Word Toys: Poetry and Technics [1 ed.] 9780817391225, 9780817358952

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WORD TOYS

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETICS Series Editors Charles Bernstein Hank Lazer Series Advisory Board Maria Damon Rachel Blau DuPlessis Alan Golding Susan Howe Nathaniel Mackey Jerome McGann Harryette Mullen Aldon Nielsen Marjorie Perloff Joan Retallack Ron Silliman Jerry Ward

WORD POETRY AND TECHNICS

TOYS

BRIAN KIM STEFANS

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALA­BAMA PRESS Tuscaloosa

The University of Ala­bama Press Tuscaloosa, Ala­bama 35487-­0380 uapress.ua.edu Copyright © 2017 by the University of Ala­bama Press All rights reserved. Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Ala­bama Press. Typeface: Minion and Futura Manufactured in the United States of America Cover design: David Nees Cataloging-­in-­Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-­0-­8173-­5895-­2 E-­ISBN: 978-­0-­8173-­9122-­5

Contents

List of Figures     vii Introduction: Beyond Estrangement     1 1. Playing the Field: Figures toward a Speculative Prosody     13 2. The New Commodity: Technicity and Poetic Form     49 3. Pilots of the Pharmakon: Bodies, Precarity, and the Milieu     83 4. Fictions of Immanence: Undigests and Outsider Writing     119 5. Terrible Engines: Toward a Literature of Sets     158 6. Miscegenated Scripts: The Gramme and Transpacific Hybridity     191 7. Discompositions: Troubling Ground in Graphic Design     228 8. Just Ask Lattice: A Poetics of Grids, Numbers, and Diagrams     260 Appendix: “Objects” in Programming and Philosophy     299 Notes     309 Works Cited     321 Index     333

Figures

Figure 1.1. Charles Olson, “History”     15 Figure 1.2. Reuven Tsur, “Arnheim”     22 Figure 1.3. Vito Acconci, “The Margins on this paper are set”     32 Figure 1.4. Harryette Mullen, page from Muse and Drudge     37 Figure 2.1. Rube Goldberg, “Simple Way to Light a Cigar”      62 Figure 2.2. “Audions and early triodes developed from them, 1918”     65 Figure 2.3. “Fleming valve schematic from US Patent 803,684”     66 Figure 3.1. Kevin Davies, page from Comp     103 Figure 4.1. John Wieners, page from Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike      132 Figure 4.2. Toadex Hobogrammathon, “Dagmar Chili”     141 Figure 4.3. Tan Lin, page from HEATH Course Pak     149 Figure 5.1. Mark Z. Danielewski, pages from Only Revolutions     176 Figure 5.2. Jonathan Safran Foer, page from Tree of Codes     181 Figure 6.1. Henri Michaux, “Alphabet” (1927)     195 Figure 6.2. Ho Hon Leung, “A Symphony Poem ‘Unfinished’ for Rose Li Kin Hong”     207

Figure 6.3. Young-­Hae Chang Heavy Industries, excerpts from “Cunnilingus in North Korea” in four languages     212 Figure 6.4. Paul Chan, “Black Panther” font from Alternumerics     215 Figure 6.5. «when you are old» (Square Word Calligraphy) 2007     218 Figure 6.6. John Cage, selection from “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham”     220 Figure 7.1. Arakawa and Madeline Gins, selection from The Mechanism of Meaning     236 Figure 7.2. Illustration from Denise Schmandt-­Besserat, When Writing Met Art, depicting token system     239 Figure 7.3. Ezra Pound, page from The ABC of Reading     244 Figure 7.4. Caroline Bergvall, page from Éclat     253 Figure 7.5. Wittgenstein’s Rod (origi­nal)     257 Figure 7.6. Wittgenstein’s Rod (corrected)     259 Figure 8.1. Gottlob Frege, from Begriffsschrift     271 Figure 8.2. Feynman diagram     272 Figure 8.3. Nomogram, “The Day of the Week for Any Date of History Back to the Birth of Christ”     274 Figure 8.4. “Nomogram for Determining the Lead Angle of a Cycloidal Cam”     275 Figure 8.5. Nomogram, “Solution of Lamé-­Maxwell Equation of Equilibrium”     276 Figure 8.6. William Poundstone, selection from New Digital Emblems     283 Figure 8.7. Christian Bök, page from Crystallography     289 Figure 8.8. Dom Sylvestre, “great cultural medical pekinese / protect steve”     297

WORD TOYS

Introduction Beyond Estrangement On the Autonomy of the Poem “He watched for the repetition of certain ideas; he sprinkled them with numbers.” —Paul Valéry, “The Evening with Monsieur Teste”

A Dissociation Alain Badiou names the central purveyors of a certain type of “post­modern” thinking—that which concedes, generally, that there is nothing “out­side of language”—vari­ously “sophists” and “anti-­philosophers,” arguing that having Wittgenstein considered the central philosopher of the early twentieth century would be like having Gorgias and Protagoras, and not Plato and Aristotle, as the founders of West­ern philosophy. If the “language game,” deconstruction and vari­ous “poststructural” offshoots, wanted to signal the end of West­ern metaphysics, Badiou instead sets aside the question of language—­ brackets it just as Husserl did the extra-­cognitive or “thing-­in-­itself ” in the construction of his phenomenology—in favor of a renewed engagement with “truth.” Quentin Meillassoux, Badiou’s former student, is the best known of those post linguistic-­turn philosophers identified, for better or worse, as “speculative realists.” Meillassoux’s relatively short work After Finitude proposes the term “correlationism” to describe those methods of philosophy that make the experiencing mind—objects as they exist in consciousness, the object of consciousness itself—the sole subject of philosophy rather than the things-­in-­themselves and the natural “laws” that govern them apart from consciousness. In these philosophies that Meillassoux wishes to supplant, only the correlation of the mind and object is what matters—neither can be understood without the other. Vilém Flusser articulates the correlation-

2 / Introduction

ist view succinctly in his highly entertaining pataphysical tract, co-­written by Louis Bec, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, on the vampire squid: “Reality is neither the organism nor the environment, neither the subject nor the object, neither the ego nor the nonego, but rather the concurrence of both. It is absurd to envisage an objectless subject or a subjectless object, a world without me and a me without the world. ‘Da-­Sein’ means ‘being in the world.’ If things were to change, it would not be because I have changed myself or because the world has changed itself but quite the contrary: the concrete ‘ego-­world’ relationship has changed, and this change has revealed itself phenomenally as changes both within myself and in the world outside” (36). While the details of Meillassoux’s argument are too complex to relate here, one finds in After Finitude a suggestive way to recover from Descartes’s famous split of the mind from matter and view consciousness as at one with the real without merely relegating consciousness as an emanation or epiphenomenon of the real (which Steven Shaviro argues is central to Whitehead’s philosophy in Without Criteria). Consciousness becomes an element of the universe to which in­di­vidual human minds have access, like a computer terminal to a mainframe, just as the laws of physics or of “nature” are an element of the universe to which in­di­vidual physical objects have access. I’d like to take advantage of this rapidly unfolding reengagement of philosophy with what used to be called metaphysics to speculate on poems as non-­textual and even non-­cultural objects—that is, as things in the world divorced from the human agents that created them and outside of the human agents that experience them. I’d like to attempt something that, to my mind, has been largely unfashionable in criticism of the latter twentieth century, which is to describe poetry—categories of poetry, poems as in­ di­vidual actors—in terms that derive from the metaphysical tradition. I’m not looking for eternal or absolute “truths” about poetry so much as to liberate poems from their depiction as merely symptoms of social, material, or his­tori­cal forces, products of when different human interests collide, cohere, or otherwise conspire to cough up things called “poems.” I don’t wish to discount these terms entirely, of course, as language is naturally tied to ethics and communal life and poetry to other genres such as the novel or even film. But I’d like to imagine poems as autonomous entities that, like machines and living organisms, enact their own interactions with their milieus, perhaps each with its own “will to power” and desire to reproduce, obtain sustenance, and evolve. Poems are, to this degree, “objects” in the sense of Graham Harman’s expanded definition, with essences that, in his theory of “vicarious causation,” retreat from other objects, hence their continued “allure” (the key concept in Harman’s aesthetics, which I won’t describe here). To Harman, objects

Beyond Estrangement / 3

only ever present “caricatures” of themselves to other objects: “The tribesman who dwells with the godlike leopard, or the prisoner who writes secret messages in lemon juice, are no closer to the dark reality of these objects than the scientist who gazes at them. If perception and theory both objectify entities, reducing them to one-­sided caricatures of their thundering depths, the same is true of practical manipulation. We distort when we see, and distort when we use. Nor is the sin of caricature a merely human vice. Dogs do not make contact with the full reality of bones, and neither do locusts with cornstalks, viruses with cells, rocks with windows, nor planets with moons. It is not human consciousness that distorts the reality of things, but relationality per se” (“Vicarious Causation” 193). To the degree that poems are objects, they can be understood, in Harman’s terms, as always already de­ familiarized in the Russian Formalist sense.

The Number and the Siren I have written elsewhere of Harman’s and Meillassoux’s major forays into literary aesthetics, the former in a book-­length work on H. P. Lovecraft entitled Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, the latter in a short book about Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard titled The Number and the Siren. In my view, both Harman and Meillassoux could be said to trust their texts in fashions that have grown alien to academic critics during the period of high “theory.” While not offering any sort of “surface” reading of the type that has become influential in the academy since the publication of “Surface Reading: An Introduction” by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus (2009)—readings that eschew the concerns of poststructural, Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic traditions view texts as dissimulating or otherwise concealing ideology, a form of interpretative loosely termed “symptomatic”—the “speculative realist” take on literary texts trusts, first of all, that they exist, and, sec­ond, like any object in the world, they are marked by appearances and essences. The result is texts are liberated from the network of relations that had threatened to turn texts into mere relations themselves, a network constructed largely by those invested with the duty to interpret texts in an era that sought to undermine the very paradigm of hermeneutics itself. Harman adheres, in his writing on Lovecraft, to a sort of naive mimesis, one that views language as largely “transparent” in a fashion long discouraged by avant-­garde writers in the tradition of, say, Stein, Ashbery, and the Language poets. The apparatus of a typical Lovecraft story is simple and ­reliable—­a monologue, a series of letters, a third person account—only taking on “horizontal” or “cubist” elements in those moments when the narrator himself fails to offer the open window on the view. “The power of lan-

4 / Introduction

guage is no longer enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality,” Har­man writes. “Instead, language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing” (25). Harman’s take on a certain famous passage in which a sailor is “swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse” (76) merges mathesis, or the expression of mathematical properties in physical reality, with journalistic subjectivity or what Frege might call “psychologism”: “Lovecraft introduces a problem. Not only is Cthulhu something over and above the three creatures he partially resembles [. . .] we now find that even acute and obtuse angles must be something over and above their qualities. There seems to be a ‘spirit’ of acute angles, a ‘general out­line of the whole’ which allows them to remain acute angles even in cases where they behave as if they were obtuse. Not since Pythagoras have geometrical entities been granted this sort of psychic potency, to the point that they have a deeper being over and above their measurable and experienceable traits” (76–77). There is pleasure in learning that there is, after Pythagoras (and before Kandinsky!), a tradition of attributing “psychic potency” to squares and circles. “[I]t is unclear how the mere fact of ‘behaving as obtuse’ would allow an angle to ‘swallow up’ an unwary sailor,” Harman continues: “Sketch the diagram of an obtuse angle for yourself, and you will see the difficulty in intuitively grasping what has happened. If the phrase ‘she looked daggers at him’ is an example of catachresis in language, a misapplication of a word to gain metaphorical effects, then the acute angle obtusely swallowing a sailor is a fine example of catachresis in geometry. We might as well say: ‘It was the number 21, but it behaved as though it were the number 6’ ” (77). A sec­ond stylistic technique that Harman describes is the “vertical” or “allusive” style, typified in this passage from the “Call of Cthulhu”: “If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing [. . .] but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.” For Harman, such a passage draws us away from trying to recreate the creature in the terms of our loathsome, mundane world of Euclidean time and space. Lovecraft situates the creature partly in the diseased imagination of a narrator who claims that the description is “not unfaithful” but hardly correct, and also “asks us to ignore the surface properties of dragon and octopus [. . .] and to focus instead on the fearsome ‘general outline of the whole.’ ” In this way, Lovecraft opens up a “gap”: things are moving along swimmingly in the story, with the narrator sane and physical reality recognizably accessible and ordered; just at the

Beyond Estrangement / 5

moment when the narrator experiences something truly astounding—the color out of space, the shadow out of time—language breaks down, and all you are left with is the “general outline of the whole” (24). Harman, to this degree, examines Lovecraft’s texts spatially, not temporally; he doesn’t provide a subjective account of a reading of the text burdened with the difficulties of generations of literary theory so much as focus on specific locations—words, sentences, paragraphs—where the text, imagined as a sort of tool, breaks and we are granted access to the noumenon. Likewise, Meillassoux surrenders to a naive mimesis: he recounts, or attempts to recount, Un coup de dés as a story with characters, a setting, and something of suspense. Mallarmé’s text doesn’t grant such easy access, of course, and argues by its syntax, graphic design, and the indeterminacies of its narrative for a mathematical reading—again, topographic, but not in the manner of a map so much as a formula or “picture” as we understand it from Wittgenstein’s definition in the Tractatus Philosophicus. Meillassoux attempts to establish a relationship to the text that is as impossible—but possibly necessary—as the drowning sailor’s grasping of a severed mast in the whirlpool. We are given something of an allegory to the “strong correlationist” description of the mind→​­object relationship, but are also teased with attempting to grab the mast itself in an effort to situate and steady ourselves in space and time. Meillassoux believes the poet was meticulously crafting a singularity: a poem that is the ultimate, and unrepeatable, response to the “crisis in verse” because it created a new poetic form premised on an unrevealed Number, a new form of measure, with its attendant metaphysical properties, but also the ultimate response to the secularization of Europe and the need, expressed in countless ways in nineteenth-­century culture, to raise art to the status of religion. Meillassoux makes an interesting critique of Wagner and his particular response to secularization: “[T]he weakness of Wagnerian ‘total art’ resides in its will to reconnect with the Greek articulation of theatre and politics. To fig­ure upon a scene the relation of humans and their gods, to render visible to the masses the principle of their communion with the aid of a narrative embellished with song—in short, to represent to a people its own mystery: such is for Mallarmé the Greek heritage upon which art, in­clud­ing Wagnerian art, continues to feed. But, according to the poet, it is precisely the representation that art must break with if it would claim to go beyond Christianity” (108). While Mallarmé referred to Christianity as the “black agony,” he nonetheless saw the roots of European culture lying not in the Greeks but in the Latin Middle Ages. “Christianity has handed down to us a ritual superior in power to those of paganism,” Meillessoux writes, “namely the real

