principal concern is that “the digital humanities have been noticeably missing in action on the cultural-critical scene.”3 Liu makes his claim against the backdrop of the past four decades or so of educational history, in which humanities departments inherited the spirit of 1960s dissent and became home to vibrant scholarly traditions of cultural critique. These traditions were conversant with the concerns of the writers and artists treated in this study, along with those of a great many others not represented here. In departing from these traditions, the digital humanities often appear to ignore the economic and sociopolitical stakes of their endeavors. Liu notes that “when the order comes down from the funding agencies, university administrations, and other bodies mediating today’s dominant socioeconomic and political beliefs, digital humanists just concentrate on pushing the ‘execute’ button . . . without pausing to reflect on the relationship of the whole digital juggernaut to the new world order.”4 I believe that Liu’s concerns can be boiled down to the following statement: The digital humanities risk becoming just an extension of the corporate-driven technocracy endemic to neoliberalism. The ongoing marginalization of the humanities within the contemporary university

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consequently sidelines the traditions of critique that Liu values. By avoiding the issue of institutional history and its relation to larger political and economic transformations, Liu charges, digital humanists risk assuming the modes of quietism and assent that have proven such an effective model of survival for the hard sciences and technical disciplines. Certainly, in an excessively corporate and bureaucratic university system enamored with STEM, the digitization of the humanities appears to be an institutional adjustment with possibly serious consequences for the future of knowledge and inquiry. The Babel Working Group, an oppositional scholarly collective, has taken up just this development in its evolving project, Disrupting the Digital Humanities. A book of that same title is forthcoming from Punctum Books, edited by Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel; in the meantime, working papers in this project can be found online.5 In Kim and Stommel’s introduction, it is possible to hear the reverberating echoes of the social ethos of the New American Poetry and subsequent cultural movements populated by an extensive cast of Lamantia’s “marginals.” Consider, for instance, Kim and Stommel’s insistence that ultimately “it’s exactly the fringes, the outliers, that make the Digital Humanities both lovely and rigorous. Many scholars originally were drawn to the Digital Humanities because we felt like outcasts, because we had been marginalized within the academic community. We gathered together because our work collectively disrupted the hegemony and insularity of ‘traditional’ humanities. Our work was collaborative, took risks, flattened hierarchies, shared resources, and created new and risky paradigms for humanities work.” But that is clearly not the case any longer. As the digital humanities have become institutionalized, they have been integrated into university structures in interest-laden ways that the editors describe as an elision, a constriction traceable to an increasingly palpable “interest in only government or institutionally funded database projects and tools, and a turn away from critical analysis of its own embedded practices in relation to issues around multilingualism, race, gender, disability, and global praxis.” According to Kim and Stommel, the motley crew responsible for the digital humanities—for attempting to compel humanistic inquiry into nonhierarchical arenas of expression and indeed beyond the “book-shaped frame”—has been remarginalized by “neoliberal impulses” heralding “efficiency, and the faux-revolution of technology bound up in the trappings of commerce.” A digital humanities field without sufficient theory and reflection—or that avoids the contemplation of more extensive stakes—might be playing unwit 138

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tingly into the further marginalization of the very real social and political concerns that have made the humanities so intellectually vibrant and stimulating in recent years (despite what the Chris Fogles of the world might think). To be accepted as an “equal partner” in humanities departments, Liu suggests, “digital humanists will need to show that thinking critically about metadata, for instance, scales into thinking critically about the power, finance, and other governance protocols of the world.”6 Liu ultimately imagines two possible escapes from this predicament. One would involve analyzing the strengths and protocols of the digital humanities—such as data mining and the creation of digital archives—through the concerns of critical media studies. The other route would involve a more pronounced engagement with “contemporary science-technology studies,” such as the history of science and philosophy of technology, which might allow digital humanists to recognize the stakes of their own work within the wider institutional structure discussed above.7 Stimulated by Liu’s concerns about decontextualized data mining, I decided to expose “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” to the Web-based reading program Voyant to see what might be ascertained through the exercise. Once I eliminated function words—determiners, prepositions, and pronouns—from my results, I was left with a quantified list in which mirror, surface, and Francesco all ranked high in the poem’s raw word count or vocabulary density. I decided to rescue the word you (twenty-one occurrences) from the function-word bin, based on the sense I had of its importance to the poem as a structure of address. My most useful discovery came from using Voyant’s trends feature, through which I ascertained that mirror occurs twelve times, room occurs nine, and their appearances are in inverse proportion to each other. That is, mirror appears more frequently at the beginning of the poem, whereas room begins to appear more frequently in the poem’s concluding segments. In this case, the arc of word usage indeed maps Ashbery’s initial desire to interface and his subsequent desire to collapse the promise of interactivity back into the solitary, to choose the isolated room over the allures of convexity. But the realization that I was correct—that my critical sense of the poem as a paper-based analogue of interfacing could be bolstered in verifiable data— only left me troubled, for the Web-based reading software revealed very little about the poem that was not already obvious from my unaided reading of it. That reading, as elaborated in chapter 6, discovers its meaning in information not explicitly contained within Voyant’s raw count—namely, the historical

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conditions of the media environment in which the poem circulated, compelling Ashbery to transform ekphrasis into a rudimentary interface that he simultaneously came to distrust. The larger point here is that word counts or trending analytics cannot necessarily make interpretive reading happen for humanities scholars and students, for both remain in need of training that allows them to recognize allusion (sometimes implicit), symbolism, technical and historical contexts, the history of literary forms, and a host of other contextualizing strategies. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” carries a richer reserve of meaning than what might be revealed through its quantified vocabulary density; there are excess implications manifest within its objecthood that withdraw from Voyant, key facets that remain extraconceptual to Voyant’s propensities for analysis. There are, of course, notable uses to which one might put Voyant. We could use it, for instance, to search Ashbery’s entire corpus for the occurrences of mirror. Or we could use it to mine the collected writings of all the New American Poets for the occurrence of mathematical terms or concepts. But we would still be left with the fact that not only does someone need to decide on the right information or textual matter before it is rendered as data, but that such inquiry should be directed by choices that cannot be delegated to reading software. Ashbery’s poem—like so many of the aesthetic relics grounding this study—remains a nexus of intermedia influences; it condenses convergent media histories within its objecthood, holding them in contemplative tension. Reading software based on quantification or computational rationality cannot speak for such artifacts all the way down, for ontology remains a site of epistemological blockage. As a result, a pronounced component of analyzing informational objects requires remaining vigilant of the networks or architectures enmeshing the objects in question. Such approaches must remain central to the sort of object-oriented intermedia history I have been attempting to elaborate throughout, guided by the insights of figures such as N. Katherine Hayles, Jacques Derrida, and Alan Liu. In addition, I believe there is much to be gained from heeding Jerome McGann’s recent call, in A New Republic of Letters, for neophilological scholarly approaches capable of assessing and operating in digital environments. McGann’s primary concern here is with stewardship: how we might come to manage the migration of our human cultural inheritance and its varying, dispersed media of cultural transmission, into digitized environments where those dispersed forms (audio, print, video) are now required to con 140

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verge within a solitary interface. In any case, more relevant to the concept of object-oriented media inquiry—or what we might call intermedia philology—are McGann’s attempts at resuscitating the lower and higher criticism of philology as part of his more ambitious cultural heritage project. With that larger goal in mind, McGann stresses that “to the philologian, all possible meanings are a function of their historical emergence as material artifacts. The investigation of those artifacts is the foundation of literary and cultural studies. The Lower Criticism devotes itself to the analysis of the textual transcriptions; the Higher Criticism studies the sociohistory of the documents.” 8 In this instance, McGann suggests that we tap into the guiding influence that textual studies, bibliographical studies, and book history might provide in allowing us analytical access to the object qualities of media forms (including literature), along with the more extensive textual architectures or networks in which we find them embedded, since those fields have long been invested in exploring the social and technical circumstances of textual production and dissemination. In terms of the lower criticism, we might think of what D. F. McKenzie deems the methodology of “bibliographical fact,” approaching informational relics as “locatable, describable, attributable, datable, and explicable”; we see this in traditional bibliography’s physical descriptions of the object qualities of textual artifacts, such as dimensions, collation, paper type, paper quality, and font.9 The higher criticism, McGann points out, represents the interpretive branch of philology as it endeavors to analyze the object qualities (or bibliographical materiality) of scriptural economies and textual transcription within a given social and technical context. Intermedia philology places the technical characteristics of textual objects into institutional, cultural, and theoretical contexts. Indeed, this is what Liu and others have asked digital humanities scholars to do: to more thoroughly examine their own technical practices as enmeshed within the evolving demands of a neoliberal university system enamored with metrics and quantitative analytics. Finally, I believe that the theoretical insights of figures such as N. Katherine Hayles and Jerome McGann are possessed by a promising or illuminating confluence with Graham Harman’s ongoing work in object-oriented ontology, a contemporary reengagement with the ontological that simultaneously refuses to be confined within the allures of quantifying analytics. In developing a conception of the world that is highly dependent on the insights of Continental phenomenology and the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Harman insists that all beings equally withdraw “from all relations,” or