6 / Introduction

convocation of a real drama.” Thus, the Master favored the mysteries of the Eucharist over the catharsis of theater or allegorical pageantry: The Eucharist is thus a paradoxical mode of ‘presence in absence’: The divine is there, among the elect, in the very host—but is not yet ­returned. . . . It is a presence that is not in the present, but in the past and in the future. To take up Mallarmé’s vocabulary—and his evocation of ‘God [. . .] there, diffuse’—we should speak, to signify the Eucharistic mode of presence, whether or not it is transcendent, of a dif­ fusion of the divine, as opposed to its representation, or its presentation. The ultimate singularity of Mallarmé’s poetics—the idea that oriented his last writings—thus consisted in the quest for a ‘diffusion of the absolute’ emancipated from representation (even if, evidently, the latter is not annulled in the labor of the work) and dismissing all eschatological parousia. (112) For Mallarmé, art doesn’t conjure the divine for humans by overpowering them with presence—narrative, technology, song, even perhaps the “soul”— but imitates rather the act of Christ, whom Mallarmé sees as the “anonymous official, effaced before transcendence, and whose sole movement of retreating, back into the throng, attests to the presence of divinity.” Though Mallarmé’s poem, with all of what the Brazilian concrete poets would term “verbi-­voco-­visual” elements, does indeed have all the trappings of a Ge­ samt­kunst­werk, it is not theater so much as an event, the “diffusion of the divine,” in all modesty an attempt to replace religion with poetry. There is a sort of Decadent trinity, the character of the Master in the poem hesitating before a throw of the dice, Chance itself, and finally, the poet and his­tori­cal fig­ure Mallarmé: [T]his ‘Master’ who would be both thrower and non-­thrower would be only a representation of the Master. He would be nothing more than a fiction engendered by the Poem—and it is precisely his fictional status that would permit him to be virtually all things, at the behest of the reader’s imagination. Now, according to our hypothesis, at stake in the Coup de dés is the ‘diffusion of the divine’ and therefore the real presence of a real drama, a drama supporting an effective infinitization—not an empty fiction. Thus, it is indeed the gesture of Mallarmé himself—his throwing of the Number, his wager engendered by the performative purport of the encrypted Poem—that must be infinitized if we would extract the Coup de des from the sole reign of representation. (132)

Beyond Estrangement / 7

Un coup de dés is not merely a narrative poem, a fiction or objective correlative (to borrow T. S. Eliot’s term), telling the story of the Master hesitating before Chance. Rather, the poem itself becomes this very act, a hesitance in which the throwing and not throwing are coexistent, like life and death in the allegory of Schrödinger’s Cat. The Number tossed, of course, is one I can’t reveal, but which Meillessoux writes can only have been, itself, discovered by chance; hence, the wager that Mallarmé himself took that his poem would never be “deciphered” and Meillassoux’s palpable excitement at having done it. In Word Toys, I try (with far less elegance and far too many words) to negotiate some of the terms Meillassoux employs: treating poems as singulari­ ties (even if clear “influences” and other his­tori­cal determinants are visible), as objects (instances of graphic design, numerically-­based diagrams, as func­ tioning actants), and as evental (a “truth condition” in Badiou’s term, producing new possibility from the void). Badiou’s most accessible deployment of the term appears in his po­liti­cal writings, such as Rebirth of History, The Communist Hypothesis, and elsewhere where he seeks to link the recent wave of “riots and uprisings” (his phrase) to something like the revaluation of history. “What is important here,” Badiou writes in the Communist Hypothesis, “is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or is dependent on the transcendental laws of the world. An event is the creation of new possibilities. [W]ith respect to the situation or a world, an event paves the way for the possibility of what—from the limited perspective of the make-­up of this situation or the legality of this world—is strictly impossible.” In other words, revolution is an attempt to try the hand of chance: to create his­tori­cal singularities that are transformative, truly novel, and that leave in their wake nothing unchanged. This is also his description of what happens in a poem.

A Quick Graph Word Toys is “non-­linear” to the degree that, on occasion, words or phrases are used in earlier chapters that are not substantially defined or investigated until later. Additionally, many terms and concepts are derived from my read­ing in Continental (and related) philosophy and might be unusual in the context of “literary criticism,” though some (especially those derived from Wittgenstein and Deleuze) have been pretty regularly employed. Another strand that appears frequently derives from vari­ous theories of the visual: new media, print design, “picture” and information theory. The most familiar element, at least to readers of this series from the University of Ala­bama Press, is that of “postmodern” or experimental poetics, though I

8 / Introduction

choose not to use those terms and, for the most part, do not chart chains of influence, social or his­tori­cal contexts, or link readings of works to predecessor texts. In “Playing the Field,” three “fig­ures” are introduced: interruption, suspension, and recursion. I call these “prosodic” to the degree that they are related to the material foundation of a poem—the words on the page, arrangement, punctuation, etc.—but don’t play a direct role in determining their “meaning,” much as metrical, phonological, and even syntactical elements of a poem (the subject of traditional prosody) don’t determine its meaning. The three terms are derived, respectively, from the writings of Badiou on Arthur Rimbaud, of Heidegger on Friedrich Hölderlin, and from my own understanding of “recursion” from object-­oriented computer programming. The test, as regards the concepts derived from philosophy, is whether these terms can be liberated from their initial application to (or derivation from) the poetry of Rimbaud and Hölderlin and be applied elsewhere. Later in the book, the criti­cal writing of poet/critics Veronica Forrest-­Thomson and Charles Bernstein are examined to round out the notion of the contribution of “non-­meaningful” elements to a poem. The “27th Letter,” another concept from the first chapter, is derived from a reading of the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, and introduces a theme that occurs in vari­ous guises through­out this book, which is that of the “mathematical” reader. A note on the link of logic and psychology (derived from the writing of Jean Piaget), a meditation on Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Mathematics, reflections on Meillassoux’s (and his mentor Badiou’s) employment of set theory in his philosophy of the “transfinite,” Sherry Turkle’s writing on video games and, finally, a linkage between the attempts in the early twentieth century by Frege, Russell, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein to create formal languages that merged mathematics and philosophy as a manner of grounding these discourses all contribute to this notion that there is some way to “perceive” a mathematical layer to what are, on the surface, linguistic structures. Occasionally, I make some asides concerning “digital humanities” and the problems of the mathematization of text and their subsequent visualizations in this academic practice (Franco Moretti, Johanna Drucker, and Alex Galloway are touchstones here). The final chapter’s long digression on a “Theory of Diagrams” and remarks on the work of William Poundstone and Christian Bök are intended as the culmination of this thematic strand. “The New Commodity” introduces the notion of “technicity,” which I base on the writing of Gilbert Simondon and, to a smaller degree, Bernard Stiegler. Starting with a reflection on the Language poets’ employment of Marx’s critique of the “commodity,” this chapter attempts to concretize, or

Beyond Estrangement / 9

render literal (and not merely metaphorical), the notion of the poem as a “machine” as both Pound and Williams suggested in different ways. Two avenues linking textual objects to functioning material objects are through computer programming—an essentially textual practice that makes things happen—and through W. J. T. Mitchell’s concept of the “metapicture,” an image that is “undecided” between a closed set of possible (and absolute) understandings rather than merely “indeterminate.” Like the first chapter, this chapter is overloaded with concepts and spends little time doing literary criticism. The first chapter “close reads” Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (to illustrate “suspension” and the notion of an underlying poetic “diagram”) and this one Ben Lerner’s Lichtenberg Figures (to illustrate the linked concepts of the metapicture, undecidability, and recursion). “Pilots of the Pharmakon” introduces concepts that are much more “social” than the above, namely the notion of the pharmakon—the ensemble of technical elements that comprise the non-­in­di­vidual “tertiary” memory of a culture—as derived from the writing of Bernard Stiegler who, in turn, adapted it from Derrida’s reading of Plato in “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Much as my first chapter started with a brief revisit with an acknowledged twentieth-­ century fig­ure, Charles Olson, this one starts with a review of some of the “method” of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and traces it through the writing of Alice Notley, Kevin Davies, and Wanda Coleman. These works best illustrate a decidedly Anglo-­Ameri­can version of Badiou’s poetics of “interruption,” and while I don’t make any sociological claims, it is notable that all three were published in within a few years of the last turn of the century. The section on Coleman concludes with a review of Kristin Ross’s notion of “the Swarm” in her book The Emergence of Social Space, and introduces another important strand for my book—the concept derived from Simondon of the “pre-­individual.” The chapter ends with a brief meditation on the “poetics of care,” which eschews interruption (seeing it as “fragmentation”) and argues instead for a poetics of “connectivity.” “Fictions of Immanence” attempts to describe an “outsider writing” and examines a new literary form that I have dubbed the “undigest.” Unlike the above chapters (and much like the two that follow), this chapter operates more as a catalogue of works—in this case Peter Manson’s Adjunct: An Un­ digest, Toadex Hobogrammathon’s “Name: A Novel” and the blog “Dagmar Chili,” and a set of works by Tan Lin—situating them within, on the one hand, an undercurrent of Modernist and mid-­century experimental writing and, on the other, a “techno-­anarchist” moment that occurred in the early days of internet art and literature. This chapter dips briefly, however, into a review of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “plane of immanence,” characterized as pre-­conceptual, transindividual, and as aspiring to “infinite

10 / Introduction

speed” (in contrast to the “slow beings that we are”). The “plane of immanence” is related to the notion of the a-­field (my own coinage) to denote a sort of physical, information-­rich field to which we have no direct access— Eugene Thacker might call this “the world without us”—but which can be seen as an empirical (even if not observable) proof of Deleuze and Guattari’s highly speculative concept. A section in the final chapter, “Just Ask Lattice,” on nomograms is also concerned with the process of deriving “decided” meanings from mathematized “planes.” “Terrible Engines” and “Miscegenated Scripts”‘ also function largely as catalogues. “Terrible Engines” attempts a “speculative realist” reading of a range of works from conceptual writing to mainstream (if highly experimental) novels by Mark Danielewski and Jonathan Safran Foer. These works can be situated in a triad that includes, in one corner, the “lyric” poem (described in my first two chapters) and the “undigest” (a sort of poem-­as-­ source-­text), as they are works that make a show of their structure and yet are (in the manner of Oulipian writing) attempting to strangle ­“inspiration.” “Miscegenated Scripts” likewise investigates works that, in some way, target a specifically transpacific linguistic, cultural, and geographical divide. Many of these works lack “content” in the traditional sense—they are of­ten works that are in the form of procedures and instructions (Xu Bing’s calligraphy, Paul Chan’s fonts, John Cage’s mesostics), or that chart some zone between “east­ern” and “west­ern” writing systems (Yunte Huang’s translation practices, Ho Hon Leung’s “matrices,” John Cayley’s “transliteral morphs)— though in other cases (Prema Murthy’s pseudo-­erotic website, Young-­Hae Chang Heavy Industry’s word movies, Theresa Cha’s performance and visual poetics) they directly target cultural and po­liti­cal representation. A section on granularity and the gramme (derived from Derrida through Steve McCaf­ fery) offers yet another take on the “plane of immanence.” “Discompositions” is a speculative reading of the basis of “meaning” in graphic design, and “Just Ask Lattice” is something of a Symbolist and art criti­cal take on decidedly non-­artistic practices such as the title states: the visualization of numbers. “Discompositions” examines how three types of grounding—formal, phenomenological, and legislative/symbolic—can be discerned in graphic design, and uses archeologist Denise Schmandt-­Besserat’s theories of the origins of writing systems to link the three. What follows is an eclectic set of case studies—Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, poems by Cummings and Clark Coolidge, and Caroline Bergvall’s Éclat—ending with an account of Wittgenstein’s “visual proof ” in Remarks. “Just Ask Lattice” starts with an account of Paul Valéry’s speculative Instrumentalists (who used “tables of correspondences”), Rosalind Kraus’s writing on the “grid,” and a

Beyond Estrangement / 11

series of reflections on the depictions of numbers in images (charts, diagrams, formal languages, nomograms) concluding with a reading of William Poundstone’s New Digital Emblems and Christian Bök’s Crystallography. This chapter ends with a quick array of linkages between purely formal structures—metapictures, paragrams, crystals—and something like the origins of the “subject,” again revisiting the notion of the “preindividual.” As this “quick graph” should make clear, Word Toys makes contentions that are, on the one hand, simply not provable and, on the other, of little use in helping to interpret poems. Yes, there are “close readings,” but they are done (or are intended to be done) in symbiotic relationship with some purely speculative, and vaguely outlandish, notion such as the “plane of immanence,” the “a-­field,” the “infinite,” the “undecidable” and so forth. I’m not a philosopher, and yet I wanted to be able to employ a set of terms from my reading while granting them more significant stage time (especially when derived from less well-­known writers like Simondon, Meillassoux, and Stiegler that I’ve grown particularly fond of) than usually occurs in literary criticism. As for stylistic infelicities, I’ve tried to delete or revise out as many em-­dashes, crazed contentions, dropped names, and impossible associations as possible, but I’m afraid that, like Frank O’Hara (or was it Rachmaninoff?), I will never be mentally sober.

Acknowledgements Some chapters in this book were initially written for a variety of occasions and were all extensively revised and expanded. A shortened version of “Fictions of Immanence” will appear in the volume Contemporary Fiction After Literature, edited by Daniel O’Hara, to be published by Northwest­ern University Press in 2017. Sections of “Miscegenated Scripts” appeared as the “new media” entry in the The Routledge Companion to Asian Ameri­can and Pacific Islander Literature (2015) edited by Rachel Lee. The sections concerning distant reading were written for a talk I gave at Richard Stockton University titled “Questions of Scale: Notes on ‘Distant’ and ‘Close’ Reading” in February 2015. A first draft of “The New Commodity” was written for the PAMLA Conference in Riverside, CA, in 2014. “Discompositions” was origi­nally conceived as the keynote address at the conference “Composition: Making Meaning Through Design” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in May 2014. The bulk of “Terrible Engines” first appeared in Comparative Literature Studies in 2014. The section on William Poundstone in “Just Ask Lattice” derives from a presentation at the Electronic Literature

12 / Introduction

Organization’s arts festival of 2010, Archive & Innovate. Parts of the sections concerning Alice Notley’s Disobedience, Kevin Davies’s Comp., and Tan Lin’s BlipSoak01 first appeared in the Boston Review in the years 2001–2004. A proper list of personal acknowledgements would take up several pages. I haven’t adopted the good habit that many academics have of sharing drafts of their work with peers—any mistakes, bad judgments, and malformed thoughts herein are entirely mine—and so thanks for feedback and so forth are absent. I don’t know how many great conversations about poetry I have had with Walter K. Lew, Tim Davis, Jennifer Moxley, Jeff Derksen, D ­ arren Wershler, Miles Champion, Sianne Ngai, Kevin Davies, Bruce Andrews, Robert Fitterman, Kim Rosenfield, Nathan Brown, Michael Scharf, Stacy Doris, Michael O'Brien, and Michael Gizzi—I’m just quite sure I had them. Writing by poet/scholars such as Charles Bernstein, Steven McCaffery, Daniel Tiffany, and Craig Dworkin, who I’m happy to count as friends, are clearly evident in this book—I hope my contribution to this library is worthy. Among my great poet-­teachers in college and graduate school I count Robert Kelly, John Ashbery, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Ann Lauterbach, but I’ll refrain from noting any other great “teachers” I’ve only known through books (thank you, The Pound Era). My poet posse here in Los Angeles—Joseph Mosconi, Andrew Maxell, Kate Durbin, Ara Shirinyan, Will Alexander, Aaron Kunin, Molly Bendall, and others—are necessary air, but most important is Román Luján, who has taught me much about the genuinely Corinthian nature of Los Angeles and the intricacies of Mexican and South Ameri­can poetry and also just how friendship works. I’ve learned much from my students, especially Jeremy Schmidt, Jacquelyn Ardam, Jay Jin, Sarah Nance, Craig Messner, and the fabulous Lysette Simmons. Friends who don’t fit into the categories above but who I have to mention include Sarah Gardam and Nathan Long. Of course, I want to thank family: my father, John, for his creativity— he wrote many songs!—and also his useful impatience with the state of the world, and his wife and my great friend Karin for her intelligence and spirit; my mother Mi Yong to whom this book is secretly dedicated, who probably got the whole poet thing going just in the richness of her “Oriental” wisdom mixed with the no-­bullshit, passionate attitude she takes into everything, along with her husband, Dean Daly, who is a quiet treasure and maybe the only sane person in my family; and my siblings Lindsay, Cindy, Alexandra, and Erik, with whom I’ve shared many misadventures but who also continue to amaze me by all they’ve learned and have been willing to share. Anna Le Roy, I love you for your patience, support, and your beautiful heart.