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that they always exist in ways “that perception or sheer causation can never adequately measure.”10 Thus Harman presents ontology as beset by an irrefutable dualism positioned “between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things.”11 Steven Shaviro usefully sums up the stakes of Harman’s insights as such: “Every object retains a hidden reserve of being, one that is never exhausted by and never fully expressed in its contacts with other objects,” which is to simultaneously claim that the functions, consequences, and proclivities of human-produced objects can never be fully accounted for within the intentionality of their design or by a summary analysis of their components.12 As such, we confront a world of things—including technical and aesthetic objects—enmeshed in and imbued by networks of relations that are rarely, if ever, immediately evident to us. At the same time, however, Harman refuses to accept that the world is nothing—that it is awash in the Nietszchean relativisms so repugnant to Wallace’s Chris Fogle, or that reality is merely a textual construct attributable to dominative linguistic and semiotic structures. Rather, as Shaviro observes, Harman “insists, rightly, that every object is something, in and of itself, and therefore an object is not reducible to its parts, or to its relations with other things, or to the sum of the ways in which other entities apprehend it.” 13 I find myself aligned with Harman in thinking that the object, including the human being, cannot be fully accounted for or completely translated into terms other than itself. What can be said (or what might be offered as a description of the object in question) can be accurate or possessed by facticity, but such descriptions are necessarily limited or finite.14 This is simply another way of presenting William James’s insight as a fundamentally insurmountable dilemma within the human encounter with a universe whose richness can never be exhausted through the medium of human ideas—including within the realms of the mathematical, which does not miraculously transcend the problems of human subjectivation. In other words, it is not that algorithmically formulated tastes or quantitative analyses lack facticity, it is that they remain inscribed within necessary partialities rather than in transcendent absolutes. Those partialities work to seamlessly integrate us into a Web-based spectacle, which on account of its partialities remains a pseudoreality but factual nonetheless. Voyant does not lie to us about Ashbery’s poem. Rather, it provides access to a partial facticity that proves quite useful to descriptive bibliography and textual studies but does not necessarily exhaust a host of other object qualities that need to be coaxed out of more opaque networks, contexts, and rela 142

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tions. The same, of course, might be said of us in this age of democratized expressive media, in which evolving face-reading artificial intelligence aspires to diagnose our sexuality, criminal proclivities, IQ, political leanings, and other personality traits from photos and images shared and then archived online—a development analogous to the modes of quantitative tyranny anticipated and feared by some of the representative figures of the New American Poetry. Indeed, attempts to comprehend the expressive affordances and limitations of social computing while constantly shadowed by data mining, algorithmic tracking, and embedded surveillance code remain vital and necessary to our present and future.



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NOTES

Introduction: The Poetics of Symmetrical Critique

1. Thomas Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2–5. 2. Kenneth Rexroth, “The New American Poetry,” New York Times Book Review, February 12, 1961, http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/american-poetry.htm. 3. Alan Golding, “The New American Poetry Revisited, Again,” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 2 (1998): 206. 4. Donald Allen, The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1961), xi. 5. Outlier is employed in statistics to refer to observation points that remain distant (or are outlying from) other observations within a given data set. As shall become evident over the course of this study, that sense of the term resonates with concerns about outsider perspective, experience, and expression as articulated within the New American Poetry and other modes of aesthetic experimentation from the Cold War era. 6. This insurgent use of print culture was partly rooted in the journals created by interned anarcho-pacifists during World War II; see Todd F. Tietchen, “On the Waldport Fine Arts Project and the Aesthetics of Estranged Being,” Mosaic: Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 42, no. 3 (September 2009): 19–38. William Everson, whose writing appeared in The New American Poetry, was the central organizer of these efforts. Many of those interned in West Coast prison camps migrated to the Bay Area upon being released and made their influence felt within the region’s famed bohemianism. 7. Donald Allen, “Writer as Native: Preface,” in The New Writing in the USA, ed. Donald Allen and Robert Creeley (London: Penguin Books, 1967), 9. For the history of hipness as an antiestablishment stance, see John Leland, Hip: The History (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005). 8. Allen would later revisit these claims; see Donald Allen and George F. Butterick, eds., The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised (New York: Grove Press, 1982), 9–12, the third and final iteration of The New American Poetry. The contents of that volume more clearly resemble the contents of The New American Poetry than that of The New Writing in the USA. As for the title of the third book, although postmodern tendencies are indeed evident in the work of some of the New American

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Poets—especially figures such as John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch—Allen’s designation appears more temporal or historical than aesthetic: he uses the term postmoderns to identify the writers anthologized as the first major aesthetic development since high modernism. 9. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 42. 10. Ibid., 62. 11. Anne Burdick, Joanne Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 59. 12. Jentery Sayers, “Computer Vision as a Public Act: On Digital Humanities and Algocracy,” in Disrupting the Digital Humanities, ed. Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel, http://www.disruptingdh.com/computer-vision-as-a-public-act-on-digital-humanities -and-algocracy/. 13. A. Aneesh, Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 5. 14. Sayers, “Computer Vision.” 15. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978– 1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004), 63. 16. Ibid., 65. 17. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7. 18. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014), 1–24. 19. Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 177–78. 20. “STEM Education Is Vital—but Not at the Expense of the Humanities,” Scientific American, October 10, 2016, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemeducation-is-vital-but-not-at-the-expense-of-the-humanities/; Patricia Cohen, “A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding,” New York Times, February 21, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/business/a-rising-call-topromote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html?mcubz=0; LorettaJacksonHayes, “We Don’t Need More STEM Majors. We Need More STEM Majors with Liberal Arts Training,” Washington Post, February 18, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/02/18/we-dont-need-more-stem-majors-weneed-more-stem-majors-with-liberal-arts-training/?utm_term=.a843a594512d.

Chapter 1. Starting with Olson

1. Paul Christensen, Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 12. 2. Ibid., 13. 146

Notes to Pages 5–19

3. Ibid. 4. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 17. 5. Ibid., 21. 6. Ibid., 63–64. 7. Ibid., 17–18. 8. John Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 8. 9. Charles Olson, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeth’s, ed. Catherine Seelye (New York: Grossman, 1975), 16. 10. Nancy M. Grace and Jennie Skerl, eds., “Interview with Anne Waldman,” in The Transnational Beat Generation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 138. 11. Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York, New Directions Press, 2003), xi–xii. 12. Ibid., xiii. 13. Ibid., 5. 14. Ibid., xix; for examples in Canto 74, see 317–24, 393–97, and 403–9. 15. Burton Hatlen, “Pound’s Pisan Cantos and the Origins of Projective Verse,” in Ezra Pound and Poetic Influence, ed. Helen M. Dennis (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 131, 137. 16. The affinities between the aesthetic philosophies of Pound and Olson have been thoroughly explored in Robert von Hallberg, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Christopher Beach, ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 17. Olson, Collected Prose, xxvii. 18. Ibid., 239. 19. Ibid., 241. 20. Ibid., 245. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 246. 23. McGurl, Program Era, 42. 24. Hannah Sullivan, The Work of Revision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 254. 25. Ibid., 255. 26. Sullivan’s important work deals with the object qualities of paper-based print culture in relation to what has been viewed as the defining characteristics of other expressive media, up through advances in digitalization. Other notable works in this vein include Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997); Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); and Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 256.

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29. Ammiel Alcalay, A Little History (New York: UpSet Press, 2013), 187. 30. Ibid., 188. 31. Joshua S. Hoeynck, “Without a Mammalia Maxima, Charles Olson and Robert Duncan Apprehend a Cosmological American Poetics,” in The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, ed. John R. Woznicki (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2013), 37. 32. In Todd Tietchen, The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), I addressed this issue or dynamic in relation to Beat narratives of the early Cuban Revolution. Those narratives configured Havana as a revolutionary dream space for the circulation of political and subjective longings foreclosed by the expressive cultures and procedural realities of the Cold War United States and Soviet Union. 33. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 241–43. 34. Daniel Belgrad, “Democracy, Decentralization, and Feedback,” in American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War, ed. Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 59. 35. Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933– 1974 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), has written eloquently of the extent to which residual and palpable anxieties about Fascism came to animate postwar American intellectual and artistic culture. These anxieties resonate with those of the Frankfurt School philosophers in noteworthy ways. See especially pages 58–59 and 260–61. 36. Belgrad, “Democracy,” 59. 37. Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 104. 38. Belgrad, “Democracy,” 61. 39. Quoted in Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (San Francisco: Chandler, 1972), 159. 40. Ibid., 315. 41. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1988), 161. 42. Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 38, 61. 43. Ibid., 61. 44. Michael Davidson, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 209. 45. Wiener, Human Use, 33. 46. George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 70, 80. See also Gleick, Information, 239–40; and Edmund Berkeley, Giant Brains; or, Machines That Think (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1949). 47. Edward Halsey Foster, Understanding the Black Mountain Poets (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 21, 45. 148

Notes to Pages 27–32

48. Hoeynck, “Without a Mammalia Maxima,” 37. 49. Allen and Creeley, New Writing in the USA, 18. 50. Allen, New American Poetry, 5. 51. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 184–85. 52. Allen, New American Poetry, 5–6. 53. Ibid., 8. 54. Quoted in Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 93. 55. Allen, New American Poetry, 2. 56. Stephens, Poetics of Information Overload, 14, 24, 88, 91. Largely because of Olson’s allusion to cybernetics in “The Kingfishers,” the work of scholars such as Foster, Hatlen, and Stephens has engaged, from one perspective or another, with the poet’s indebtedness to informatics. Catherine Simpson, “Charles Olson: Preliminary Images,” Boundary 2 2, no. 1–2 (1973): 151–52, suggests that Olson’s canon is analogous to an overloaded computer. My goal in this chapter is not only to add to this discussion but also to suggest that his concerns are endemic to that of the New American Poetry. 57. Stephens, Poetics of Information Overload, 91. 58. Grace and Skerl, “Interview with Anne Waldman,” 133. 59. Ibid. 60. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008); Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators (New York: Penguin, 2010). 61. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 32–35, discusses the “oracle illusion.” Chapter 2. Humanizing the Network: Noise!

1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Horn on Howl,” in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking Press, 1992), 254–63. 2. David Batstone, “Cyberbeats,” Wired, March 1, 1998, http://www.wired.com /wired/archive/6.03/cyberbeats_pr.html. 3. This characterization of the Beat writers as new media prophets has been addressed in Wired on more than one occasion. See, e.g., Tommy Long, “On the Road at 50 Remains an Anthem for the ‘Crazy Ones,’ ” Wired, August 2007, http://www .wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/theluddite/2007/08/luddite_0830, which argues that Kerouac’s lack of respect “for the walls of convention” earns him a lasting place in the “geek’s literary canon”; and William Gibson, “God’s Little Toys,” Wired, July 2005, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html, which identifies William Burroughs’s “cut-up” aesthetic as an important precursor to the cut-and-paste appropriation so central to the age of personal computing. 4. Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums (New York: Penguin, 1991), 200. Kerouac’s reference in Dharma Bums is to Mountains and Rivers without End by Gary Snyder (on

Notes to Pages 33–39

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whom Ryder was based). Snyder’s long poem cycle would not appear in print until 1996, even though Donald Allen published Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers without End through his Four Seasons Foundation in 1965. 5. Allen, New American Poetry, 414. 6. Jack Kerouac, Good Blonde and Others (San Francisco: Grey Fox, 2001), 191–92. 7. My use of ontotheology and ontotheological is largely derived from Martin Hei­ degger, who used it to refer to moments that inaugurate new conditions (or a new first principle or cause) for accessing the object meaning of the world, the organizing principles of history, and the continued unfolding of human existence within the paradigmatic confines of those historical principles or causes. Heidegger stressed that in the case of ontotheological shifts, a narrow explanation of being comes to claim a universalized status or the exalted ability to definitively explain all of being (as if it fell logically and obediently under the order of the newly anointed absolute). Heidegger developed these ideas principally in his 1936 lecture on Schelling, published in 1985 as Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, and in 1959’s “The Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics.” For a lucid and precise explanation of the concept, see Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (Chicago: Open Court, 2007), 47–49. 8. Kevin Kelly, “On the Next 5,000 Days of the Web,” EG Conference, 2007, TED, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of _the_web.html. 9. Kerouac, Good Blonde, 200–201. 10. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 72. 11. Quoted in Gleick, Information, 239. 12. Kerouac, Good Blonde, 194. 13. Quoted in Gleick, Information, 240. 14. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 110. 15. David A. Mindell, “Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics,” in A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 798. 16. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), 95. 17. Ibid., 97. 18. Warren Weaver, “The Mathematics of Communication,” Scientific American 181, no. 1 (July 1949): 11–12. 19. Kerouac, Good Blonde, 201. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 193. 22. Mindell, “Norbert Wiener,” 796. 23. Indeed, Gibson’s own admission that the “source code” for his earliest works can in part be traced to “a childhood that had exposed me simultaneously to science fiction and the Beats (mainly Burroughs and Kerouac)” suggests that the similarities between Kerouac’s and Gibson’s imagined futures (along with Burroughs’s dys 150

Notes to Pages 40–48

topian “interzone”) is more than incidental; see William Gibson, Burning Chrome (New York: Eos, 2003), xvii. Gibson inherited his interest in urban hustlers and hipster sensibilities from Kerouac, but he also extended Kerouac’s critique of postwar computing and cybernetic technology into a robust fictional world that continues to seem plausible and timely. Readers of Gibson should immediately recognize the resemblance between Kerouac’s Multivision Set and Gibson’s simstim deck (a simulated stimuli apparatus), which also rests on the user’s forehead. Both Multivison and simstim anticipated the wearable computing now being realized in gadgets such as Google Glass. Moreover, Gibson’s short story is a male buddy tale narrated by a character named Jack who along with his best friend, Bobby (a cowboy archetype similar to Neal Cassady), searches for experience in the outermost expanses of cyberspace. 24. Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 87. 25. The most detailed exploration of the period’s aesthetic indebtedness to notions of spontaneity and improvisation is found in Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 26. Dickstein, Leopards, 87. 27. Tim Hunt, The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 67–69. 28. Tim Hunt, “ ‘Blow As Deep As You Want to Blow’: Time, Textuality, and Jack Kerouac’s Development of Spontaneous Prose,” Journal of Beat Studies 1, no.1 (2012): 49–50. 29. Daniel Kane, We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 20. 30. Ibid. 31. G. P. Winkler, ed., The Associated Press Style Book (New York: Associated Press, 1953), 5, 13. 32. Tom Whipple, “Slaves to the Algorithm,” Intelligent Life, May/June 2013, http: //moreintelligentlife.com/content/features/anonymous/slaves-algorithm?page=full, points out that media outlets have become increasingly dependent on authorial algorithms to compose basic news stories. He provides the following example: “On February 1st, the Los Angeles Times website ran an article that began ‘A shallow magnitude 3.2 earthquake was reported Friday morning.’ The piece was written at a time when quite possibly every reporter was asleep. But it was grammatical, coherent, and did what any human reporter writing a formulaic article about a small earthquake would do: it went to the US Geological Survey website, put the relevant numbers in a boilerplate article, and hit send. In this case, however, the donkey work was done by an algorithm.” In a sense, the algorithmic composition of rudimentary, noneditorializing news stories—in which the author function becomes replicable in software—helps clarify the conceptual links between Shannon’s thoughts on communication and the evolution of information production and distribution within the technical ensembles of the news media.

Notes to Pages 48–51

151

33. Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll, ed. Howard Cunnell (New York: Penguin, 2007), 145, 151. 34. Ibid., 148. 35. Timothy Hampton, “Tangled Generation: Dylan, Kerouac, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Escape,” Critical Inquiry 39.4 (Summer 2013), 713. Note that Hampton’s comments refer to the 1957 edited version of On the Road, published by Viking Press. Although Kerouac eventually edited the scroll into a more conventional narrative form, that did not halt the philosophical and compositional implications of the original three-week performance from passing over into the object qualities of the Viking version (as Hampton’s comments make clear, along with much of the other scholarly commentary presented in this chapter). 36. Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 1992), 57. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Kerouac, On the Road, 304. 40. Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)): GOTO 10 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 11. 41. Ibid. 42. Nick Montfort, “Continuous Paper: The Early Materiality and Workings of Elec­tronic Literature,” paper presented at the Modern Language Association Convention, Philadelphia, December 28, 2004. 43. Vilem Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 17. 44. J. C. R Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics 1, no. 1 (March 1960): 4. 45. Kerouac, On the Road, 2. A number of Kerouac’s other scroll manuscripts exist in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. They include Memory Babe (a thirty-five-foot scroll from 1958), “Beat Spotlight Notes” (a ten-foot scroll from 1968), two Dharma Bums drafting scrolls (one of which includes “Good Blonde”), and 1955’s Diamond Vow of God’s Wisdom (a forty-foot scroll), as well as Gregory Corso’s “Bomb” (originally typed out by Kerouac on a two-foot scroll). 46. The compositional history of the scroll, as Cunnell makes evident, was far more protracted and complicated than Kerouac often cared to let on. Joyce Johnson, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (New York: Penguin, 2013), also makes clear the extent to which Kerouac worked through multiple drafts and conceptions, over a grand course of years, before finally completing the scroll. Kerouac, however, went to great lengths to invest his object with the aura of instantism and improvisation, as in his January 1958 letter to Philip Whalen, in which he claimed that the 1957 Viking version of “On the Road was not edited (a few libelous deletions)— that was my ‘middle style’ between Town & City and Doctor Sax—It was published as is off my ms. from the 120 foot roll—The rumor [that it has been heavily edited] is 152

Notes to Pages 52–56

untrue.” Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, 1957–1969, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 1999), 112. 47. Kerouac, On the Road, 116. 48. Ann Douglas, “ ‘Telepathic Shock and Meaning Excitement’: Kerouac’s Poetics of Intimacy,” College Literature 27, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 14. 49. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 10–11. Chapter 3. Dharmic Atomism: On the Metaphysics of Extended Cognition

1. Paul Boyer, “The United States, 1941–1963: A Historical Overview,” in Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940–1960, ed. Brooke Kamin Rapaport and Kevin L. Stayton (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 56. 2. Gregory Corso, “Bomb,” in The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 1992), 174. 3. Ibid., 176. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 177. 6. Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 142. 7. Gary Snyder, “Highest and Driest: For Philip Zenshin’s Poetic Drama/Dharma,” in The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, ed. Michael Rothenberg (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), xxvii. 8. For more on the role played by Suzuki, Watts, and the Beat writers in popularizing Buddhist concepts, see Richard Hughes Seager, Buddhism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 90–112. 9. Snyder, “Highest and Driest,” xxviii–xxix. 10. Kerouac, Dharma Bums, 98. 11. Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 78. 12. The Lotus Sutra, trans. Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 338. 13. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Gyurme Dorje (New York: Penguin, 2005), 485. 14. Allen, New American Poetry, 288. 15. Ibid., 172–73. 16. Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2003), 325. 17. Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions Press, 1969), 113, 114, 116. 18. Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995, ed. Bill Morgan (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 3. 19. Greif, Age of the Crisis, 58–59; 260–61. 20. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 10. 21. Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 4. 22. Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (Oakland, CA: Ronin, 1998), 22.