1 Playing the Field Figures toward a Speculative Prosody

The Field For readers of Anglophone poetry of the twentieth century, the concept of the “field” as the true ground of poetic composition, in contrast to a false ground of meter, rhyme, and formal patterns such as the sonnet, will have some resonance. Charles Olson advocated the “composition by field” predicated on his understanding of Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophy transformed the concept of “field” in particle physics to an entire metaphysi­ cal system, while The Opening of the Field was the title of a major book by Robert Duncan, the first of a trilogy he published with New Directions in the 1960s, foregrounding his particular blend of the techniques of Pound and Olson, his deep reading in a variety of literatures, occult philosophies, and emancipatory politics. The argument by these and other practitioners of “New Ameri­can” poetics was that the page could operate like a plane of appearances, as a foundational bed or ground in which objects, namely clusters of words, could be situated and in which experiments in spatial organization, reading temporality and semantic indeterminacy—the page as “score”—could be enacted. Olson, inspired by his reading in Whitehead, would understand the page as a field of processes, of “actual events” or “actual occasions,” terms Whitehead employed to collapse the binary between objects and events (or subject and predicate), favoring instead a metaphysics that rendered events or occasions as in a state of constant destruction and renewal—which he called “prehension”—and to a degree undecided until observed (like the particle/wave distinction in physics). This concept is central to Whitehead’s notions of time, which he understood as having extension

14 / Chapter 1

like space, and explanatory of why things appear to change. Keith Robert­ son writes (in the context of a comparison with Deleuze’s “plane of immanence”): “Prehension is a noncognitive ‘feeling’ guiding how the occasion shapes itself from the data of the past and the potentialities of the future. Prehension is an ‘intermediary,’ a purely immanent potential power, a relation of difference with itself, or pure ‘affection’ before any division into form and matter” (219). The central issue in Robertson’s essay, and much writing about Whitehead, is whether or not Whitehead’s “process” philosophy is a philosophy of “flux” in the Bergsonian sense; the theory of “prehension” seems to argue for a sort of pulse, a “rhythm of life,” a sort of temporal atomism, that would argue against it. “[E]very element in an open poem,” Olson wrote in “Projective Verse,” “must be taken up as participants in the kinetics of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality”—“accustomed” being the key term, as in the Whitehead worldview, “objects” are really events, their static stability a mere illusion. Refiguring the classic clash of the “raw” and the “cooked,” of Whitman against the traditional poetries of the Old World, Olson dubbed formal poetry the “verse which print bred,” in which form seemed to be imposed from outside, like the form of the brick on the matter of clay, maintaining the hylomorphic dualism of “matter” and “form” characteristic of Aristotle and later Medieval scholastics. Olson argued instead that poems were “direct transfers of energy” between the writer (not the subject but “some several forces”) and reader, and in fact a physical inscription of the bodily (breathing) act of the poet. To this degree, poems for Olson were in constant states of becoming, both in the writing (the cybernetic loop that requires the typewriter to provide precise feedback to the poet engaged in the process) and for the reader who adjusts his/her reading according to the marks on the page, and not final states of being following some predetermined pattern such as a sonnet. The page could, to this degree, be described as merely the place where these transfers were stopped, burning their energies into a hindering medium, like the canvas upon which Pollack captured his arcs of paint or the plane that checked the three pieces of thread, dropped from the height of one meter, in the Three Standard Stoppages of Duchamp. Olson’s poetics in particular seemed to suggest that the page simply existed as a place where a series of seemingly random, and largely disordered, processes were “recorded” if only because they were halted in their motions through space. Syllables, that most granular element of language below which exists only the sound or the stroke, were the building blocks of this form of poetics, even as Olson never experimented with the types of deterritorialized (in Deleuze and Guatarri’s sense) or “ideolectic” (some would say merely nonsense) poetries that Charles Bernstein among other Language

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 15

Figure 1.1. Charles Olson, “History.”

poets have advocated (Bernstein 1996). There are, however, significant moments in Olson’s writing in which he did, indeed, turn to formal patterns, notably in the charts and diagrams that he drew up to clarify his understanding of the transformations that he was requesting be made in general thinking about the relationship of, for example, history to the present, or the Cartesian “self ” to the Whiteheadian “actual occasion.” A diagram known as “History” (“me fecit” on Janu­ary 7, 1955) is one of the more intriguing of these occasional charts (see fig. 1.1). The chart describes the convergence of

16 / Chapter 1

several vectors onto a single rectangular plane, perhaps that of the page, but equally like that of the person Ed Dorn, whose name stands at the center of it. The vectors are, roughly: • that of “history” seen previously as “static” travelling across “millennia, 12,000 BC to 1955 AD” to form (once inside the plane) the “field”; • that of the “individual,” formerly understood as a “soul” and now given, contra Descartes, extension (“as round as is long, as wide as is down”), being the “result” inside the plane; • that of the “soul” or “spiritual” life which, like above, is depicted as somehow acquiring extension (“a measurable quantum”) but this time as a “process” and not as the round, wide object of before, understood inside the plane as the “act”; and • that of the “environment” or “society”—perhaps the milieu of Bernard Stiegler’s pharmakon, as we shall see later—that, through the growth of population and the expansion of technology, is depicted as ­having merged into something he calls “quantity,” later as era or “time” (in square quotes with a trailing question mark, as if Olson himself didn’t know), on the interior of the plane. His note on the bottom of the chart outlines some of the less apparent symmetries—that “time” is quantity and “field” is millennia, “process” is soul and “person” is the science of soul—none of which I hope to unpack here. My concern is simply with Olson’s use of a diagram, a formal and symmetrical structure, to describe a poetics that is predicated on a multiplicity of processes that could never be reduced to the sorts of abstractions he contends draw us away from our particularity. There are many points in the diagram that seem classically Olsononian—the eccentric rhetoric (“how— how—how”), the etymological insertions (“meta + hodoes = TAO”); and the resistance to a total symmetry (the writing is simply too indeterminate and idiosyncratic for that)—and for this reason one must ask: is this diagram actually a poem. My guess is that most readers of Olson would simply say, yes, of course, but to do so would beg the question: is it then no longer a diagram? If it’s so easy to think of a diagram as a poem, can we then think of poems, even or especially lyric poems, as a species of diagram? Olson’s direct influence on Ameri­can poetry is a bit hard to discern today, but his poetics offer a way to rethink what is of­ten thought of as a convergence of “avant-­garde” or “Language” poetries with those poetries known as “lyric,” serving as an anticipatory unifier of literary “fields” in this way. Though it has hardly become a common term, the “new lyric” was mostly

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 17

related to the poetry of Jennifer Moxley and her journal The Impercipient (1992–1995), and others who had some affiliation with the Brown University creative writing program in the 1990s, and was understood at the time as a lyric “after” Language poetry—the return of the subjective “I,” passionate affect, and the rapprochement with a sort of Romantic tradition (though not the Tradition as known through Eliot). Influenced perhaps by Bernadette Mayer’s engagements with classical literature, Moxley was particularly bold in affecting a Romantic posture and exiling the difficulties and “ironies” one associated with postmodernism, even as she flirted with the campy excesses, the “moral exhibitionism” (as Benjamin wrote of the Surrealists) of Frank O’Hara. She writes in “Æolian Harp”: Ribboning dreams unspool in a discarded heap of oppressive gravity, remember when life was still compelling, your talents in truck for fealty, the luxurious future at hand, pastoral lack of capital in the vernal fervor couched; “make something of yourself,” for example a man or a picture of archaic pride atop an old armoire, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” as did those bargained away first sons whose whims were nursed by sins far worse than sacrifice . . . (56) The run-­on syntax and heightened verbiage, not to mention declamatory pose, of O’Hara’s “Odes” is readily apparent, but so is a strong pentametrical base, with lines like “bargained away first sons whose whims were nursed” only straying slightly from a string of clear iambs. Other journals with slightly different emphases, such as Apex of the M (1994–1997) and The Germ (1997–2005), were also seen as emblematic of this turn from constructivist poetics. However, it was not until the turn of the twenty-­first century that lyric poetry, in guises far from traditional, made a resurgence, not just as a reaction against the excesses of Language poetry but also against the ascendance of “digital culture”—the textuality of blogs, spam, algorithms, all sorts of machinic creativity characteristic of the Internet. A plethora of presses have formed around the interests of these poets, such as Wave Books, Flood Editions, and most importantly Ugly Duckling Press, which has worked against the trend of digitally-­created and internet-­distributed books by crafting each volume like a fetish-­object. If one end of the poetry-­ publishing spectrum takes McLuhan as their guide, pouring out e-­books and PDFs on the web (ubu.com’s “slash ubu” series, Gauss PDF, and Troll

18 / Chapter 1

Thread are three examples), these presses look back to the artisanal practices of William Morris, the Russian avant-­garde of the twenties, and the small presses of the seventies.1 One could generalize and say that this merging of the “lyric” and the more indeterminate forms of “Language-­centered” writing brings us back to what Olson proposed: the composition of deeply novel poems, point by point rather than as a way to fill a prescribed form, using the entire energies of the poet’s mind/body to make “high energy constructs.” However, I’d like to suggest that a different set of poets are reviving some of the poetics of “field,” even as the page is not being understood as a medium that makes visible (or captures photographically) the activities of the field, but rather points to a field that remains invisible. Among these poets engaged in a revival of the “lyric,” many, even if they are instinctually allergic to traditional meters and forms, are nonetheless investigating the very object-­nature of poems, their autonomy as things in the world (and not as constellations of fragments), as identifiable patterns and not congeries of traces. While still eschewing composition by “field,” these poets opt vari­ously for highly rhe­ tori­cal (as opposed to Romantic), procedural (as opposed to “organic”), decidedly unnatural modes, characterized by the uses of arbitrary constraints, word lists, syllabics and exhaustive reworkings of precedent texts. Books consisting of shorter lyrical works (some authors include Matthea Harvey, Harryette Mullen, Susan Wheeler, Christian Bök, K. Silem Mohammad, Ben Lerner, and Aaron Kunin) and “novels” such Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (his follow-­up to the widely acclaimed House of Leaves) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, both of which strike me as narrative poems, exhibit these tendencies. My sense is that, though the term “open form” was of­ten used as a synonym of “composition by field,” one could argue that the page-­as-­field is where poems in both “open” and “closed” form could exist—a sonnet, for example, would run there in the way a train engine could run on tracks and yet be an object in opposition to another object on the same page— and, indeed, in Olson’s Maximus poems, several elements of “closed” poetry appear (“Aloofe, aloofe; and come no neare, / the dangers doe appeare,” a transcription of “The Sea Marke” by John Smith), not to mention archi­ val documents that couldn’t possibly represent a “direct transfer” of energy (an aspect Susan Howe would fruitfully exploit). What would have to be asked, then, is whether it is ever truly possible to escape the “field” upon which literature is based—the plane of appearances that we call “poems”— and if there could be a composition by a-­field, a field beyond literature (or consciousness-­of-­literature). Is there a way that a theory of the page-­as-­field

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 19

has been preserved, even as the apparatus of Projective Verse—the composition by breath, the liberation from the left margin, the inclusion of un­ digested bits of documentary matter—has become unfashionable? (Bern­ stein’s understanding that Maximus “fares best when it is released of the demands of information, its cargo load jettisoned: when its content is not like vitamins added to bread which has had its bran removed” [Content’s Dream 336] is probably commonplace.) Has a paradigm shift occurred, and are we no longer able to understand the page as intensely private, an enactment of specific energies between writer and reader, because of the ubiquity of the present tense from all quarters of society—the techno­logi­cal milieu—today? Finally, is the new emphasis on the ludic nature of communications systems—the database logic that underlies all instances of digital communication and that Lev Manovich identifies as constituting a new “sym­ bolic form” (Language of New Media)—forcing us to rethink the divide between “formal” and “experimental” verse? Can the use of fixed (even if invented) forms be understood as aspiring to be evental—as pulling from the invisible—­rather than merely the rehearsal of a “tradition”?

A Note on Prosody Prosody has traditionally denoted the study of rhythmical patterns in poetry, a search for a universal set of terms with which to describe its pre-­semantic underpinnings through sound and pattern. Some poets, like Thomas Gray, Adelaide Crapsey, and John Hollander, have written detailed treatises on poetic meter, but for the most part studies of prosody are associated with non-­poets, with a particular swelling of the practice in the late nineteenth century culminating in George Saintsbury’s His­tori­cal Manual of English Prosody (1908), which was over fifteen hundred pages long. Joost Daalder, in a recent study of the tome, echoes what is probably the view of most poets and scholars today when he notes that Saintsbury’s “remarkable theory of the English language, and of versification . . . in its very unsoundness [is] a provocative challenge to those of us who would like to describe the facts of English prosody” (1), concluding: “The ‘feet’ which lie at the heart of Saints­bury’s sys­tem . . . provide an inadequate concept in the analy­sis of almost any kind of English verse. The chief merit of his monumental book is that its very erroneousness forces us to think more clearly than he did” (19). Contemporary treatments of prosody in the Saintsbury tradition are notable for their chapters on “free verse” and Ameri­can variations on somatic metrics ranging roughly from Whitman to Williams and Olson, suggesting that some serious attention to the “variable foot” and the “line by breath”

20 / Chapter 1

is warranted but ultimately cannot be reduced to system. This continued reference to notions of form and pattern in verse suggests that something of the technicity of a poem lies in the discernible mechanics and patterns ­lying beneath the level of affect and proposition, even if it’s not describable in the language of stress and “feet.” By technicity, I mean the properties that a poem shares with those machines that Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler describe as constituting a “third order of being” between those orders of the inanimate (stones, wind, sunlight) and the living. The prosodists are, to this degree, correct in believing that there is an invisible (or insen­ sible) element grounding poems, but wrong in thinking that the only way we gain access to this grounding is through examining stress patterns, phonetics, metrics, and so forth. Richard Cureton writes in Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (1–75) that there are currently fifteen major schools of prosody, among them: foot-­ substitution prosodists (“The oldest and still most dominant approach to English verse . . . derive[d] from classical scansion”); temporalists who replace the foot with “measures”; phrasalists and prose rhymists who likewise see a frame beyond the foot; and free verse prosodists who, notably, have failed “to describe the complex non-­visual rhythms of free verse” but have succeeded “in describing the effects of visual form.” Intonationalists base their find­ ings on phonology and morphology, of­ten using very creative visual systems for denoting the way poems sound, while generative metrists, influenced by generative grammar, “assume that verse meter/rhythm is essentially linguistic or algebraic rather than psychological. Barbara Heirnstein Smith’s theories are notable for her focus on poetic closure (a central theme of Lyn He­jinian’s poetic theory), while Donald Wesling coined the term “grammetrics,” favoring “weak questions” over the “strong explanations” that lead prosodists to create absurdly over-­determined systems. “Prosodic reading in ­Wesling’s approach centres on the reader’s sequential experience of the ‘fig­ures of grammar’ in the text—subordination, apposition, modification, tense, mood, sentence types (e.g., questions, statements, etc.), anaphora, etc.— and all of the vari­ous fig­ures caused by the linear positioning and processing of syntactic units—deletions, transpositions, inversions, parentheses and so forth—as these ‘fig­ures’ play within and across the other prosodic ‘structures’ in the reader’s acts of attention” (65). Wesling calls this bifurcation of focus between grammar and metrics “scissoring.” This suggests, to me, that what the poet is doing when writing is, in fact, binding, a term taken from cognitive science to describe the sense of a unity in a perception despite the activation of discrete parts of the brain. This is akin to an act of synesthesia: “When I look at a red square, the color and the shape may be represented