Notes to Pages 57–68

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23. Ram Dass, Be Here Now (New York: Crown, 1971), 24. 24. Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzer, and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: Citadel Press, 2007), 5. 25. Ibid., 47, 48. 26. Ibid., ix, xi. 27. Ibid., xv, xvii. 28. Leary, Politics of Ecstasy, 5. 29. Ibid., 5, 6. 30. Ibid., 7. 31. Ibid., 8. 32. Ibid., 11. 33. Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (New York: Back Bay Books, 2005), 56. 34. The box set Fillmore West 1969: The Complete Recordings was released on Grateful Dead Records in 2005. 35. Lesh, Searching, 15. 36. See, e.g., “Feedback” on the album Live/Dead (Warner Brothers, 1969); and the compilation of “Drums” and “Space” segments on Infrared Rose (Grateful Dead Records, 1991), which often contained feedback-driven improvisation. 37. Edwards, Closed World, 184. 38. Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” 1998, http://cogprints .org/320/1/extended.html. 39. Ibid. 40. Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Books, 2016), 2–5. 41. Ibid. 42. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” 1996, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 43. Leary, Politics of Ecstasy, 5–7. 44. Evgeny Morozov, “Two Decades of the Web: A Utopia No Longer,” Prospect Online, June 22, 2011, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/morozov-web -no-utopia-twenty-years-short-history-internet/#.Unu5dr_3Cxc. 45. Ibid. 46. Evgeny Morozov, “The Real Privacy Problem,” MIT Technology Review, October 22, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520426/the-real-privacy -problem/. 47. Gary Wolf, “The Quantified Self,” TED, www.ted.com/talks/gary_wolf_the _quantified_self. 48. David Barison and Daniel Ross, dirs., The Ister, Icarus Films, 2004. 49. For the development of the technogenetic correction to Heideggerian thought, see Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (New York: Meridian Books, 1998). Heidegger’s thoughts on Dasein, the particularly human experience of being, are most fully developed in 154

Notes to Pages 68–78

Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010). 50. Hayles, How We Think, 10. On the concept of the self-amplifying cybernetic loop—also known as positive feedback, for it involves a positive or aggregating loop gain—see Ben Zuckerman and David Jefferson, Human Population and the Environmental Crisis (Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett, 1996), 42. See also Sandra Braman, “Designing the State in the Information Age,” Information Society and Civil Society: Contemporary Perspectives on the Changing World Order, ed. Slavko Splichal, Andrew Calabrese, and Colin Sparks (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1994), 166–67. 51. See the discussion of “surplus” in Harman, Immaterialism, 3–6. 52. See, e.g., Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 158–59; and Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75–76. 53. Steven Belletto, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4. Chapter 4. Secondary Paradise: The Surrealist Immersion

1. Mindell, “Norbert Wiener,” 799. 2. Jack Kerouac, “After Me, the Deluge,” in The Portable Jack Kerouac, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 2007), 575. 3. Philip Lamantia and John Hoffman, Tau and Journey to the End, ed. Garrett Caples (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008), 9. 4. Philip Lamantia, The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia, ed. Garret Caples, Andrew Joron, and Nancy Joyce Peters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), xxv. 5. Lamantia and Hoffman, Tau, 62. 6. Ibid. 7. The mystic allure of psychotropics also persists as a collection of powerful motifs. I was reminded of this in viewing Mitch Schultz, dir., DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Warner Brothers, 2011, a documentary that begins with physician Christian Meuli describing his encounter with a green city of light as part of a fully immersed and convincing encounter with a secondary realm or world while under the influence of the drug DMT. There are many other similar testimonies contained within the film, nearly all of which describe the sensation of having consciousness rent completely free of its embodied existence. The documentary ends by stressing the possible spiritual and evolutionary value of such DMT voyaging to human civilization. 8. Allen, New American Poetry, 154. 9. Lamantia, Collected Poems, 46. 10. Ibid., 200. 11. Game design offers a viable, intellectually rich nexus for considering the evolving relationship between computing technology and aesthetics. McKenzie Wark’s work

Notes to Pages 78–86

155

has offered an extended meditation on this nexus and the sociocultural consequences of more ubiquitous and more easily accessible reality augmentation. These new immersions or augmentations suddenly became quite evident in the immediate participant observation characterizing late twentieth-century global media events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square; see McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). The augmentations of global media spectacle—to which we can now immediately respond, or more directly immerse ourselves within, through various comment and blogging functions—corresponded with the evolution of console-based and Web-based gaming culture as utopian virtual spaces; see McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 12. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 10. 13. Ibid., 36. 14. Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–5. 15. Ibid., 7. 16. Ibid., 8. 17. Ibid., 44. 18. Rubin, David S., ed. Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 16. 19. Ibid., 15. 20. The question here for me is not whether virtual or authentic experience is qualitatively better, because I do not see how that can ever be answerable. The distinction between the two, however, is fundamental to human experience, so the intriguing question always remains of how technological changes alter our understanding of the borders between the authentic or real and the virtual in ways that simultaneously alter our conceptions of consciousness, embodiment, collectivity, the possibilities and limits of interpersonal and transpersonal expression, and the laws and contours of physical reality. I suppose that in these matters I have taken a number of cues from Philip K. Dick. 21. Philip Lamantia, “Poetic Matters,” Arsenal 3 (Spring 1976): 7. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 8. 24. Davidson, Guys Like Us, 209. 25. Ibid., 17. 26. Gerd Stern, “From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and Beyond, 1948–1978,” oral history conducted by Victoria Morris Byerly, Regional Oral History Office, 1996 (Berkeley: University of California Bancroft Library, 2001), 11–12, 19. 27. Ibid., 72. 28. Ibid., 69. 29. Ibid. 156

Notes to Pages 86–92

30. Ibid., 73. 31. Ibid., 74. 32. Ibid. 33. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 48. 34. Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York: Wenner Books, 2005), 40. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 41. 37. Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 3. 38. Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget, 123–25. 39. Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 47–48. 40. Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget, 190. 41. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, 12. 42. See Cliff Kuang’s “Like Magic,” Wired 21.9 (September 2013): 142–147. Chapter 5. Surveillance as Pleasure

1. Lev Manovich, “Art after Web 2.0,” in The Art of Participation, 1950 to Now, ed. Neal Benezra (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 74. 2. Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems, ed. Mark Ford (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 177. 3. Benjamin Lee, “Frank O’Hara and the Turn to Friendship,” Criticism 49, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 244. 4. O’Hara, Selected Poems, 26. 5. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harbinger, 1962), 16. 6. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), 344. 7. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 161. 8. O’Hara, Selected Poems, 234. 9. Allen and Butterick, Postmoderns, 9. 10. O’Hara, Selected Poems, 234. 11. Ibid. 12. Lytle Shaw, “Gesture in 1960: Toward Literal Situations,” in New York Cool, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: Grey Art Gallery, 2009), 44. 13. Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers, “How to Proceed in the Arts,” in Evergreen Review Reader: 1957–1966, ed. Barney Rosset (New York: Arcade, 2011), 147. 14. Ibid., 41–42. 15. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 2.

Notes to Pages 92–106

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16. Loren Glass, Countercultural Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 3–5. 17. Ibid., 12. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 24–25. 20. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 5. 21. Allen, New American Poetry, xii. 22. Various versions of this argument may be found in Davidson. Guys Like Us; Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Ronald Sukenick, Down and In: Life in the Underground (New York: Collier, 1988). 23. David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 340. 24. Lee, “Frank O’Hara,” 244. 25. O’Hara, Selected Poems, 159. 26. Ibid. 27. Lehman, Last Avant-Garde, 35. 28. Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), xiv. 29. Ibid., xiii. 30. Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 1. 31. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 70–80; Gleick, Information, 204–68. 32. Streeter, Net Effect, 45. 33. Something further might be said about this in relation to O’Hara’s choice of cultural icons in poems such as “The Day Lady Died” and “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)” Billie Holiday’s history of legal troubles combined with the uncompromising nature of her artistic style granted her undeniable outlaw credibility among the New Bohemia. Turner’s connections to the criminal underground became notorious in 1958 after her daughter stabbed Turner’s abusive lover, the known gangster Johnny Stompanato, to death. O’Hara, of course, was even more drawn to the Byronic posturing of James Dean (as were the Beat writers). The young actor was granted iconic status in several of O’Hara’s poems, including “Thinking of James Dean” and “For James Dean.” 34. Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 24. 35. O’Hara, Selected Poems, 164.