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 21

in different parts of my visual system. But somehow these separate pieces of information are brought together so that I experience a single red square, so that I can identify and report a red square, and so on. This phenomenon is of­ten referred to as binding, and the question of how it is achieved is of­ ten referred to as the binding problem” (Bayne and Chalmers 3). To this degree, the act of the prosodist is to unbind—to segregate the merged elements of literary reception into discrete parts with the hope that the unassembled puzzle offers insight into poetics. While some of these new theories of prosody have focused on the visual element of poems, they don’t generally, to my mind, respond to poems as ob­ jects apart from the human observer or “reader,” but rather still as the representation of something that could be speech, or a species of rhetoric. ­Reuven Tsur’s Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics offers a different approach, nicely summarized by Cureton: Tsur’s central claims are: (1) that cognitive processing proceeds by successive “recodings” of information at several levels of representation; (2) that these “recodings” are motivated by informational economy and simplicity, and that “simplicity” is defined, (3) differently on different levels of coding, and (4) (predominantly) from “higher” levels to “lower” levels within cognitive processing as a whole. As in [­ Rudolph] Arnheim’s theory of visual art or [Leonard] Meyer’s theory of music, the controlling notion in these claims is “simplicity,” what the gestalt psychologists called prägnanz, or “strong shape.” A structure is “strong” if it presents “clear-­cut contrasts, distinct outlines,” with these contrasts and outlines deriving from innate principles of perceptual/cognitive “symmetry, similarity, regularity, and balance.” All things being equal, it seems well established that we “prefer” to perceive shapes that are “strong” in this sense. (40–41) Tsur’s “cognitive” poetics recognizes the activity of a poem on a reader as akin to that of a painting or musical composition; the reader “recodes” complex arrangements into simpler “shapes” even as elements within the work will resist this reduction. Tsur describes the effects of poetry as largely one of tensions—convergent/conclusive (tending toward certainty and control) and divergent/suspensive (tending toward uncertainty and emotional resonance). Tsur draws directly from Arnheim’s notion of “perceptual forces.” [A]rnheim demonstrates the “the hidden structure of a square” by plac­ ing a black cardboard disk in vari­ous positions on a white square. Thus

22 / Chapter 1

Figure 1.2. Reuven Tsur, “Arnheim.”

he “maps out” regions of tension and of balance. In [this drawing (see fig. 1.2)], the disk lies slightly off the centre. “In looking at the disk we may find that it does not merely occupy a certain place but exhibits restlessness. This restlessness may be experienced as a tendency of the disk to get away from where it is placed or, more specifically, as a pull in a particular direction—for example, toward the center.” Although perceptual forces are not physical in the sense that gravity is, “there is no point in calling these forces ‘illusions.’ They are no more illusory than colors, which are attributed to the objects themselves, although they are actually nothing but the reactions of the nervous sys­tem to light of particular wave lengths.” (132) Not surprisingly, Tsur’s central example of how these “perceptual forces” exist in poetry centers around an examination of the caesura, and to that degree lies comfortably in the field of prosody. But the ontological claim at the end of this passage is interesting: visual tensions are as “real” as colors and prosodic tensions are as “real” as, say, the asymmetries of one of G ­ ehry’s Bilbao-­style crushed can buildings or a wonky eyeball. A type of a literary synesthesia is described (Tsur devotes a chapter to the subject) that is not merely analogical—as if words had colors—but actual: poems have tensions that exist crossing the visual, verbal, and syntactical, regardless of the human subject. Though much of Tsur’s theory of “cognitive poetics” centers on higher level semantics, such as the perception of allegories, symbols, and archetypes, his abstraction of poetic effects into moments of control and suspension, linked to physiological responses to language and syntax, suggests a way to begin to discuss poems not only as pictures or diagrams but as even­ tal in Badiou’s term—as containing within them invisible elements that are nonetheless central to, or constitutive of, their effects.

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 23

Interruption, Suspension, Recursion I’d like to posit three categories of poetic operation that exist outside of, even as they intersect with (as a circle with a line in Flatland), the tradition of schematizing the production of meaning through analyses of the lexical, grammatical, and phonological activities of in­di­vidual poems. This tradition includes the classical studies of rhetoric—of­ten called “poetics” as in Geoffrey de Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova (1210)—through the countless treatises on prosody of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the Russian Formalists and those they influenced (the New Critics, reader response theory) and, after a “poststructural” turn that eschewed any sort of vulgar epistemology, recent developments in both prosody and “cognitive poetics.” My categories are not intended to be of any benefit in a hermeneutic enterprise, for while they move toward explaining some aspects of a poem’s power—its reality effects—most likely the absence or presence of these features does not intersect with any element of the poem’s “meaning.” These elements create the possibility of meaning to the degree that they ground the concrete aspects of a poem much as syntax and grammar ground the words of a prose sentence, but the nature of this poetic grounding is largely only discernible in the space of the event of poetry. Being essentially sin­ gular and therefore non-­normative, it has no relationship to convention and only a modest relation to method. Poems can be poems even when lacking these events—I’m not the gatekeeper of a genre—and I don’t intend the outline of these features to form the foundations for an evaluative paradigm for poems. But my sense is that the containing of these events within a poem are what elevates poems above rhe­tori­cal eccentricities, what truly separates them from prose essays, fiction, speeches, or comedy routines, all of which can at any time exhibit many of the qualities of poetry (posited by, for example, Jakobson).

a. Interruption The first fig­ure I’d like to introduce stems from Alain Badiou’s discussion of Rimbaud’s method in his collection Conditions, and is called “interruption.” While it is debatable whether any of the methods Badiou identifies in poetry are portable enough to transfer to poets outside of his personal canon (or “poetry” in general) without corruption—I’m avoiding his analy­sis of “subtraction” in Mallarmé for this very reason—Badiou’s chapter suggests ways to discuss both rhe­tori­cal and aporetic features in poetry without submitting to something like a vulgar epistemology (and hence supporting practices of “reading”). Interruption is “brutal, unequivocal”: “More harshly still, in the sense that Rimbaud welcomed all harshness—‘True, the new hour is nothing

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if not harsh’—poetry is a promise that should not be kept” (68). Badiou describes several features he associates with interruption: It splits the poem in two. Its operators are the “nothing,” the “enough,” the “but,” and the “no.” In the Drunken Boat, there is a flood of Parnassian rheto­ric that verges on radiant promise—“Million golden bird, o future Vigour”— and then there is this: “But, in truth, I’ve wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter,” which is like the abolition, or the revenge, of a zero degree of desire. (68) These “nos” and “buts” are a “non-­dialectical negation,” a “no that does not sublate anything, with which Rimbaud turns poetry from its own opening” (69). No third term surrenders itself from this negation, only a new world, a new poetry, created which opposes the old in the same poem. But what I am calling “new poetry” is in fact “a prose as dry as a notary report”: “For interruption effectively aims to disappoint; it attests to the radical doubt that besets the epiphany. And this ‘prose waiting in ambush’ is . . . the latent fig­ ure of this doubt” (72). In more conventional literary terms, one could express this “fig­ure of doubt” with the drop of bathos, or even, in Daniel Tiffany’s estimation, with the intervention of kitsch, which Tiffany notes “traces a Luciferian arc from cosmos to cosmetics, from canonical to degraded verse: a delusional program of bad taste and aesthetic failure” (“On Poetry and Kitsch”). The interruption produces what Badiou calls the undecidable—a central feature of his philosophy of the event: “The undecidable division of being itself, of being qua being, is distributed by the poem between its legal situation and the disappearing of the pure event. In Rimbaud’s poetics, the undecidable comes with our being proposed, literally, and in all senses, two universes, and not only one. This composition is that of someone who stands before a sudden decision for which there is no norm” (74). Badiou continues with an analy­sis of a fig­ure that appears in two of these universes, that of women, who are (referring to two titles of Rimbaud’s poems) “as much crows as they are genies” for “she co-­belongs to both universes” (76). Reader’s of Badiou will recognize elements of his argument for “multiplicities” against the fig­ure of the “count-­as-­one,” derived from his understanding of set theory as the foundation of ontology (and which I don’t hope to describe here). Rimbaud is the poet of disappointment because he is “dream[ing] of a truth that would be coextensive to the entirety of a situation,” unlike the Master, Mallarmé. “Poetry has always propped itself up on exactly this un­ decidability, because for our education and joy it separates out the poets of incitement and the poets of composition, the tropes of interruption and

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those of the exception. On the one hand, there is the ‘enough!’ of impatience, the abrupt ‘nos’ and ‘buts’ of de-­liaison. On the other, there are the ‘excepts,’ the ‘otherwises’ and the ‘thoughs,’ which rescue thought from being engulfed in the nullity of the site through a patient exposition of the void” (Badiou 88). Naturally, one can describe this difference between poetic methods as between that of the “poet of youth”—for whom the world is a totality, is multiple, but is not infused with justice—and the “poet of science”—­under no illusions about the spontaneous arrival of justice, systematically investigating through the painstaking creation of tools what is now a “void.” But no such tropes corrupt Badiou’s meditation. Mallarmé is the poet of “exception,” to that degree the ‘pataphysician, the patient creator of the singular, while Rimbaud—who wanted to “strangle rhetoric” in Conrad Aiken’s poem “Preludes For Memnon”—interrupts with a flurry of over-­packed qualifications, the logician in flux. Perhaps the first Ameri­can poet to leap to mind as exploring this fig­ure of interruption is William Carlos Williams. Williams shares with Rimbaud a love for visceral imagery (notably in the “anti-­poetic” Spring and All), the use of the exclamation point to denote ironies or merely to expel excessive energy, and not least the tendency to destroy a pretty picture, his Parnassianism, with interjections that place what has preceded into the world of the undecidable. “A Portrait of a Lady” dramatizes Williams’s need to interrupt, enacting an inner battle that only cripples any simple mimetic metaphor: Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Which sky? The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper. Your knees are a south­ern breeze—or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard? —As if that answered anything. (129) A more famous, if less cleanly cut, example of Williams’s interruption occurs in “To Elsie,” which runs as a single run-­on imagist sentence decrying the loss of “peasant traditions” and describing a world from which all enchantment has been banished, before growing reflective—“Somehow / it seems to destroy us “—concluding with perhaps Williams’s most philosophically resonant lines: “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” This dramatic turn to reflection in stanza 20 sets up quickly what becomes,

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in stanza 22, an ascent into metaphysics (who is this “no one”) and even cybernetics (what does it mean to “witness” and “adjust”?), a departure that puts all of the previous stanzas (which roughly argued along the lines that the “Pure products of America / go crazy”) into question. We become, in some way that seems like an impasse (even as it describes one), unsure of what we have just been reading. I’m increasingly convinced that Ashbery is the most Rimbaudian of Ameri­ can poets even as the two poets’ temperaments couldn’t be more different. A parody of a Rimbaudian interruption occurs ten lines into “And Ut Pictora Poesis Is Her Name,” creating a bend in the poem and leading it from a decidedly urbane form of the Parnassian to practical, prosaic matters: You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange Of you, you who have so many lovers, People who look up to you and are willing To do things for you, but you think It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . . So much for self-­analy­sis. (Selected Poems 235) The effect here is, of course, one of bathos; the mental pastoral mode that readers of Ashbery are well acquainted with drops, with a rakish wave of the hand, into the matter-­of-­fact reality of someone—certainly not Ashbery, perhaps simply the empowered reader—trying to write a poem. Of course, by the end of this poem a synthesis does occur: “The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind / Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-­like foliage of its desire to communicate / Something between breaths, if only for the sake / Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you . . . “ (House­ boat Days 45). In Badiou’s terms, such a synthesis never arrives in Rimbaud.

b. Suspension A fig­ure alluded to but never named in Badiou’s essay on Rimbaud is that of “suspension,” which might, in general, be considered the normative state of language in a poem, the base level of the “poetic.” Suspension is the most traditionally linguistic of the three fig­ures I’m introducing here as it can be characterized, if only partially, by the well-­known term indeterminacy, the slippage of meanings that corrodes the indexical identity of the sign→​ ­signified→​­referent equation of traditional semantics. Marjorie Perloff argues

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that the postmodern cult of indeterminacy is founded in a mode ­starting with the French Symbolists, but she uses the terms “indeterminacy” and “undecidability” interchangeably (Poetics vii). I’d like to see suspension, how­ ever, as more than merely linguistic, but rather as the non-­evental form of ontological undecidability, that is, not the blurring of meanings but the flip­ ping back and forth or between several discrete meanings that never merge, one of which must be chosen to make a poem work. Suspension fig­ures words as elements in sets that constrict or even endow them with meaning, not as units possessing their meanings in the form of some elusive essence. The poem can be seen, therefore, as a sort of function delimiting sets by their very suitability. The analogy would be in the attempt of Russell and Whitehead (following Frege) to replace the subject / predicate binary of traditional logic systems with a function / variable structure in the Principles of Mathe­ matics. Poems can then be considered Venn diagrams in which possible relations can be discerned between words; given that poems generally have more than a handful of words, these overlaps can be exponentially increased. Suspension moves beyond a mere uncertainty about the meanings—­ authorial intentions, cultural determinants, formalist understanding of patterns in sound and grammar—into something more speculative: a con­sid­era­ tion of words as particles or objects in a field. Words are, in fact, suspended by their very undecidability—it is why we become aware of them as words. Badiou suggests in his writing about Rimbaud a form of interruption not only across the parts of a poem but within the word or phrase it­self: “[I]nterruption consists in the brusque rise to the poem’s surface of the ever possible prose it confines” (71). Suspension suggests that the words are in transit between two (or more) points; the reader, in turn, is moved from a single point to a sort of “infinite” in the contemplation of the undecided word. With suspension, we are still in the universe of pure presence, of “breath and movement”—that which the interruption interrupts—but are far from attaining surety of situation or place, what Heidegger might call “dwelling” in his writing on Hölderlin: “[T]he phrase ‘poetically man dwells’ says: poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell. But through what do we attain to a dwelling place? Through building. Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building” (391). This “building” is, however, really a suspension between the earth and heaven: “Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it. Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling” (Jackson 392). Only in the realm of sheer toil does man toil for “merits.” There he obtains them for himself in abundance. But at the same time, in this