158

Notes to Pages 107–115

Chapter 6. Mirror, Mirror: Thoughts at the Interface

1. On the complicated relationship between O’Hara and Warhol, see Kane, We Saw the Light, 156–59. 2. Ibid., 151. 3. Ibid., 154. 4. Richard Stamelman, “Critical Reflections: Poetry and Art Criticism in Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,’ ” New Literary History 15, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 607–30. 5. John Ashbery, Collected Poems, 1956–1987, ed. Mark Ford (New York: Library of America, 2008), 475. 6. Ibid., 475, 480. 7. For a more detailed treatment of Paik’s influence, see Matt Danzico and Jane O’Brien, “Visual Artist Nam June Paik Predicted Internet Age,” BBC, December 18, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20649028. 8. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 476. 9. Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1. 10. Ibid., 4. 11. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–52. 12. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 474–75. 13. Ibid, 387. 14. Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 15–16. 15. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 387. 16. Hallberg, American Poetry, 58–59. 17. Stephen Paul Miller, “ ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,’ the Watergate Affair, and Johns’s Crosshatch Paintings: Surveillance and Reality-Testing in the Mid-Seventies,” Boundary 2 20, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 98. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 103. 20. Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 141. 21. Ibid., 5. 22. Ibid., 142. 23. Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 24. John Ashbery, Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 81. 25. Ibid., 113. 26. The pages in question have since been reprinted in Ashbery, Collected Poems, 344–45.

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27. Ashbery, Selected Prose, 82. 28. Peter A. Stitt, “John Ashbery, the Art of Poetry No. 33,” Paris Review 90 (Winter 1983), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3014/john-ashbery-the-art-ofpoetry-no-33-john-ashbery. 29. Ibid. 30. Ashbery, Selected Prose, 215. 31. Ibid. 32. John Ashbery, A Worldly Country (New York: Ecco, 2007), 9. 33. Ibid. 34. Derrida, Paper Machine, 23. 35. Ibid. 36. Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 31. 37. Ibid., 30. 38. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, 14. 39. Ibid., 61. 40. Ibid., 116, 130. Epilogue: Contextualizing Quantification

1. William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in William James: The Essential Writings, ed. Bruce W. Wilshire (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984): 326–42. 2. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, ed. Michael Pietsch (New York: Back Bay Books, 2012), 240. Wallace pointedly observes that the interactive media architectures constituting our information age were well on their way toward eradicating “any kind of clear line between personal and public, or rather between private or performative”—a blurring convincingly undertaken in the work of O’Hara and Warhol from the early 1960s (80). Writing in the initial years of the millennial decade—just before the tremendous popularity of social computing platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram— Wallace saw that eradication operating primarily through “web logs, reality television, cellphone cameras, chat rooms . . . not to mention the dramatically increased popularity of the memoir as a literary genre.” He further points out “that in 2003, the average author’s advance for a memoir was almost 2.5 times that paid for a work of fiction” (80–81). The allure of profitability aside, Wallace’s assertion remains particularly attuned to the fact that the content and form of our literary histories—the sudden ascendancy of the memoir, in this case—often evolve in relation to the development of other technical and expressive modalities, or alongside other communicative and information architectures. This insight ultimately goes a long way toward explaining the literary, artistic, and cultural genealogies that have emerged interdependently with the increased democratization of computing potential that is so characteristic of the information age Wallace distrusts.

160

Notes to Pages 129–137

3. Alan Liu, “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 491. 4. Ibid. 5. See www.disruptingdh.com/position-papers. 6. Liu, “Where Is Cultural Criticism?”, 495. 7. Ibid., 505. 8. Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 19. 9. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 55. 10. Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 75. 11. Ibid., 74. 12. Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 29. 13. Ibid., 32. 14. Basically, Harman is wrestling with the dilemmas of knowability and essence on the other side of postmodern relativism or antifoundationalism, which tended to flatten facticity into an arena of competing epistemologies somehow rendered fully illusory through the mere fact of their coexistence.



Notes to Pages 137–142

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INDEX

Acid Tests, 93–94 action painting, 105, 110 actor-network theory (ANT), 74 “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” (O’Hara), 111 aesthetics: authenticity of, 122–24; avantgarde, 72–73; of Cold War, 79; collective, 95; experimental, 90, 107; and interfaces, 131–32; intermedia, 90–95; and Kerouac, 10–11, 40, 44, 48–49, 52–56; and Lamantia, 86; manifestos of, 21, 24–25, 28; and New American Poetry, 1, 16, 27; and objects, 9, 78–79, 142; and O’Hara, 105– 8, 112, 115; and Olson, 9, 21; postmodern, 119; and psychedelics, 82–83, 88, 90–95; social, 123; of social computing, 121; spontaneous, 10–11; surrealist, 83–90; surveillance, 13, 115, 117–19, 127; and typing technology, 26; and webs of affiliation, 109. See also cultural aesthetics “After Me, the Deluge” (Kerouac), 82–83 agency, 13, 20, 29–30, 67, 74–75, 85–86, 98 agential objects, 70–71, 77, 82, 120, 133 Alcalay, Ammiel, 27 aleatory, 5, 45, 79 algocracy, 7–8, 10, 15, 36, 40, 77, 132, 135–36 algorithms: and algocracy, 7; and Ashbery, 130, 135; authorial, 151n32; behaviorism, 77; and cybercapitalism, 131; and cybernetics, 77; and digital humanities, 15–16, 136; and fascism, 34, 40; and interactivity, 57–58; and rationality, 7; and tracking systems, 36, 115, 133–34 Allen, Donald, 1–4, 19, 27–28, 33, 100, 104, 109–10, 127–29 Alpert, Richard, 67–69

alterity, psychedelic, 95 alternative sensual environments, 13, 93–94 alternative (secondary) worlds, 82–83, 86–88, 98 An American Family (television show), 126 Aneesh, A., 7 ANT (actor-network theory), 74 Anthem of the Sun (album), 71–72 antiessentialism, 119, 132, 137 antifoundationalism, 136–37 artificial intelligence, 143 Ashbery, John, 118–33, 135–36, 139–40 The Associated Press Style Book, 50–51 atomic era/atomism, 12, 59–64 authenticity, 57, 88–89, 113, 122–23, 156n20 authored experience design, 98 autobiographical poetics, 14, 101, 110, 129 automation: and agitation, 96; and algocracy, 36; of cognition, 16, 32; digitized, 96; and Kerouac, 10, 41–43, 47, 51, 56, 58; and Lamantia, 84–85; reliance on, 79 avant-garde aesthetics: and the Beats, 63, 67; Cold War American, 9, 119; and coteries, 129; and cybernetics, 35; and the Dead, 70–72; and Lamantia, 90–91; literary, 3, 112; and New American Poetry, 1–4; and outlier networks, 27; and paperback publishing, 106–7; postwar, 3–4, 11, 15, 95, 100–101, 104, 106–7, 109, 113; prewar, 127; and romanticism, 112–13; and surrealism, 13, 83–97; and technomodernism, 9 avant-rock experimentation, 70–76, 82, 93 Babel Working Group, 16, 138 Baraka, Amiri, 27 173

Barlow, John Perry, 75–76 Bateson, Gregory, 20–21, 29–30 Batstone, David, 39–40 Beats, 39, 46, 48, 60–65, 66–70, 148n32, 149n3 Belgrad, Daniel, 29–30 Belletto, Steven, 79 Benjamin, Walter, 27, 122–23 big data mining, 15, 136 The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault), 7–8 bleshing, 70–76 bohemian culture, 63, 75, 96–97, 107, 109 Boise, Ron, 94 “Bomb” (Corso), 61–62 book-form, 5, 10–12, 14, 41, 56, 122, 133 Boyer, Paul, 59 Brainard, Joe, 129 Breton, André, 13, 83–84, 86–88, 95 Buchanan, Ann, 118 Buddhism, 62–65, 68 Butterick, George, 104 Cage, John, 71–72 Call Me Ishmael (Olson), 19–21 canalization: and algocracy, 132; and cybernetics, 34–36; ideological, 28; self-canalization, 96; and surrealism, 77, 90; and surveillance, 125; of will, 3, 19–21 capitalism: and coteries, 128–29; cybercapitalism, 7–8, 15–16, 131–32, 136; digitized, 41, 57; and Morozov, 76–77; and online empires, 134; and surrealism, 90–91 Caples, Garrett, 83–84 Carr, Lucien, 50 celebrity, 14, 114, 117–18, 121, 126–28 centralized media, 66–67, 132 The Circle (Eggers), 99 City Lights Pocket Poets series, 13–14, 106 “cityCityCITY” (Kerouac), 10–11, 41–47, 50, 57–58 civic consciousness, 4, 19, 21, 33, 58 cloud computing, 58, 98 cognition: automated modes of, 32; and convergence, 106; and cybernetics, 32; and cyberpunk, 47; and digital humanities, 16; and digital recommender systems, 36–37; and distraction, 35; and epigenetics, 78; and experience design, 98; extended or distributed, 60, 63, 174