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realm, man is allowed to look up, out of it, through it, toward the divinities. The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it remains below on the earth. The upward glance spans the between of sky and earth. This between is measured out for the dwelling of man. We now call the span thus meted out the dimension. This dimension does not arise from the fact that sky and earth are turned toward one another. Rather, their facing each other itself depends on the dimension. Nor is the dimension a stretch of space as ordinarily understood; for everything spatial, as something for which space is made, is already in need of the dimension, that is, that into which it is admitted. (392) Poetry provides the “measure” by which man can conceive a relationship to the heavens; it is the dimension upon which the “facing” of “sky” and “earth” depends. “The taking of measure is what is poetic in dwelling. P ­ oetry is a measuring.” Again: “To write poetry is measure-­taking, understood in the strict sense of the word, by which man first receives the measure for the breadth of his being” (394). But by what can we replace Heidegger’s language of the “sky” and “earth”—that is, can one generalize this notion of suspension beyond Hölderlin’s poetry? Heidegger’s language is, of course, very particular to his system, and his style is notoriously difficult, setting the stage for many duels among his aco­ lytes. Heideggerian phenomenology, especially in his later essays, makes for an uneasy fit with the decidedly anti-­mystical array of philosophers I’ve decided to employ for this present book. However, this notion of a poem as both the possibility of a dwelling—what brings us to dwell—and the dimension that conjoins the sky and earth, that makes them face each other, is apposite for an understanding of how a poem could both form the possibility for a cognitive (spiritual, psychological, etc.) grounding—a central term in chapter 7—while offering, seemingly in opposition, a relationship to the “infinite” that philosophers such as Deleueze, Badiou, and Stiegler describe, in their own ways, as the locus or essence of thought. I can think of several poets who engage in “suspension” as I understand it here; not surprisingly, many of them can bear a useful relationship with the tradition of phenomenology. But of poets for whom phenomenology would not prove a suitable method for explication, I think it is Hart Crane who, at his best, typifies a poet of suspension. This is partly due to an arsenal of techniques that are familiar to a reader of Crane: a baroque syntax, perhaps based in some misprision of either Latin or Shakespeare but not tied to anything like conventional Ameri­can speech; a vocabulary that can seem at once random and precise; modes of address to fig­ures, either the reader or a fictive other, of­ten wanderers of some nature; and a deeply formal ele-

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ment that suggests blank verse but which rarely settles into regularity. Note how the suspended absence of the sentence’s subject animates its qualifiers in the opening stanza of “Voyages”: Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime, Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast Together in one merciless white blade— The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits. There is something slightly absurd, though certainly bold, in starting a verse with the single adjective, “meticulous,” which opens a very narrow range of meanings—only the conscious and careful are meticulous—and then qualifying its extensional locus (“in clear rime”) temporally (“past midnight”), before adding two more adjectives with very different connotations to which the preceding descriptors do not directly relate, “infrangible” (not breakable, inviolable) and “lonely”—perhaps due to its atomic nature? A more conventional image follows, that of a “smooth . . . white blade,” though the unusual adjective “merciless” is added to the pool of suspended words. Finally, one learns that it is “bay estuaries” that are meticulous, infrangible, lonely, and merciless, though of these adjectives it seems that “lonely” would have to be ascribed to the effect the vision has on the viewer rather than as intrinsic or essential to the object itself. But this last line contains a heretofore not witnessed form of suspension: the verb “flecked” is used to describe the activity of the bay estuaries on the sky in a decidedly nonsensical way. “Fleck” usually takes some sort of object—moles fleck the arm, whitecaps fleck the sea—with an asymmetry between those several objects that fleck and the larger body that is flecked (or flecked with). One can only assume, in this final line of the poem, that the bay estuaries are flecking the limits with bits of sea spray or bits of whiteness; the very absence of these words is what permits the sky to survive as a “limit” toward which these suspended meanings aspire. The brief passage from “Voyages” suggests that it is the very job of words to draw false certainties from the void, but even in the most straightforward statement of this fact—“What words / Can strangle this deaf moonlight?”—we are faced with a void, or a series of undecidables: a moonlight possessing the properties of being “deaf ” and of being able to be “strangled” by “words,” but also “words” that possess the ability to “strangle” the electromagnetic phenomenon of “light.” Which of these several discursive fields, that of language, of neurology (“deaf ”), or of radiation is to be privileged? This type of irresolvable metaphor is characteristic of much of Crane’s work; my contention is that Crane is aware of the reader’s drive toward what Tsur calls “strong shapes”

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and, unlike the poet of indeterminacy, does not want to deny an eventual completion of the task.

c. Recursion In computer science, recursion is the phenomenon of an algorithmic function referring to itself within its execution. For example, if I were writing an algorithm that was to continue running until the value of x, initially defined as equal to 10, attained the value of 0 and named this function s­ ubtract1UntilZero, I would call subtract1UntilZero—which subtracts one from x—from within the function itself until x equaled 0. For example:

variable x = 10; function subtract1UntilZero { x = x -­1; if (x == 0) { print “done!”; exit; } else { s  ubtract1UntilZero; } } Recursion can occur in nature, for example in the shape of a seashell in which the same pattern or process is repeated from the smaller, interior parts of the spiral to the outer levels. The once ubiquitous visualizations of the Mandelbrot, or any set of fractals, might be the most iconic images of the process. While he doesn’t use the term “recursion,” Roman Jakobson suggests in “Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry” that these types of generation out of self-­referentiality or identification are common even in folk ­poetry. Recursion’s primary avenue is through grammatical parallelism, which when present threatens to override anything we might call semantic meaning. Jakobson writes, “[T]he juxtaposition of such sequences as the farmer kills the duckling and the man takes the chick makes us ‘feel instinctively, without the slightest attempt at conscious analy­sis, that the two sentences fit precisely the same pattern, that they are really the same fundamental sentence, differing only in their material trappings. In other words, they express identical relational concepts in an identical manner.’ Conversely, we may modify the sentence or its single words ‘in some purely relational, non­

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material regard’ without altering any of the material concepts expressed” (86). Jakobson argues for a “clear-­cut discrimination” between “material” and “relational” (or “lexical” and “grammatical”) elements in a language, suggesting a nearly Cartesian dualism between body and soul; sentences can be fundamentally the same even if the material elements change. He also posits that a “poetry without images” is possible, conveyed entirely through the permutations of its morphology and parallelisms: “[I]n imageless poems, it is the ‘fig­ure of grammar’ which dominates and which supplants the tropes” (93). Grammar might, indeed, represent the pictorial in poetry by its relationship to the diagrammatical (and, it must be said, to the mathematical proof) to which painting also bears a relationship. Jakobson cites Benjamin Lee Worf: “[Worf] discusses the abstract ‘designs of sentence structure’ as opposed to ‘in­di­vidual sentences’ and to the vocabulary, which is a ‘somewhat rudimentary and not self-­sufficient part’ of the linguistic order, and envisages ‘a “geometry” of form principles characteristic of each language’ ” (133). Quoting, of all people, Stalin, Jakobson writes: “ ‘[G]eometry, when giving its laws, abstracts itself from concrete objects, treats objects as bodies deprived of concreteness and defines their mutual relations not as concrete relations of certain concrete objects but as relations of bodies in general, namely, relations deprived of any concreteness.’ The abstractive power of human thought underlying [. . .] both geometrical relations and grammar, superimposes simple geometrical and grammatical fig­ures up on the pictorial world of particular objects and upon the concrete lexical ‘wherewithal’ of verbal art” (95). While Worf ’s and Stalin’s understanding of the abstracting powers of grammar have long been supplanted by generative linguistics (Chomsky made his reputation through a damning critique of behaviorist linguistics such as Worf ’s), this understanding of the pure abstractive powers of grammatical parallelism hint at the non-­dialectical powers of negation that a recursive poetics suggests. My key exhibit of a totally recursive poem is Vito Acconci’s work “Margins on this paper are set” (see fig. 1.3) whose only positive quality is that it offers an exhaustive description of itself. Like all of Acconci’s text works of this period, “The letters” was typewritten on a letter sized page; the fixed width of the typewritten text (as opposed to the variable width of a computer font like Times New Roman) is exploited as a sort of measure by Acconci, an imposition of a mathematical formality on printed text. After the standard paragraph indentation, the poem starts: “Margins on this paper are set, on the left, one inch from the,” then, following the carriage return, “edge, at e, t, l, , o, i, n, a, v, , , -­, a, o, b, a, e, , , g, ,” followed by a carriage return. The reader can, naturally, continue reading, but most would want to verify the statement since, unlike Wittgenstein’s hippopotamus, the object being de-

Figure 1.3. Vito Acconci, “Margins on this paper are set.” Courtesy of Vito Acconci, Acconci Studio.

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scribed is in the room. Indeed, reading vertically down the left margin, one sees the sequence of letters and glyphs exactly as Acconci describes: edge t, ly, , on i, and so forth (commas show up as empty entries in the array). He proceeds to tell you about the letters on the right hand and top margins (“M, a, r, g, i, n, s . . .”), noting a few times that the “spaces” on the page are peculiar to his typewriter, an Olivetti Underwood Lettera 31. He lists the letters above which indentations appear (there are three paragraphs, so three lists of letters), then proceeds to describe the spaces between each line of text, starting with the space between the first line, “Margins on this page . . .” and the next line “edge, at e, t, . . . ,” a task that could never be finished as it takes six and a half lines of typing to describe the spaces between two lines of text. Anticipatory of much of the work of “conceptual writing” that would appear in the early twenty-­first century, notably Craig Dworkin’s Parse, which replaces all of the words of an English grammar with the terms used to describe their grammatical function (particular nouns, for example, become “subject,” “object,” “indirect object,” and so forth), Acconci’s work, via the act of recursion, is both purely solipsistic as it seems to run, or want to run, without any intervention from an “outside” while, at the same time, it creates propositions that are entirely true by the terms of analytic philosophy. To this degree, it satisfies the requirements that Wittgenstein sets out in the Tractatus for an “atomic” fact: it is both tautological and yet foundational. Recursion, then, can be seen as a species of interruption: it provides a break in the “breathing” of true poetry (here described as suspension), but rather than splitting the poem into two “universes,” it collapses, or provides an intersection between, these universes or, conversely, closes off access to either universe. Consequently, it is also the most obvious site of the presence of the matheme in poetry, as it privileges geometrical tropes over semantic (affective, factual, metaphorical, etc.) elements.

Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge As I suggested above, interruption is a rare quality in poetry, though, as my section on Alice Notley’s Disobedience will show, certain poetic efforts make

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recourse to interruption as a matter of form. Suspension, however, seems to be at the core of what most people think of when discussing poetry, particularly the lyric: scattered points of undecidability, a hovering about a never-­ reached essence, a poignancy about some topic but diluted within a penumbra of meanings that seem to both focus and disperse the singular “prose” meaning. An excellent example of a poetic sequence that seems at once to court these qualities of the lyric while gesturing toward what I will describe later as an “undigest”—a text that keeps its powers in reserve, that acts as a sort of “source text” to a virtual lyric—is Harryette Mullen’s celebrated 1995 sequence Muse & Drudge. Muse & Drudge was one of many works that signaled a turn away from some of the so-­called free­doms granted by avant-­garde poetics, notably composition by field, as it instead foregrounded a relatively conventional formality, hovering around the mutating fig­ure of the ballad form and the plain­tive voice of the blues. Each page of the sequence consists of four quatrains comprised of lines of variably two or three stresses, though Mullen occasionally breaks from this pattern with lines that are much longer—“now it’s known that we use mum or numb our stresses” (145)—and, arguably, shorter, as in this quatrain: “didn’t call / you ugly—said / you was r­ uined / that’s all” (140). Veering as close to prose as the quatrains get in Muse & Drudge, the final line, “that’s all,” could, nonetheless, be read as double-­stressed given the preponderance of spondaic rhythms elsewhere in the book, such as in the lines “butch knife / cuts cut” (110). In addition to a regularity of rhythm is the presence of a rhyme scheme that shifts from the standard abab schema of a ballad (“curly waves away blues navy / saved from salvation / army grits and gravy / tries no lie relaxation”) to a set of rhyming couplets (“devils dancing on a dime / cut a rug in ragtime / jitterbug squat diddly bow / stark strangled banjo”) (116). However, as any reader of Muse & Drudge knows, no single set of quatrains adheres completely to any of these formalisms. None of the poems contain four quatrains of abab or aabb rhyme scheme (and, indeed, most of the rhymes are off, eye or slant) or regularly patterned 2-­or 3-­stress lines. None of the poems adhere to normative syntax for longer than a line or two, the quatrain noted above starting “didn’t call” being a singular exception. Part of the pleasure of reading Muse & Drudge relies, in fact, on the very display of Mullen’s attention to the ghost-­like formalism of the fixed rhyme and stress pattern of the ballad along with the approaches toward, and divorces from, standard grammaticality. The poems suspend this fig­ure of the ballad form and normative syntax in the poem while never bringing it clearly into view; in turn, this never revealed ideal form suspends the words of the poem themselves. Muse & Drudge is, to my mind, one of the most virtuosic and vari­ous

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investigation of the quatrain form since Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauber­ ley, written expressly to revive interest in fixed forms in the fate of the success of vers libre while never displaying the regularity of, for example, T. S. Eliot’s quatrain poetry of the same period. The real note of suspension in the sequence, however, is in Mullen’s self-­ styled “visionary heteroglossia,” a sort of field in which seemingly irreconcilable words and syntax can coexist. Responding in a 1997 interview to the question of whether she writes for an ideal reader who has “access” to all of the vocabulary that she utilizes in her work, Mullen replies: No [laughter]. Because I don’t really have access to all of them. I can put Spanish words in there because I did take Spanish classes and I grew up around people speaking Spanish but I am not a Spanish speaker by any means. So I don’t really have access to Spanish in the way that a Spanish speaker does and I have even less of the other languages. I think I threw a Portuguese word in there and a French word or two, some Af­ri­can terms, mostly Yoruba. It’s just a gesture toward multiplicity, my small gesture toward a visionary heteroglossia, which seems appropriate to the diaspora of languages and cultures that the black world encompasses. There’s always the possibility of the unimagined reader, someone not necessarily aimed at, but one who can read the text as I’d never imagine. I do want to leave space for that possibility. Also, the poem was a process for me, you know. I was throwing in black vernacular from Clarence Major’s dictionary Juba to Jive. I would find something really juicy and say, “Oh, I’ve got to put this in.” I have something that I got from you Farah [laughter], “washing her nubia.” I knew I had to use it somehow. I was picking up all of these threads like the magpie that I am and weaving them into this poem. (Griffin, Magee, and Gallagher) Notable is Mullen’s suggestion that, in some possible future, an “unimagined reader,” perhaps the same one that can read the Cantos unassisted, will be able to take in Muse & Drudge as naturally as one reads, say, The Prelude. In this case, suspension can be further described as how the vari­ous bits of language that the “magpie” poet has collected remain in a tense relationship to the ghost-­fig­ure of the ballad and normative English syntax, not to mention the “unimagined” reader for whom this poem is close to natural language. Muse & Drudge exploits the relation that signs are asked to maintain, through the middle area of the signifier, to the referent; that is, if words are being divorced from their respective linguistic systems, whether it be distinct languages such as Spanish, French, and Portuguese or the class, race, or

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age-­specific codes or slangs that Mullen later names, then the transport between sign and referent is required to cross an exponentially more unstable field, one which we can associate with the transfinite world of radical contingency (in Meillassoux’s understanding) rather than the merely infinite world of possible meanings (in the sense of Chomsky’s understanding of an “infinite number of sentences” conceivable based on a finite set of grammatical rules). “You know, the young people will get some things,” Mullen says in the interview, “the older people will get other things, the white people are getting one joke and the black people are getting another joke, and people who speak Spanish are getting some other joke, and the laughter ripples around the room. I really enjoy that” (Griffin, Magee, and Gallagher). Mullen’s sequence represents a turn away from the radical indeterminacies of Language Poetry (or John Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath) toward a reengagement with the referent, since the work maintains strong ties to the real of black culture, “appropriate to the diaspora of languages and cultures that the black world encompasses.” The poem is metonymic to the degree that it bears some indexical relationship to what one might call, after Timothy Morton, the hyperobject of the Af­ri­can diaspora. While this might seem far-­fetched, the Af­ri­can diaspora (in­clud­ing nonhuman, cultural elements like music and language) maintains many of the properties Morton lists: it is “viscous” to the degree that it alters whatever has been touched by it; it is “nonlocal” to the degree that no in­di­vidual object associated with it is directly the “diaspora” itself; it is “interobjective” in that it can be “detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties and objects”; and it is “transdimensional” in that it couldn’t be perceived in all of its present dimensions without access to a point beyond (1, 73). Hyperobjects, though they extend beyond human scales and temporalities, “don’t inhabit some conceptual beyond in our heads or out there. They are real objects that affect other objects” (73). To this degree, Muse & Drudge stands in direct relationship to the Af­ri­can diaspora, just as it does to “what was Af­ ri­can Ameri­can literature” in Kenneth Warren’s controversial estimation.2 Figure 1.4 shows a poem from Muse & Drudge as it appears in its 2006 reprint from Graywolf Press (I’ve offered this image, rather than retyping it, to put it into some relationship to the rest of the diagrams in the present book). The “greased flagpole” appears to refer to the practice of greasing flagpoles to prevent the erection of an Ameri­can flag during pre-­Revolutionary days, though in this case it might refer to the battle of the Union and Confederate flags. “Hambone” seems to refer to the bone in a ham—an absurd thing to hock—though equally to the nickname “Hambone” in Bessie Jones’s collection of plantation songs, Step it Down, suggesting perhaps that one “hocks” Af­ri­can Ameri­can identity or language in favor of something less or more

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 37

Figure 1.4. Harryette Mullen, page from Muse and Drudge as it appears in Recyclopedia.

“authentic” (Mullen’s sequence doesn’t permit such obvious binaries). Interestingly, the dance called juba was origi­nally not able to be performed with percussion instruments due to the possible inclusion of secret codes; this suggests a bridge between what Mullen is doing by repressing the strict formalism of the steady ballad rhythm in favor of meandering around it and Amiri Baraka’s contention in Blues People that the “nonsense” lyrics of work songs concealed coded messages, some of which directly concerned economics (Baraka 25). “Cock and bull” is, of course, British slang for a tall tale, while “tough muffins” is slang for “tough luck.” “Miz Mary” and her “mack truck” are a play on the hand-­clapping game “Miss Mary Mack,” in which the titular heroine is “dressed in black” and, consequently, asks her mother for 50 cents to see the “elephants, elephants, elephants.” A “Cadillac” is nearly ubiquitous in pop songs as representing the peak of promiscuous wealth, though, curiously, “slick black cadillac” seems to have been coined by Quiet Riot for a 1978 single. “La muerte,” a personification of death—deemed female rather arbitrarily due to the gender of the article—could also be seen as some representation of Charon as (s)he ferries the “green” (naive) man over to his death on the subway. In an effort to make these properties of Muse & Drudge more visible, I’d

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like to attempt a diagrammatical representation of this poem. In the alternate rendering of the poem below, I’ve highlighted standard prosodic elements such as meter and rhyme (bold faced for stressed syllables) to highlight how the syncopated sound play, the technicity of off-­rhyme, internal rhyme, and uneven if confident metrics, amplifies this quality of suspension: [if you’ve been in Virginia (a) where the green grass grows (b) did you send your insignia (a) up a greased flagpole]? (b) [you used to hock your hambone (a) at a cock and bull pawnshop]; (-­a, x)

[got your start as a sideman], (a) [now you’re big on your own]. (a)

(“green” resonates with “been” and “-­gin-­“) [strong rhyme] [off rhyme] ("greased flagpole" elevated to molossus) (“hambone” elevated to spondee) (“bull pawnshop” elevated to molossus) [internal rhyme around “-­ock” and “-­op,” “pawn” picks up “bone”] (“sideman” elevated to spondee) [series of slant end rhymes around “-­one” sound]

[what makes tough muffins (a) [possible double spondee] put Juba on the back]. (b) [Miz Mary takes a mack truck in (b, a) [feminine rhyme imitated by “in”] trade for her slick black cadillac]. (b) [mixed strong end rhymes, ­internal rhymes around “ck” consonant] [la muerte dropped her token (a) in the subway slot machine]. (a) [nobody told the green man (a) the fortune cookie lied] (x)

[Texan/Ameri­can pronunciation of Spanish?] [three slant-­rhymes] [“-­une” links to previous lines while “lied” brings the poem back to prose—a sort of entropy]

The brackets in the above suggest sentence or clause clusters while punctuation marks after a closed bracket suggest what type of sentence or clause it is. All in all, what this exercise in a rather old-­fashioned form of textual

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 39

analy­sis suggests is a very lively, variable surface for the poem that points to its direct relation to an invisible fig­ure as well as to its relationship to the vari­ous fields of language—Af­ri­can Ameri­can slang, British slang, hand-­ clapping songs, Spanish, etc.—from which it draws.

The 27th Letter A fourth element that can be added to our notions of a speculative p ­ rosody must appeal to computation for its explanation. Fifteen years before the launch of ASCII, Claude Shannon elaborated upon his notion of information entropy in his 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” and began the path to the mathematization of writing by codifying a 27-­symbol ‘alphabet,’ the 26 letters and a space. Lydia H. Liu writes of this momentous event: When Claude Shannon added a twenty-­seventh letter to the English alphabet in 1948, no one had remotely suspected that the phonetic alphabet was less than perfect. Shannon’s introduction of the new letter, which codes “space” as an equivalent but non-­phonetically produced positive sign, laid the first stone in the mathematical foundation of information theory in the early postwar years; it was as revolutionary as Newton’s apple. [ . . . ] Whereas many of us recognize the impact that information theory has exerted on computer science, linguistics, cryptology, military technology, molecular biology, neuro­physi­ology, and other disciplines over the past half century, we have not been forthcoming in posing the following question: Does Shannon’s twenty-­ seven-­letter English alphabet pose a challenge to our conception of ­alphabetical writing? (45) Two years later, Shannon published “Prediction and Entropy in Printed English,” in which he established a connection between his mathematized language and normal usage by, in a sense, inserting a computer into the reader: “The new method of estimating entropy exploits the fact that anyone speaking a language possesses, implicitly, an enormous knowledge of the statistics of the language. Familiarity with the words, idioms, clichés and grammar enables him to fill in missing or incorrect letters in proof-­reading or to complete an unfinished phrase in conversation” (54). Despite the presence of numbers and formulas, this inner statistician is bound by several finitudes: the “finite number of possible sequences of N letters,” (55) the extant English vocabulary, and the particularities of grammar and syntax. Shannon then embarked on an interesting mental experiment in which

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he imagined a user guessing letter by letter what will follow in a string. In the experiment, “if the guess is correct, he is so informed, and proceeds to guess the sec­ond letter. If not, he is told the correct first letter and proceeds to his next guess.” A “play” of this game produced the following, in which the (1) lines are the origi­nal text and the (2) lines represent by dashes the correctly guessed letters: (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2)

THE ROOM WAS NOT VERY LIGHT A SMALL OBLONG ––––ROO––––––NOT–V–––––I––––––SM––––OBL–––– READING LAMP ON THE DESK SHED GLOW ON REA––––––––––O––––––D––––SHED–GLO––O–– POLISHED WOOD BUT LESS ON THE SHABBY RED CARPET P–L–S–––––­O–––BU––L–S––O––––––SH–––––RE––C––––––

“The errors,” Shannon notes, “occur most frequently at the beginning of words and syllables where the line of thought has more possibility of branching out,” which is to say, after the “27th letter.” The crux of Shannon’s argument is that “both lines contain the same information in the sense that it is possible, at least in principle, to recover the first line from the sec­ond. To accomplish this we need an identical twin of the in­di­vidual who produced the sequence. The twin (who must be mathematically, not just biologically identical) will respond in the same way when faced with the same problem. Suppose, now, we have only the reduced text of [the (2) lines]. We ask the twin to guess the passage. At each point we will know whether his guess is correct, since he is guessing the same as the first twin and the presence of a dash in the reduced text corresponds to a correct guess” (55). Naturally, Shannon’s “mathematically identical” twin is, in his paper, eventually replaced by a computer, thus setting the stage for a variety of forms of information compression that allow densely encoded artifacts to be transmitted electronically, and over “noisy” systems, largely intact. While I don’t want to promote a poetics premised on information theory, which would suggest some perfect “message” that a poet intends and that the noisy wire of the poem, its instantiation in the mundane world, renders “difficult,” this notion of the 27th letter—the “pause and effect” (to borrow M. B. Parkes’s title for his excellent study) that brought about the creation of punctuation in West­ern typographical systems—as a mathematized space, as a moment for the reader to reflect, if pre-­symbolically, on the statistical possibility of the next letter or word, provides a way to think of the “empty spaces” of a poem as information rich. That is, those parts of the page that are usually considered empty, the first spaces after the end of the poetic line, are not merely part of the background before which the fig­ure of the poem is

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 41

posed, but are actually highly concretized, if invisible, elements in a poem, as “real” as the words themselves. Literary scholars, and most likely readers of poetry, appreciate that the spaces between words (in­clud­ing the line break) as largely indeterminate, a reprieve, perhaps, from the autocratic march of denotative language, a space where “poetry” happens as the reader engages in the free fall of a challenging enjambment. But is it possible to think of line endings not merely as vacancies but as positive elements, as objects, concrete as letter-­forms themselves? Charles Olson is notable, in “Projective Verse” (published the same year as “Prediction and Entropy in Printed English”) for also concretizing the 27th letter, not as a space but as a typographical mark, the slash “/.” Olson, naturally, was attuned to the use of empty spaces, but referred to them as chains of blanks forming horizontal durations—they communicated to the eye the natural pause in reading. Consequently, both spaces and the “/” are understood as emerging from both organic (the poet hears or feels a necessary pause) and semantic (marking a unit of rhetoric) necessity: If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as the phrase before it, he means that space to be held, by the breath, an equal length of time. If he suspends a word or syllable at the end of a line (this was most Cummings’ addition) he means that time to pass that it takes the eye—that hair of time suspended—to pick up the next line. If he wishes a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma— which is an interruption of the meaning rather than the sounding of the line—follow him when he uses a symbol the typewriter has ready to hand: What does not change / is the will to change Observe him, when he takes advantage of the machine’s multiple margins, to juxtapose: Sd he: to dream takes no effort to think is easy to act is more difficult but for a man to act after he has taken thought, this! is the most difficult of all Each of these lines is a progressing of both the meaning and the breath­ ing forward, and then a backing up, without a progress or any kind of movement outside the unit of time local to the idea. (Selected Writ­ ings 22–23)

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To my mind, Shannon’s 27th letter plays no role in suggesting a “score” for a poem; there is no way to render into statistics the likelihood of an empty space being followed by another empty space. Notably, two or more blank spaces are automatically collapsed into one in the HTML protocol, as the notion that a space can follow a space, or two instances of the 27th letter occurring in a row, has no value in information theory. This makes it very difficult to reproduce poems like Olson’s on the web without chains of the HTML code— —for non-­breaking spaces. Shannon’s idea instead asks that one recognize a variation on the 27th letter between each word, line, and stanza break in a poem. One could, in this way, construct a basic key for a poem which might run like this: ◆ = break in string (denoting a “word”) ◊ = break in line (denoting a “verse”) ➢ = additional line breaks (denoting a “stanza”) so◆much◆depends◊upon➢a◆red◆wheel◊barrow➢glazed◆with◆rain◊ water➢beside◆the◆white◊chickens Even in the absence of punctuation and capitalization, these empty spaces mark out a concrete syntax—they are information rich. They are also the moments when the “mathematical” body is most fully employed, if least capable (you can get a lot wrong here), in a statistical analy­sis of the future events of the poem. It is here that the poem’s level of suspension is evaluated, as horizons are traced out concerning what is linguistically normative (ranging from mundane to creative) and what is purely random. Consequently, it is in these spaces that an evaluation of phonetic properties—the arrangements of rhythms and sounds that have carried forth in a poem to that point—occurs. Readers of­ten have a favorite poem, a favorite line, or even a favorite word (“carbuncular”) from a poem; these concretizations of empty spaces are what allow one to have a favorite enjambment even if it is impossible to preserve them without the surrounding words. While the full formalization of the 27th letter in terms of aesthetics is largely speculative, thinking of this empty space as a positive unit adds an element to any conception of the poem as an example of “technics”—these are parts that work, that have properties even if not appearance, and that have, in a sense, an essence. Shannon’s notion of the 27th letter suggests that elements of poems usually thought of as ineffable are in fact objects, and to that degree are analyzable, reproducible, singular, or hackneyed—and even copyrightable.

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 43

The A-­field As these three fig­ures of prosody, suspension, interruption, and recursion, suggest, poems possess properties that don’t exhibit in appearances—the word-­as-­image, the word-­as-­sounded, the semantic content of a word or sentence or psychological affect—or merely as moments of indeterminacy as commonly understood in discussions of Modernist/postmodernist poetics. Because poems are autonomous units, things in the world that endure (not merely in memory but physically), they take with them, even if they don’t appear to have, evental qualities. Badiou writes of the “the autonomous function of the thought of the poem” (Age of Poets 39), and that “the poem’s power of revelation encircles an enigma” (Age of Poets 53), that “the modern poem identifies itself as a form of thought . . . it is the set of operations whereby this thought comes to think itself ” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 20), and that “the poem exposes itself as imperative in language, and, in doing so, produces truths” (Infinite Thought 107)—all of which could never be affirmed epistemologically or even upon reflection. An account of Badiou’s notion of the event, a central element of his philosophy, is well beyond the scope of this book. A brief passage from Infinite Thought will have to suffice: “An event is linked to the notion of the undecidable. Take the statement: ‘This event belongs to the situation.’ If it is possible to decide, using the rules of established knowledge, whether this statement is true or false, then the so-­called event is not an event. Its occurrence would be calculable within the situation. Nothing would permit us to say: here begins a truth. On the basis of the undecidability of an event’s belonging to a situation a wager has to be made. This is why a truth begins with an axiom of truth. It begins with a groundless decision—the decision to say the event has taken place” (62). The key elements he notes here are that 1) the event is not something that is seen, heard, or immediately registered—it has no way to be proved—but is known by a truth that it produces and, eventually, a name; 2) the event (or the truth it produces) exceeds anything that is merely “possible” given a state of affairs—it can never be “calculable” in a situation; and 3) in one’s fidelity to the event, one makes a “wager” since there is no epistemological or even philosophical verification, a central theme in his po­liti­cal thinking. One could argue, in fact, that the defining characteristic of a lyric (or maybe simply the short poem) is that it aspires to be an event, to be evental, which is not something a news article, a speech, or even a novel, insofar as it merely tells a story, could be said to always do. This evental quality will always happen beneath what one hopes to gain through the senses, what can be confirmed, what one is aware of as happening or as having happened, and

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is purely formal to the degree that semantic content (especially the lyric “I,” which could be understood as paratext) merely colors, or provides the pretext or scaffolding for, the event. The event is not mere formalism to the degree that the event itself is pure meaning, divorced from contingent social or cultural factors, even as it permits the poem, primarily by giving the poem duration through time, to always be available for new connections (which Bruno Latour, in his collapsing of the nature/culture binary, would call “allies” [Prince of Networks 19]). A great “po­liti­cal” poem, for example, reaffirms its power in contexts that are not related to politics of any specific nature, or politics of a nature completely different from that which occasioned its writing, due to this evental status. Maintaining the language of fields from Olson, I’d like to suggest that these formal poetries like Mullen’s are grounded in something I call an a-­ field. To offer something of a material base to this speculative concept: I think of the “a-­field” as all of those fields in the physical universe that have not influenced evolution—that is, those aspects of the physical universe that permeate those spaces of “life” as we know it but which haven’t been, and perhaps could never be, exploited to continue life. These fields had never, prior to science, been informational to the organism. Because light is affected and responds in consistent ways to objects or bodies, it proves of service in navigating the world; if light didn’t have these properties and in fact changed its laws of behavior moment by moment, it could never be used for navigation (imagining that, of course, other objects in the universe maintained their familiar and constant properties). Elements of the a-­field could never become an element of the human Umwelt as conceived by ­Jakob von Uexküll, as our field of perception would never have access to it, though as Uexküll argues, the prosthetic sensorium of science has incorporated “a-­ field” elements into the human real (the “world-­as-­is” becoming thus the “world-­for-­us” according to Eugene Thacker in In the Dust of This Planet). What I call the “a-­field” is comprised of those fields that serve no purpose for navigation or evolution and yet are an active element of the universe, even the “human” universe. The “a-­field” can also be considered analogous to that world of perceptions described by Vilém Flusser as “infernal” in his ‘pataphysical tract about the squid Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which he describes as phenomenologically opposite from the human as it thrives in darkness rather than light, is radially rather than symmetrically formed, and has feeding and excremental organs in the same orifice rather that exiled to either end of the body. Between these two organisms there is something of an excluded middle, a non-­meeting place between their respective Um­ welts. The neutrino, a subatomic particle with no electric charge and which

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 45

passes through matter unimpeded, would be the primary example of an elemental field which exists and yet which humans can never adapt to sense directly or even his­tori­cally, which is to say after they have made some effect on perceivable matter. Neutrinos don’t, for example, cause the decay of the elements of skin cells (unlike ultraviolet rays), and were merely discerned as a physical necessity based on the decay patterns of protons and electrons in experiments (they were not directly detected until 1942). If composition by field seemed to suggest the page as a sort of constant, like the speed of light, and the works embedded in the plane of the page, the poetics of the a-­field can’t possibly recognize the page in this fashion, choosing instead to animate fields beyond sensation and yet real, for example mathematical truths. The “a-­field” is, in a way, proof of immanence in that it is not in fact a field of possibilities, of material creation, but in fact the empty “space,” a concretization of Deleuze’s virtual, Simondon’s pre-­ individual, or Badiou’s void, from which forms can emerge—not a nothing, but a prior to something.