Index

66, 68–69; and Kerouac, 40, 46, 56, 58; networked, 12, 60, 66, 70, 73–76; and sensual immersion, 82, 87; and temporalities, 101 Cold War: aesthetics of, 79; in Ashbery, 125; and avant-garde, 9, 119; and the Beats, 48, 62–64, 66–67, 69; and containment culture, 3–4, 6, 10, 14–15, 28, 36, 100, 111; and figures of New American Poetry, 12–14; and information technologies, 5–6; and military technologies, 31–32; and paperback publishing, 106–7 collage poetry, 91–92 collective aesthetics, 71–72, 74–75, 95 collective consciousness, 60, 69 communication: and control, 34; and data, 50–51; electronic, 6, 24, 79; and feedback, 29–30, 43–44; and instantism, 36; and Kerouac’s scroll, 52–53; limitations of, 122–24; mass, 66–67; networked, 21, 44–46; and noise, 53, 57; and Olson, 24–25; post-symbolic, 97–98; shifts in, 5–6, 94; technical, 10, 57; telecommunications, 44, 75; and typing technology, 27–28, 50–51; and vernacular, 2 communication architectures, 30, 36 communication technologies, 1, 100, 103, 108, 110 communism, 3, 84, 95 communitarianism, 76–77 the Company of Us (USCO), 92–93 compositional technologies, 26, 55 computational architectures, 73, 75–76, 86 computational media: aesthetics of, 40–41, 91, 115; and convergence, 108; and cybernetics, 34, 43; evolution of, 84, 88; networked, 44–45, 77; and participation, 82; and postsymbolism, 95, 97 computational processes, 135–36 computational rationality, 10–11, 140 computer-based writing, 132–33 computing: cloud, 58, 98; interactive, 82; personal, 14, 27, 40, 73, 120; phenotropic, 97–98; postwar, 43. See also computational media; social computing confessional poetics, 14, 111–12, 128–29 containment culture, 3–4, 6, 10, 14–15, 28, 36, 100, 111 continual copresencing, 103–4

control informatics. See informatics of domination Corso, Gregory, 61–62 coteries, 4, 15, 27, 100, 110–11, 112, 127–29 countercultural networks of yearning, 12, 28, 60 counterculture: architectures of, 12, 60; and bleshing, 75; and collaborative creativity, 70–76; and cybernetics, 81–82; and information economy, 3; and intersubjectivity, 66; and Kerouac, 82–83, 95; and Lanier, 96; and psychedelics, 69; sociotechnological imagination of, 12–13; and surrounds, 94–95; and surveillance, 125; and television generation, 70 coupled systems, 74, 79 Creeley, Robert, 4, 33–35 critical analogues, 9–11, 21, 24, 51, 54–56, 62, 109–10, 132 culte du moi (self-cult), 129, 132 cultural aesthetics: and democratized media, 70; and object qualities, 11; and O’Hara, 114–15; and paperback publishing, 108; psychedelic, 82–83, 93; and surveillance, 115, 117; and virtuality, 95–96 culture industries, 67 Cunnell, Howard, 56 cyber-boosterism, 76–77 cybercapitalism, 7–8, 15–16, 115, 131, 136 cyberlibertarianism, 75–76 cybernetics: and aggregation of data, 135; and algorithms, 77; and avant-garde, 35; and behavior, 30–32; and canalization, 34–36; and cognition, 32; and computational media, 34, 43; contrasting philosophies, 20–21; and counterculture, 81–82; and critical analogue, 21; and data, 28; and human-machine symbiosis, 57; and informatics, 21, 30, 33–35; and Kerouac, 10–11, 40, 41–47; and noise, 51–53; and Olson, 9, 27–36, 149n56; postwar, 9; and psychedelics, 69; and social interfaces, 123; and totalism, 97–98; and Wiener, 73 cyberpunk, 47 cyber-utopian views, 43, 76–77 cyborgian, 22, 26 “Dark Star” (song), 71–72 data: and communication, 50–51; as cyber

capital, 115; and cybernetics, 28; and digital recommender systems, 36–37; in Kerouac, 42–43; and lifelogging, 99; networked extraction of, 134; and predigital information architectures, 118; and singularity, 98; and social interfaces, 123, 131 data mining, 15–16, 36, 58, 136, 139–43 Davidson, Michael, 31, 89–90 “The Day Lady Died” (O’Hara), 101–2, 105–6 “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (Barlow), 75–76 democratization: alternatives in, 12, 66; and collectivism, 20; and communication architectures, 30, 36; of computing, 14, 96, 120–21; of cultural production, 4; and expansion, 7, 32; and expressivity in media, 70, 117, 143; of information economy, 58, 70, 77, 112–13; and interfacing, 120–21, 135; of media, 6, 70, 113–14; and modes of cognition, 68; and modes of communication, 94; of narrative practice, 108; postwar, 3; potential for, 29–30; public sphere, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 107–8, 132–33 Desolation Angels (Kerouac), 63–64 DH (digital humanities), 15–16, 136–41 Dharma Bums (Kerouac), 39, 63–64 dharmic religions, 12, 62–69 di Prima, Diane, 27 digital humanities (DH), 15–16, 136–41 digital interfacing technologies, 131–34 digital networks, 7, 44 digital recommender systems, 36–37 digital vs. literary, 101, 110 Digital_Humanities, 7 digitization: aesthetics of, 96; and automation, 96; and capitalism, 41, 57; and cultural practices, 87, 132–33; and disposability, 13, 39–40; of distribution networks, 114, 128; and interactivity, 36–37; and neoliberalism, 7–8, 41; and print analogues, 39–41, 49–50; and social computing platforms, 114; and surveillance, 134; and techno-utopians, 77; and transhumanism, 98 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 125 Disrupting the Digital Humanities (Kim and Stommel), 16, 138 Index

175

dissemination technology, 106–7 dissident networks, 15, 106–7 domination. See informatics of domination dominative media, 83–84, 94 Douglas, Ann, 57 drug-based exploration. See psychedelics Dyson, George, 43–44 dystopian writing, 10, 41–47 Edwards, Paul N., 33–34, 73 effectiveness problems, 45–47 Eggers, Dave, 99 ekphrasis, 119–21, 140 electronic media, 1, 3, 6, 9, 19, 24, 28, 45, 48, 67, 72–73, 79, 81–82, 93, 95, 103, 120–21, 123 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), 31–32, 43 electronic surveillance, 134 Eliot, T. S., 130 enchantment, defense of, 87–88 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), 31–32, 43 entheogens, 67–68, 84. See also psychedelics epigenetics, 78 “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (Kerouac), 10, 53 Evergreen Review (journal), 62 experience design, 98 experimental aesthetics, 90, 93, 107 experimental cinema, 118 expressivity: alternative venues of, 3–4; and Ashbery, 119–24, 129–30, 132–33; and chance, 79; of the collective, 74–75; and convergence, 106, 108; and cybercapitalism, 131; and democratization of media, 70, 117, 143; and digital humanities, 136; electronic, 72–73, 82; and feedback, 72–74; in history, 11–12; and imagination, 87–88; in Kerouac, 10–11, 41, 43–46, 48–49; and longings, 64–65, 85–86; and McLuhan, 91–92; nonliterary, 5–6; in Olson, 8–9, 21, 24, 36; and postsymbolism, 95–98; and surveillance in media, 115; and temporalities, 101–3; and typing technology, 25–26 “The Extended Mind” (Clark and Chalmers), 73–74, 78 176

Index

Facebook, 40, 77, 96, 100, 108, 114, 123, 134 the fantastical, 13, 83–84, 86–88, 90, 93–94, 95, 97–98, 122 fascism, 21–24, 30, 34–35, 37, 40, 148n35 feedback, 9, 21, 28–32, 43–44, 57–58, 70–74, 77, 90, 155n50 Floating Bear (newsletter), 27–28 Flow Chart (Ashbery), 130, 132 “The Fluorescent Tubing Burns Like a Bobby-Soxer’s Ankles” (O’Hara), 115 Flusser, Vilém, 55, 133 Foster, Edward Halsey, 32 Foucault, Michel, 7–8, 125–26 “Frank O’Hara’s Questions” (Ashbery), 128 Galloway, Alexander, 133 gaming, 14, 73, 86–87, 120, 155–56n11 genre publishing, 107–8 “Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)” (O’Hara), 100 Gibson, William, 47, 150–51n23 Ginsberg, Allen, 12, 36, 52–53, 62–63, 66–67, 102–3 Giroux, Robert, 56 Glass, Loren, 106–7 Gleick, James, 43 Golding, Alan, 2–3 Gooch, Brad, 114 Grateful Dead (band), 70–76, 93 Grove Press, 62, 107 “The Gutenberg Galaxy” (McLuhan), 92 Hampton, Timothy, 53 happenings, 82–83, 88, 94, 105 Harman, Graham, 74, 141–42, 161n14 Harvard Psilocybin Project, 67–68 Hatlen, Burton, 23–24 Hayles, N. Katherine, 11, 78 Heidegger, Martin, 78, 150n7 Hendrix, Jimi, 81–82 “High” (Lamantia), 85–86, 98 “High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia” (Caples, Joron, and Peters), 83 hippiedom, 12, 60, 81, 97 Hoeynck, Joshua, 28, 33 “How to Proceed in the Arts” (O’Hara and Rivers), 105 Howl and Other Poems (Ginsberg), 39, 62 Human Be-In (festival), 65–66, 69