Logicism Implicit to thinking of poems as devices that contain events in the form of interruptions is the notion that poems are, on the one hand, objects, and, on the other, structures of thought. Poems can contain worlds much like a novel or film can, but can also be understood as a form of proof or instance of logic—“imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” as Marianne Moore wrote. Kurt Schwitters charts this course nicely in his famous query: Preisfrage:

1.) Anna Blume hat ein Vogel, 2.) Anna Blume ist rot. 3.) Welche Farbe hat der Vogel. (“An Anna Blume”) (8)

Jean Piaget argues that the human only acquires what he calls a capacity for perceiving “structured wholes” around the time of adolescence, at the latest fifteen years of age. Before then, children display rudimentary forms of logic with discrete elements, but see, in a sense, the trees always before the forest: [T]he child age 7 to 11 when given an inductive problem in physics . . . limits himself to the raw experimental data. He classifies, orders the data in series, sets up correspondences between them, etc. but does not isolate the factors involved or embark upon systematic experimentation. The adolescent, however, after several preliminary attempts tries

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to discover all possible combinations, so as to select the true and discard the false. In the course of this selective activity, he intuitively constructs a combinatorial system. It is for this reason that he repeatedly passes from one propositional operation to another. The method of solution in each actual problem situation then consists in the selection of the true combination (or combinations) out of the whole set of possible combinations. Propositional operations do not therefore appear in the adolescent’s thought as unrelated discrete operations; they form a sys­tem or struc­ tured whole. (38–39) This passage suggests that the capacity for poetry, especially of a combinatorial nature (any poem that exhibits some sort of formal property will have this) emerges at this same moment that discrete elements are related to a whole, and in which different solutions can be selected before settling on one. Confirming this thesis is Piaget’s argument that one progresses toward this recognition of patterns not because they exist in the world, but because these structures belong “to the simple forms of equilibrium attained by thought activity.” He further counsels that “[a] state of equilibrium, it should be remembered, is one in which all the virtual transformations compatible with the relationships of the sys­tem compensate for each other. From a psychological point of view, the logical structures correspond precisely to this model. On the one hand, these structures appear in the form of a set of virtual transformations, consisting of all the operations which it would be possible to carry out starting from a few actually performed operations. On the other, these structures are essentially reversible, that is to say, the virtual transformations which they permit are always self-­compensatory as a consequence of inversions and reciprocities” (41). In more mundane, if imaginative, terms: one could say that the child, over time, develops the habit of leaving mental bread crumbs that allow him or her to return to prior states and investigate, in a purely mental way, a state of affairs. Piaget continues: “In this way, we can explain why the subject is affected by such structures, without being conscious of them. When starting from an actually performed propositional operation, or endeavoring to express the characters of a given situation by such an operation, he cannot proceed any way he likes. He finds himself, as it were, in a field of force governed by the laws of equi­ librium, carrying out transformations or operations determined not only by occurrences in the immediate past, but by the laws of the whole operational field of which these past occurrences form a part” (41). If poststructural uses of psychoanalytic theory of­ten argue for the construction of the

Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 47

subject, or the sense of personhood, as based on a master signifier, Piaget’s earlier structuralist argument claims that controlling “forces of equilibrium” obtain in the most abstract patterns and experimental activities. A cybernetic theory of poetic composition would argue that the poet brings the poem to a “poetic” state through collaboration with the typewriter, but this argument for the emergence of “equilibrium” from an experimental attitude describes what, exactly, it is that the typewriter gives back. More interestingly, Piaget argues for a rapprochement between two terms that have, in modern times, been separated, that is between logic and psychology. Logicians such as Frege will argue against all forms of psychologism in mathematics and logic, whereas the discovery of a largely “irrational” unconscious in James and Freud argued against logicism, or a well-­ordered unconscious that can be discovered through reflection or enhanced through practice, the basis of ethics and aesthetics. This experimental attitude, the perception of “structured wholes,” is premised directly on one’s relationship to objects. Piaget discerned, largely through observations of his own children, that the tendency of humans to believe that objects persist even when they are not being directly perceived is something that develops in childhood in the first twelve months, during the “sensori-­motor” stage in which the baby’s interaction with the world contains nothing of what we would call the imagination—the baby doesn’t internalize, or recreate in the mind, objects of perception. Between the eighth and twelfth months, the baby begins to recombine and organize these objects, even to achieve specific goals, and begins to understand objects as existing even when they are not seeing, touching, or otherwise sensing them (Piaget, Origins of Intelligence). My gloss on such a schema is that our own believability in, for example, the state is largely (and facetiously) based on our developed understanding of objects existing in some sense permanently. This would place object permanence somewhere at the base of Lacan’s notion of the master signifier, since the signifier is not affirmed in constant states of perception but carried forth in memory. Laws, in a metaphysical sense, don’t actually exist—or, at least, are not outside the bounds of human agency (we can change laws, or challenge mores, for example)—and yet they can have the impregnability of stone. It seems that these two capabilities of the mind, when applied to phenomena that don’t really have anything to do with survival in the world— poems, for example—are nonetheless engaged. Poems draw cognitively from practical skills like pattern recognition to language, a sort of synesthesia but not involving sounds or colors so much as algebra and geometry. It’s because of pattern recognition that we see form in the arrangement of words, and

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it’s because of object permanence that we think entities like poems (Milton’s Paradise Lost, Williams’s “This is just to say,” Mullen’s Muse & Drudge) continue to exist even when we not looking at them. As David Chalmers and other cognitive scientists have argued, we cannot be sure that these elements of cognition, even object permanence, are in fact consonant with the properties of the external world or adaptations or approximations that have merely evolved in the process of gaining a higher ground over other beings.

2 The New Commodity Technicity and Poetic Form

Language Poetry and the Commodity The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, published in 1984 and edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, is composed of roughly half of the first three volumes of their poetry journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978–1981), the fourth volume being its own perfect-­bound issue of the Canadian journal Open Letter and still readily available at the time. Published by the South­ern Illinois University Press with a decidedly tacky non-­serif font, the book’s 295 pages didn’t include what the editors considered to be ephemeral material—­“bibliographies, contributors’ lists of recommended readings, brief comments on current books, correspondence, and the like” (Andrews and Bern­stein, x)—a remainder that, to readers stricken with the “archive fever” of a later age, those interested in a poetics of pure information like “conceptual writer” Danny Snelson, might have made for as interesting a perusal as the material deemed worth preserving.1 One of the key tenets to which many of the Language poets adhered was that poetry as generally understood—“mainstream,” any sort of “closed” or conventionally lyrical poetry, and not only poems written with traditional forms—was offered to the world in the guise of a commodity. Adding a strong dose of Frankfurt School and Althusserian Marxism to Charles Olson’s cosmological arguments in “Projective Verse,” which described an “open” verse (composed by “field,” a constellation of “actual occasions” in White­head’s terminology) in opposition to the “verse which print bred,” the Language poets argued that “closed” verse was consumable in the way that, say, televi-

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sion shows, feature films, or magazine articles are. Making a large conceptual leap, they also argued that such poems-­as-­commodities gave an impression of the world itself as consumable; objects depicted in “transparent” writing were, via their enumeration, fixed as things that could be owned. Conventional verse, situated outside the world—pointing to a transcendental subject, the “author,” yet consequently imposing a master discourse, that of the state—and not in the world—aware of its status as a text among many, perhaps merely as the trace of a process rather than fortified object—obscured a truer understanding of experience as an indeterminate continuity (there is a strong strand of phenomenology underlying the materialist critique) shaped as much by a collective as an in­di­vidual symbolic order. In contrast, mainstream or “closed” poems, the types in the New Yorker and the mass of academic reviews that played a much larger role at the time, sliced consciousness itself into discrete units by a knife marked “epiphany” and shipped to anyone for a price. A more subtle argument, distinguishable from the crypto-­Marxist, phenomenological one above, suggested that words in the average poem, and in fact the poem itself, were being construed by the conventional poem as instrumental—of some “use” as “tools”—a natural corollary (if discovered after a detour through Heidegger’s writing on technology) to the argument that poems were commodities that quantified the world. Of course, any notion that poems could be understood as tools was a bad thing—poems, in the minds of the Language poets (and not inconsistent with forebears from the Romantics to the New Ameri­cans) should constitute a special class of objects that not only remained unsullied by ephemeral, goal-­oriented activities but that refreshed the reader’s relationship to the real, reconfiguring this relationship from the closed “self ” and “commodity” binary to, perhaps (they generally avoided capital-­letter abstractions), that of an intersubjective “Thought” and or a multiple “Being.” The idea that poems should not be understood as commodities extended to the idea that poems should not be seen as instrumental, and yet a contradiction arises as a function was clearly outlined by the Language poets for what poems could do, namely, address what other poems and other media were already doing as conduits of ideology, rendering the world into commodities. However, a description of how in­di­vidual poems worked (“close reading,” or the New Criticism still ascendant when these poets were in school) was eschewed in favor of discussions that crossed over into general linguistics (Saussure, Jakobson, and the later Wittgenstein were touchstones) and ideology critique. I am, of course, retroactively imposing my own language for understand­ ing poems onto what I am deceitfully identifying as some consensus view among the Language poets (who, it should be noted, initially wanted their

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work to be identified as Language writing and not poetry). A search, perhaps in the spirit of the “digital humanities,” of the appearance of the word “commodity” in the The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book produces the following set of (yes, largely de-­contextualized) statements: [Ron Silliman’s essay] “Disappearance of the Word / Appearance of the World,” reprinted here, applies the notion of commodity fetishism to conventional descriptive and narrative forms of writing: where the word—words—cease to be valued for what they are themselves but only for their properties as instrumentalities leading us to a world outside or beyond them, so that words—language—disappear, become transparent, leaving the picture of a physical world the reader can then consume as if it were a commodity. (Andrews and Bernstein, x) Pointing or referential signification first signifies depth, or reinforces the security found in possible depth—the pot at the end of the rainbow, the commodity or ideology that brings fulfillment; choicelessness; a lower layer that is nature-­like in its immobility or fixity or self-­ evidence. [  .  .  . ] Commodities are sold, productions are forgotten. (An­drews, “Text and Context” 32) The older language of the signified finds itself constantly tempted into commodification. (Andrews, “Code Words” 54) [T]he primary impact on language, and the language arts, of the rise of capitalism has been in the area of reference and is directly related to the phenomena [sic] known as the commodity fetish. [. . .] What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism,” the optical illusion of reality in capitalist thought. [ . . . ] The objects of consciousness are reduced to commodities and take on the character of a fetish. Things which appear to move “freely,” absent all gesture, are the elements of a world of description. The commodity fetish in language becomes one of description, of the referential, and has a sec­ond higher-­order fetish of narration. (Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word / Appearance of the World” 122, 126) Experience dutifully translated into these “most accessible” codes loses its aura and is reduced to the digestible contents which these rules alone can generate. There is nothing difficult in the products of such activity because there is no distance to be travelled, no gap to be aware

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of and to bridge from reader to text: what purports to be an experience is transformed into the blank stare of the commodity—there only to mirror our projections with an unseemly rapidity possible only because no experience of an “other” is in it. (Bernstein, “The Dollar Value of Poetry” 140) In a commodity society, we might say, poetry can refuse an exchange-­ value to make itself available as use-­value, or to use another term, text (-­uality). Recent trends in poetry can be described as the attempt to deny this commodity aspect of language. (Boone, “Writing, Power and Activity” 141) A language centered writing, for instance, and zero-­semantic sound poetry, diminishes the profit rate and lowers the investment drives just as a productive need is increased. Meaning in these cases is no longer a surplus value, but that which is to be produced without reinvestment. This need to produce (brought on by instituting an opacity in language) becomes the need to activate a relation of human energies. [ . . . ] Meaning finds its place in bourgeois epistemological economy as a consumed surplus value; the extract from textual signification, found wholly as a surplus value at the end of a reading (whether sentence, paragraph or entire text). (McCaffery, “From the Notebooks” 161) Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, which is to say the occultation of the human relations embedded in the labour process has been central to my own considerations of reference in language—of, in fact, a referentially based language in general—and to certain “fetishistic” notions within the relationship of audience and performer. Reference in language is a strategy of promise and postponement; it’s the thing that language never is, never can be, but to which language is always moving. (McCaffery, “Intraview” 189) This ensemble of concepts assembled around the word “commodity” doesn’t present any obvious coherence. Some, like Silliman, Boone, and McCaffery, employ Marxist notions of the “commodity fetish,” a somewhat mystical, maybe auratic, valuation, the “fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities,” (Marx 165) involving the displacement of human relations onto objects as they relate to themselves. Andrews and McCaffery enter into something like the language of process philosophy or Bergsonian vitalism, favoring the experience of language through or in time (active “production,” not postponed as a “surplus value” reached after reading) rather than as formal object that could be