The Human Use of Human Beings (Wiener), 31 human-machine symbiosis, 6, 9, 10–12, 22, 25, 41, 54–58, 77–79 Hunt, Tim, 48–50 Husserl, Edmund, 124 “I Am a Victim of Telephone” (Ginsberg), 102–3 idealization, 6, 21, 30, 34 “Image Problem” (Ashbery), 131 imagery, 86–89 imagism in Pound, 89 immersivity, 12–14, 41, 82–83, 86–88, 90, 91–95, 97–98, 99 improvisation, 70–73, 78–79 indeterminacy, 78–79 informatics: defined, 6–7; and Kerouac, 10, 41, 57; and Olson, 20, 28, 32 informatics of domination: and algocracy, 40; in counterculture, 95; and cybernetics, 21, 30, 33–35; and digitized neoliberalism, 8; evolving, 134; and experience design, 98; and feedback, 77; introduced, 6–7; and mainstream media, 66–67; and romanticism, 113; and surveillance, 14, 119, 125 informatics of liberation: aspirations toward, 69, 76; and bleshing, 73; in counterculture, 95; and cybernetics, 21, 30; and digitized neoliberalism, 8; evolving, 134; and feedback, 29; humanmachine symbiosis as, 12, 55; introduced, 6–7; and Kerouac, 51–52; and Olson, 9; and psybernetics, 60; and public poetics, 14, 128; and romanticism, 112–13; and social computing, 12, 75–76; and typing technology, 25–26 information architectures: and authenticity, 123; Bateson and Mead on, 29; cybernetic conception of, 43; and idealization, 70; and immediacy, 54; and intersubjectivity, 25; and introjection, 67; networked, 73–74; predigital, 118; and singularity, 97–98 information economy: and algocracy, 7; and Ashbery, 15; and convergence, 106; and counterculture, 3; democratization of, 58, 70, 77, 112–13; and feedback, 29;

and interactive longings, 120–21; and Kerouac, 10, 40; and Lamantia, 91; networked, 17; and Olson, 35; and participation, 114; and social computing, 11–12; and typing technology, 41 information engineering, 6, 19–22, 29, 37, 40 information mobilization, 20–21, 35 information technologies, 6–7, 9, 11, 41, 47, 54, 58 information theory, 5–6, 9–10, 28, 45–46 installation art, 13 instantism, 10, 24, 28, 104–5 interactive media, 12–13, 86, 94–95, 99, 124 interactivity: algorithmic, 57–58; and Ashbery, 14, 113, 119–26, 128, 139; digitized, 36–37; and Ginsberg, 103; and happenings, 88, 105; and networked processes, 75; and New American Poetry, 12–13; and participation, 82–83, 113; and social computing, 86; and surrounds, 94 interconnectivity, 12, 36, 59–60, 66 interfacing: aesthetics of, 131–32; agential, 133; in Ashbery, 14–15, 120–21, 123–26, 139–41; democratized, 120–21, 135; digital, 131–34; and experience design, 98 interfacing technologies, 57, 103, 131–34 Internet, 27, 36, 39, 50, 75–77, 108, 135 intersubjectivity, 12, 25, 47, 60, 66, 69, 71 Interview magazine, 126–27 intimacy, 14, 94, 110, 117, 119–24, 132, 136, 142 introjection, 58, 66–67, 70, 75, 94 James, William, 142 jazz, 10, 40, 48–49, 52 Jenkins, Henry, 106, 108 Kane, Daniel, 48–50, 118–19 Kelly, Kevin, 42, 47, 58 Kerouac, Jack: antistatism of, 75; “cityCityCITY,” 41–47; and counterculture, 82–83, 95; and dharmic religions, 63–65; and human-machine symbiosis, 54–58; scroll compositions, 10–12, 39–41, 49–58, 152n35, 152n46; and spontaneous prose, 10–11, 40, 48–54; as technomodernist, 39–41 Killen, Andreas, 127 Index

177

Kim, Dorothy, 138 “The Kingfishers” (Olson), 8–9, 19–21, 28–29, 32–36, 89–90 Lamantia, Philip, 13, 83–91, 98 Lanier, Jaron, 96–98, 133–34 Latour, Bruno, 74 Leary, Timothy, 60, 65–70 Lee, Benjamin, 100, 110 Lehman, David, 110–11 Lesh, Phil, 70–72, 74–75 Leslie, Alfred, 49 liberation. See informatics of liberation Licklider, J. C. R., 55–58 life writing, 41, 100, 114, 127 “Litany” (Ashbery), 129 literary artifacts, 11, 16, 55 literary environments, 105 literary experimentation, 26, 40, 107, 133 literary underground, 128 literary vs. digital media, 101, 110 literature and film, 49 Liu, Alan, 16, 137–39 LSD, 67, 93–94 Lunch Poems (O’Hara), 13–14, 102–4, 106, 108, 114–15 lyrical mode, 40, 50–51, 110, 121–22, 130, 133 machine culture, 20 machine-reading software, 15–16 Macy Conferences, 9, 29, 35 “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (Licklider), 55–56 “Manifesto of Surrealism” (Breton), 86 manifestos, 21, 24–25, 28, 66, 75, 86, 88, 96, 100 Manovich, Lev, 99 mapping software, 103 Marcuse, Herbert, 58, 66–67 marketing and branding, 15, 128–29 mass aestheticizing, 114, 127–28 mass communication, 66–67 mass interactivity. See social computing mass media, 26, 48–49, 83, 94, 113, 122 The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon and Weaver), 44 McCulloch, Warren, 29 McGann, Jerome, 140–41 McGurl, Mark, 5, 25 178

Index

McKenzie, D. F., 141 McLuhan, Marshall, 91–92 McNally, Dennis, 66 Mead, Margaret, 20–21, 29–30 media: democratization of, 6, 70, 113–14; electrified, 9, 48, 67, 81–82; electronic, 1, 19, 28, 45, 82, 93, 95; interactive, 12–13, 86, 94, 124; intrusion of, 47; mainstream, 67, 83, 85; mass, 26, 48–49, 83, 94, 113, 122; and modernity, 35; multimedia, 12–13, 82, 92; new, 39, 49, 106, 132; politicization of, 19; print, 3, 19, 108; and technomodernism, 5–6; transformations of, 82, 99–101; word-based, 55. See also computational media; expressivity media architectures, 12, 29, 50, 60, 66, 132 media convergence, 106 media histories, 4–5, 11, 49–50, 106, 120 media objects, 95, 108 Melville, Herman, 19–21 Metzer, Ralph, 68–69 Mexico City Blues (Kerouac), 65 Miller, Stephen Paul, 125–26 Mindell, Dave, 44, 46–47, 81–82 Moby Dick (Melville), 19–20 modernism, 26 modernity, 29, 35, 106, 113, 123 Montfort, Nick, 55 Morozov, Evgeny, 76–79 multimedia, 12–13, 82, 92–93 Mumford, Lewis, 102 narrative(s): and Ashbery, 131; democratization of, 108; of the everyday, 102; and Kerouac, 10–11, 41, 52–53, 54, 56–57; and literary tradition, 11; and New American Writing, 26; and O’Hara, 13–14, 101–2; and social computing platforms, 114; and spontaneous prose, 48–50 Nazi Germany, 12, 67, 94–95 Nelson, Deborah, 14, 111–12 neofascism, 9–10 neoliberalism, 7–8, 16, 41 networked cognition, 12, 60, 66, 70, 73–76 networked communications, 21, 44–46 networked technologies, 103 networks: of affiliation, 111; of alternative distribution, 107; of association, 109, 110; and avant-garde, 27; of countercul-

ture, 28; digital, 7, 44; digitized distribution, 114, 128; dissident, 15, 106–7; outlier, 3–4, 5, 9, 16, 27, 145n5; print-based, 107, 110; social, 75, 76, 100–101, 103, 127; teletype, 10 New American Poetry, 1–13, 16, 19, 24–26, 27, 33, 46, 58, 109–10 The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (Allen), 1–4, 10–11, 24, 27, 40, 100, 102, 109 new media, 39, 49, 106, 132 A New Republic of Letters (McGann), 141–42 The New Writing in the USA (Allen and Creeley), 4, 33 New York School, 13–14 “The New York School of Poets” talk (Ashbery), 128 niche capitalism, 128–29, 132 Nixon, Richard, 126 noise, 10, 40, 44–46, 51–54, 57, 73 normativity, 132 nuclear age, 1, 31, 59, 62 objects: aesthetic, 9, 78–79, 142; agential, 77; and Ashbery, 121–24, 130; behavior of, 78; expressive, 11; media, 95, 108; objecthood, 78–79, 122, 140; paperbacks, 13, 106–8; qualities of, 11, 49, 52, 55, 142– 43; social theory of, 74–75, 78; transitional, 108 Office of War Information (OWI), 8, 19 O’Hara, Frank, 13–14, 26, 100–115 Olson, Charles, 8–10, 19–26, 28–29, 32–37, 89–90 On the Road (Kerouac), 10–11, 39–41, 49–54, 56–57 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 66–67 online empires, 134 ontological excess, 40, 52, 78–79 ontology, 60, 64–65, 68, 74, 85, 88, 136–37, 140–42 ontotheology, 42, 136, 150n7 opacity, 128, 132, 135–36 ordinary-language poetry, 89 Osmond, Humphrey F., 88 “The Other One” (song), 71–72 outlier networks, 3–4, 5, 9, 16, 27, 145n5 outsider branding, 106–7, 128

outsider poetry, 129 outsider sexuality, 110 OWI (Office of War Information), 8, 19 Paik, Nam June, 113, 120 The Pale King (Wallace), 136–37, 160n2 panopticism, 99, 114–15, 117–18, 125–26, 128, 132 Paper Machine (Derrida), 132–33 paperback publishing, 13, 106–8 paper-based expression, 13–14, 36, 123–24, 133, 139 Parmigianino, Francesco, 119–24 personal computing, 14, 27, 40, 73, 120 personhood: and agitation, 96; and Ashbery, 119–21, 128–29, 131, 132, 136; authentic, 57, 113; and experience design, 98; romantic conceptions of, 113; and the self, 99; and social media, 77 “Personism: A Manifesto” (O’Hara), 100 phenotropic computing, 97–98 Pinchbeck, Daniel, 69 The Pisan Cantos (Olson), 8–9, 22–24, 26, 28 “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)” (O’Hara), 103–6 “Poetic Matters” (Lamantia), 88 poetic space, 90, 104–6, 113 poetic voice in Olson, 34 poetical phenomenology, 130 “Poetical Space” (Ashbery), 130 “Poetry, Violence and the Trembling Lambs” (Ginsberg), 66–67, 70 The Politics of Ecstasy (Leary), 69 postmodernism, 119–20, 132, 136, 145–46n8 poststructuralism, 119–20, 132, 136 postsymbolism, 95–98 Pound, Ezra, 8–9, 21–26, 28, 88–89 prediction machines, 31 predigital aesthetics, 86 predigital information architectures, 118 print: as analogue to digitization, 39–41, 49–50; as analogue to film, 84; and intermedia convergence, 108; teletyping, 50, 54–55; underground, 109, 145n6 print culture, 3, 19, 25–26, 49, 87, 107–8, 109, 113–14, 145n6 print networks, 107, 110 Index

179

privacy, 14–15, 47, 111–12, 119, 124–26, 128. See also surveillance The Program Era (McGurl), 5 projection, 36. See also spontaneity projective verse, 2, 9–10, 22–25, 28, 33, 72 “Projective Verse” (Olson), 23–26, 28 psybernetic outlook, 60 The Psychedelic Experience (Leary and Metzer), 68–69 psychedelics, 13, 67–69, 71–73, 82–83, 87–88, 90–97 public poetics, 63, 128 quantification, 7, 16, 33 quantified-self movement, 77, 99 quantitative analytics, 16, 77, 141–42 quantitative rationality, 7–8, 136–37 queer theory, 100 Ram Dass. See Alpert, Richard Raskin, Jonah, 62 rationality: algorithmic, 7; bureaucratic, 85; computational, 10, 16, 140; fascist, 23, 30, 34; and Kerouac, 40; organizational, 30–31; quantitative, 7–8; and surrealism, 86 reality television, 126 recommendation engines, 36–37 representational practices, 133 Rexroth, Kenneth, 2–3, 5 Rivers, Larry, 105 rock culture, 72–73, 88 romanticism, 33, 56, 81, 87, 89, 112–15, 123, 129 Rosset, Barney, 106–7 Rubin, David, 87–88 Saler, Michael, 87–88 Sayers, Jentery, 7 science fiction, 41–47 Scientific American, 45 Screen Test series (Warhol), 118–19, 125–28 screen-based celebrity, 114, 128 scroll compositions, 10–12, 39–41, 49–58, 152n35, 152–53n46 secondary worlds, 82–83, 86–88 self-amplifying loop, 78. See also feedback self-authoring, 102–3, 113, 114 self-canalization, 43, 96 180

Index

self-cult (culte du moi), 129, 132 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Parmigianino), 119–20 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (Ashbery), 14, 119–31, 132–33, 135–36, 139–40 Shannon, Claude, 10, 44–46, 50–52, 55–58, 90 Shaviro, Steven, 142 Shaw, Lytle, 105, 110–11 Sieburth, Richard, 23 “A Simple Answer to the Enemy” (Lamantia), 85–86 singularity, 97–98 Six Gallery reading, 83 Snyder, Gary, 62–63, 65–66, 73, 75 social ascription, 14, 46, 48, 57, 87, 119, 131 social computing (social media): aesthetics of, 121; architectures of, 86; and Ashbery, 14; and celebrity, 127–28; and digital interfacing technologies, 131, 133; and digital recommender systems, 36–37; and expressive media, 143; and informatics, 7, 12, 75–76; and the information economy, 11–12; and interactive media, 86; and interactivity, 14, 113; and intermedia, 94; and Kerouac, 10, 39–41, 56–58; and O’Hara, 100; and Olson, 9; and self-authoring, 114–15; and template software, 96; and temporalities, 103 social engineering, 29–30, 77, 134 social interaction (happenings), 82–83, 88, 94, 105 social networking, 75, 76, 100–101, 103, 127 social theory of objects, 74–75, 78 software, 15–16, 96, 103 sousveillance, 99 spectatorship, 85–86, 117 speculative fiction, 47 spontaneity: and Kerouac, 10–11, 40, 48–54; and O’Hara, 104–5, 108, 110; and Olson, 24; and sound, 71–72; and technomodernism, 5; and typing technology, 26, 55 Stanley, Owsley, 93–94 “The Star Spangled Banner” performance (Hendrix), 81–82 “Statement on Poetics,” 10–11, 24, 40, 53, 100 STEM funding, 15–16 Stephens, Paul, 35

Stern, Gerd, 90–95 Stiegler, Bernard, 78 Stommel, Jesse, 138 Streeter, Thomas, 112 Sturgeon, Theodore, 70–71 subversive poetics. See avant-garde aesthetics Sullivan, Hannah, 26, 147n26 sunyata, 64–65 surrealism, 13, 83–97 surrounds, 94 surveillance, 4, 6–7, 13–15, 47, 99, 114–15, 117–19, 124–28, 134 “The System” (Ashbery), 125 taxonomic crisis, 11, 108 technical temporality, 101–3 technicisation of living, 78 technocracy, 10, 13, 84, 137–38 technogenetics, 76–79 technological romanticism, 112–15 technomodernism: and aesthetic experiments, 132; and the atomic era, 60; and avant-garde, 9; and the Grateful Dead, 73; introduced, 5; and Kerouac, 10, 41; longings, 24–25; and Olson, 35–36 techno-utopianism, 12, 82 telephony, 26, 44–45, 103 teletype, 10–11, 41, 50–51, 54–55 television, 70, 93–94, 113, 120, 126, 133 template software, 96 temporalities, 101–4 “Terror Conduction” (Lamantia), 84–86, 98 text-based mash-ups. See collage poetry textual artifacts, 11, 17, 141 textual fixity and flux, 13 textual mapping, 16, 136 “That’s It for the Other One” (song), 71–72 thinking machines, 31–32, 43 Thunder Sculptures (Boise), 94 transcription technology, 55 transitional objects, 108 transpersonal, 12, 64, 67–70, 72, 75–77, 94 Turkle, Sherry, 103–4 Turner, Fred, 13, 94–95



Twitter, 40, 77, 94, 96, 108, 123, 127 typing technology, 10–11, 22, 25–28, 39, 41, 48–51, 54–57 typography, 24, 92 Tytell, John, 21 underground, 109, 126–27, 129, 145n6 USCO (the Company of Us), 92–93 user-generated commentary, 113 Vendler, Helen, 121–24 Verbal American Landscape project, 91–93 virtual reality, 87–88, 96–98 virtual worlds, 6, 13, 103 voluntary surveillance, 13 von Hallberg, Robert, 30, 125 Voyant, 139–40, 142–43 Waldman, Anne, 22, 26, 36 Wallace, David Foster, 136–37 Warhol, Andy, 117–18, 126–28 Watergate, 4, 14, 119, 125–26 Weaver, Warren, 44–46 Web 2.0, 13, 39, 87, 96–97, 108, 117, 127, 131 Weber, Max, 87 Whalen, Philip, 65 “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” (Liu), 137–39 Whitman, Walt, 33 “Who Are You and What’s Happening” intermedia event, 93 Who Owns the Future? (Lanier), 97–98 “Why Tribe” (Snyder), 66 Wiener, Norbert, 21, 28–36, 43–45, 73 Wilcock, John, 127 Wolf, Reva, 127–28 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin), 122–23 World War II, 1–2, 8, 19–20, 28–29, 31–32, 47, 59 World Wide Web, original, 96 You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Lanier), 96–97

Index

181

The New American Canon Violet America: Regional Cosmopolitanism in U.S. Fiction since the Great Depression by Jason Arthur

It’s Just the Normal Noises: Marcus, Guralnick, No Depression, and the Mystery of Americana Music by Timothy Gray

The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Lindsey Michael Banco

American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11 by Kathy Knapp

Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War by Eric Bennett

Visible Dissent: Latin American Writers, Small U.S. Presses, and Progressive Social Change by Teresa V. Longo

Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry by Jim Cocola The Legacy of David Foster Wallace edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature by Nicole Brittingham Furlonge Postmodern/Postwar—and After: Rethinking American Literature edited by Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University edited by Loren Glass Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature by Sean Austin Grattan

Pynchon’s California edited by Scott McClintock and John Miller Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism by Ian McGuire Reading Capitalist Realism edited by Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge Technomodern Poetics: The American Literary Avant-Garde at the Start of the Information Age by Todd F. Tietchen How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production by John K. Young