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shifted to a market. Bernstein is notable for his argument against language as “instrumental,” but also regrets that language ceases to be, perhaps in a Levinasian sense, an “other.” While the play of commodity and tool I am attempting to draw out is not always present (Boone notably favors the use value of language over its exchange value), in general, the belief that language in a poem is even remotely consonant with the instrumental functions of language in, say, journalism, a speech, or an office memo (as ­Marianne Moore might argue) was anathema to these writers. Unlike in Marx, in which the sublation of the product into the sys­tem of exchanges alienated man from his labor, “commodified” language in the form of a poem doesn’t seem to alienate the writer, but rather merely corrupts a truer, immanent yet indescribable, quality of language. For example, in Silli­ man’s estimation, an element of nonsense (or at least the “non-­referential”) flourished in some pre-­capitalist past in Native Ameri­can societies (“The presence of ‘nonsense’ syllables in tribal literature is unmistakable” [123]) and even the poetry of John Skelton: [Capitalism] came into existence through a long succession of stages, each with its own characteristic modes of production and social relations. While the literature of a people about to enter into the stage of capitalism through bourgeois revolution will necessarily be much closer to our own experience, differences can still be observed. The following are the first eleven lines of “The Tunnying of Elynour Rummying” by John Skelton, written in about 1517: Tell you I chyll, If that ye wyll A whyle be styll . . . [The] most obvious difference between Skelton’s poetry and the mod­ ern is its use of rhyme: eleven consecutive end-­rhymes using only two endings, -­yll and –age, plus five other instances of internal rhyme and off-­rhyme . . . [It] is an ordering of the language by its physical characteristics, its “nonlinguistic” ones, a sign that this dimension is felt. (124) John Skelton was, of course, anomalous for his time (much like Blake, Dickinson, and Hopkins in theirs) and employed “nonsense” only sporadically. Wittingly or not, Silliman, who as Brian Reed notes “purports [in “Disappearance of the Word”] to explain the entirety of literary history from the medieval period to present” (141), attempted to reproduce some of the mastery of Pound (in his “How to Read” essays and writing on the Chinese ideogram) and Olson (in his critique of philosophy back to the Greeks and his

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Mayan research) in trying to isolate an uncorrupted, nearly pre-­social form of language usage—the last gasp, perhaps, of the Rousseauian urge to find the purity of the prelapsarian savage in the decadent modernity we have all inherited. It is unclear how sec­ondary meanings accrue to the poem in the way “exchange values” accrue to the commodity in the sys­tem of poetry distribution. Naturally, a poet’s fame or obscurity will alter the value of a poem to the general reader, but even reading (or writing) this sentence suggests the absurdity of believing these values could ever be quantifiable—who is the “general reader,” how much money could a poem actually be considered worth? These texts from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E were written before Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (published in France in 1979) had become influential in the United States; otherwise, one answer could have been provided around vari­ous notions of cultural capital (notably social and symbolic), but Bourdieu’s notions seem only applicable to writers or artists who have gained some sort of reputation outside of the arts communities—the as-­yet inchoate habitus of the “avant-­garde” or even that of the world of poetry journals, grants, and awards systems—that generally support them. Absent a theory of cultural capital, the Language poets were left purely with the problem of reference, which in McCaffery’s view created “promise and postponement” that were satisfied at the end of reading, which he equates with capitalist “surplus value.” The vari­ous aesthetic strategies that the Language writers adopted to com­bat this “commodification” of language are familiar to readers of Anglo­ phone twentieth-­century experimental poetry: in Bruce Andrews, the preference for “horizontal” systems of reference rather than a “vertical” sys­tem that points to hidden (but nonetheless stable) “depths” to a poem; in Charles Bernstein, the foregrounding of “artifice” in structure, affect, content, and visual impact of­ten to the point of illegibility; in Ron Silliman, extensive collaboration and the “new sentence” that destabilizes syllogistic structure; and in McCaffery, among his many strategies, a “zero-­semantic” or “protosemantic” sound, visual, and book poetics. Lyn Hejinian is notable for deriving her language from the pragmatist philosophy of William James and feminists such as Luce Irigaray, arguing for a push against the Faustian “rage to know” (54): The desire that is stirred by language is located most interestingly within language itself—as a desire to say, a desire to create the subject by saying, and as a pervasive doubt very like jealousy that springs from the impossibility of satisfying these yearnings. . . .

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If language induces a yearning for comprehension, for perfect and complete expression, it also guards against it. Thus Faust complains: It is written: “In the beginning was the Word!” Already I have to stop! Who’ll help me on? It is impossible to put such trust in the Word!” This is a recurrent element in the argument of the lyric: “Alack, what poverty my Muse brings forth  .  .  .”; “Those lines that I before have writ do lie . . .”; “For we / Have eyes to wonder but lack tongues to praise. . . .” In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. (55–56) Hejinian seems to be arguing against a certain monumentality, the completed “master” work, but rather than advocating the types of “deterritorialization” Deleuze and Guattari describe in “What is a Minor Literature?,” she favors something nearly conversational, an open-­ended process with the reader. The development of “poetics” itself could be seen as an extension of this war with the object, in this case the “essay” and not the “poem,” as the term was not being used in the Aristotelian sense, in favor of the creation of the sys­tem that flourished alongside the production of poetry, but, rather, was envisioned as an extension of poetic practice. Language poets of­ten sought to produce texts that could be read as a poem, a manifesto, a critique, or a poetic philosophical document, and while these practices diverged (and sought to diverge, as Bernstein’s title for his sec­ond collection of essays, A Poetics, put the “anti” back in “a”), a new genre, “poetics,” eventually emerged and, with its appearance, suggested an orthodoxy. The genre even became institutionalized in the “poetics” program of the University of Buffalo, while A Poetics of Criticism (1994), edited by Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Pam Rehm, and Kristin Prevallet, sought to undermine conventions of scholarly and normative criti­cal writing (which they saw as repressive, a version of “frame lock” in Bernstein’s phrase [A Poetics 92]).

Technicity A different discourse about linguistic objects and instrumentality than what the Language poets had to offer is to understand poems as technical objects, situated somewhere between texts and machines and marked by a degree of technicity. On a basic level, one could argue that the figuration of the poem as commodity that comes out of Marx misses the point when applied to the

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valuation of poems. Marx’s general objection to the commodity-­form wasn’t that the commodity as object had uses—in fact, he felt that the use-­value of the commodity was much closer to an unalienated view of what an object was than its exchange-­value (something Bruce Boone describes in his excerpt above)—but that the object, once entering the sphere of exchange and speculation, became alienated from its creator, became corrupted by an imposed exchange value, and obtained the quasi-­mystical “fetish” quality that is an amalgamation of labor relations, all of which would be hard to map over the relationship of the author, poem, and reader. The particular instrumentality of the commodity doesn’t fig­ure in Marx’s equation except in the cases in which he considers the capitalist’s investment in new capital, new machines of production, which departs from the standard circles of production, labor, and distribution. French philosopher and historian of technology Gilbert Simondon articulates a line of battle between all technical objects and what is conventionally called “culture” in the introduction of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects2: “Culture has become a sys­tem of defense against technics; now, this defense appears as a defense of man based on the assumption that technical objects contain no human reality. We should like to show that culture fails to take into account that there is a human reality in technical reality and that, if it is to fully play its role, culture must come to incorporate technical entities into its body of knowledge and its sense of values. [. . .] The most powerful cause of alienation in the contemporary world resides in this failure to understand the machine, which is not caused by the machine but by the non-­understanding of its nature and essence, by its absence from the world of meanings, and by its omission from the table of values that are part of culture” (1). Technological objects are not simply replacements for humans, and certainly not just tools subservient to humans, but “what resides in machines is human reality, human action fixed and crystallized in functioning structures” (13). Those familiar with the writing of Bruno ­Latour in We Have Never Been Modern, Timothy Morton in The Ecologi­cal Thought and Hyperobjects, the po­liti­cal ecologist Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter, and the “object-­oriented ontologist” Graham Harman in numerous works in­ clud­ing Tool Being and The Quadruple Object will hear echoes of Simondon’s call for an overturning of this “defense against technics,” of the wall between “nature” and “culture.” Simondon’s central, radical insight here is that humanists have been conditioned, at least since the Romantic period, to think of machines as products of the most abject, least “human” side of creativity, and therefore they craft philosophies that merely treat technology as a necessary plague. Simondon instead argues that there is “human reality in technical reality,” that machines are indeed an “other” to the human and

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are closer to being human than, say, a stone, a bird, or the stars due to the crystallization of human functions in their operations. (One could argue that this human reality—the technicity at the heart of a poem—displaces, if only slightly, the reality of the lyrical “I,” which could then be understood as an element of paratext framing the reading of the poem itself, not a privileged marker pointing to a poet’s “soul.” Formalist poetics thus becomes inherently humanist so long as it concerns technicity.) Bernard Stiegler draws much of his thinking on technics from Simondon (along with paleontologist André Leroi-­Gourhan and a host of more canonical thinkers). Stiegler states in the general introduction to his three volume Technics and Time that “technics evolves more quickly than culture” and that his project will be to show how vari­ous contributions to the history of technical evolution permit the hypothesis that between the inorganic beings of the physical sciences and the organic beings of biology, there does indeed exist a third genre of “being”: “inorganic organized beings,” or technical objects. These nonorganic organizations of matter have their own dynamic when compared with that of either physical or biological beings, a dynamic, moreover, that cannot be reduced to the “aggregate” or “product” of these beings. [. . .] Life is the conquest of mobility. As a “process of exteriorization,” technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life. (17) The concerns of Simondon and Stiegler (in some contrast to those of Latour, Bennett, Morton, and Harman, who are concerned with the larger realm of “objects” of all kinds) are on both an ontological level—they wish to describe this “third order of being” and demonstrate how it evolves according to its own laws and processes beyond the human—and phenomenological—suggesting that a rapprochement of the human with the technical (which contains, in Simondon’s phrase, “human reality”) lies at the heart of vari­ous industrial-­era ills, in­clud­ing most poignantly the failure of human individuation in an age of technological milieus (two terms central to Simon­don’s thought). In this, both philosophers follow closely on the call by Marx in a footnote in the first volume of Capital: “A criti­cal history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century are the work of a single individual. As yet such a book does not exist. Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e., the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis

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of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention?” (493). Marx’s cursory linking of Darwin’s evolutionary theories and the history of the “productive organs of society” anticipates the central, distinctive theme of Simondon’s philosophy: that technology develops through history toward greater states of concretization, perhaps a form of “perfection,” that resembles the progress of life forms through time toward a greater fitness with a given environment—a milieu, or, in the language of Uexküll, Umwelt. As Arthur Bradley notes, “In the view of a number of influential commentators from Kostas Axelos up to Jacques Derrida himself, Karl Marx is nothing less than the first thinker of technology—le premier penseur de la technique,” (21) and “he breaks decisively with the classical theory of technology: what-­is-­ placed-­in-­front-­of man, pros-­thetically, for Aristotle, is placed within man, intra-­thetically, for Marx” (40). The machine Marx is largely interested in is always the “productive machine” (31), that is, one that produces its own power rather than deriving it from man, animal, or nature, and to this degree the autonomous machine. The machine “[embodies] the real subsumption of living labour . . . by dead or frozen labour,” (32) a process that leads to an entirely new, and co-­dependent, ecology: “For Marx . . . human species-­ existence (if we can still use such a term to name something in which the human itself is only one element) is both productive of, and produced by, its technical interactions with its environment: man and matter invent one another through the medium of the tool. It becomes possible, in the light of such a conclusion, to imagine a Marxian materialist genealogy (rather than a simple anthropology) of the human where, as Amy Wendling notes, ‘the embodiment of different forms of tools produces different types of human being’ ” (27). Echoing concepts dear to N. Katherine Hayles, Bradley writes that Marx’s “account at times seems to anticipate the kind of ‘extended’ or ‘distributed’ quality” in its imagining of the human body “that contemporary cognitive philosophy now regularly attributes to mind” (26). George Basalla writes in The Evolution of Technology: “Neither Marx nor any of the others who attempted to explain the development of technology along Darwinian lines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used the available his­tori­cal data and scholarship to work out the full implications of the evolutionary analogy” (208). Basalla pursues an evolutionary theory like Simondon’s, in­clud­ing detailed analyses of the developments of technologies, but studiously avoids the larger ontological claims and specialized conceptual vocabulary of the French thinker. Basalla’s sobriety is most visible in his seemingly deflationary account of his subject, as when he writes of tools and life forms: “One [technological development] is the result of a purposeful human activity, the other [natural selection] the outcome of a random natural process. One produces a sterile object, the other a living being ca-

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pable of reproducing itself ” (3). However, a rapprochement of terms does occur between the two thinkers as Basalla, noting that technological developments are not associated with in­di­vidual genius so much as antecedents— “Whenever we encounter an artifact, no matter what its age or provenance, we can be certain that it was modeled on one or more preexisting artifacts” (209)—evokes the concept of “novelty,” akin to Simondon’s essence, to explain contradictions within incomplete accounts of technological development: “In tracing the artifact streams back in time, problems arise only when we try to determine the sources of novelty and account for the differential rate of the appearance of novelty among past and present inhabitants of the earth” (111). Basalla critiques the argument that technological change only occurs based on human “necessity”—did we really need, for example, automobiles?—and notes that, though “[b]efore the coming of the wheel, large heavy objects were moved on sledges—wooden platforms with or without runners,” wheels were not immediately exploited as labor-­saving devices but rather for “ritualistic and ceremonial purposes” (5). “[B]y putting wheeled transport into a broader cultural, his­tori­cal, and geographical perspective, three important points emerge: First, wheeled vehicles were not necessarily invented to facilitate the movement of goods; sec­ond, West­ern civilization is a wheel-­centered civilization that has carried rotary motion in transportation to a high state of development; and, third, the wheel is not a unique mechanical contrivance necessary, or useful, to all people at all times” (11). Basalla effectively liberates the technical object from the overdeterminacy (born of a belief that technology exists outside of nature) of social causality, granting it some of the autonomy, if not the agency, that Simondon provides. Simondon had a central disagreement with Marx about the source of alienation during the first industrial revolution. On a fundamental level, Marx argues for what Pascal Chabot calls “doubled . . . relationships of servitude” that “concern first the human-­machine system, then the appropriation of this sys­tem in the evolution of capital” (39). Simondon dismisses the sec­ond of these terms, that which brackets the machine and highlights the asymmetries of capitalist-­laborer relationship, in favor of diagnosing the servitude of industrial man entirely on the basis of his/her relation to technics or the technological milieu. Chabot writes: Alienation resides at this level; it is not necessary to leave the domain of technology to locate the source of this sys­tem of slavery. “This alienation seized upon by Marxism as having its source in the relation of the worker to the mode of production,” [Simondon] writes,” “does not, in our opinion, derive solely from a relation of ownership to non-­ ownership between the worker and his working tools.” A more pro-

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found and more essential dimension is responsible for the alienation of the worker. This dimension is neither legal, nor economic, nor po­ liti­cal. It is technological. It concerns the “continuity” between the human in­di­vidual and the technical individual, or the discontinuity between them. Continuity here refers to the successful coupling of the schematic corporeality of man and machine, while discontinuity signifies the rupture of this union. This experience is more profound than Marx’s dialectics of labor, because the psycho-­physiological constitution of the in­di­vidual is more primal than the individual’s socio-­ economic circumstances. (40) Unlike thinkers who would always see technology as non-­human, an abject excrescence or mere tool of domination over nature, Simondon posits a “successful coupling of the schematic corporeality of man and m ­ achine” that, he acknowledges, is punctuated by periods of “discontinuity” (40). Simon­ don is,  therefore, a humanist in the Marxist tradition—his central prob­ lem is that of human emancipation and creativity—but is also a rather new brand of psychologist, one who advocates a rapprochement between humans and technical objects as a form of social therapy, a notion that would be expanded by Stiegler as a central component of what he calls the pharma­ kon. Indeed, Simondon’s career after the writing of his very few books in his mid-­thirties was as a lecturer on his particular theories of human individua­ tion, a person’s growth into a singularity that derives from one’s access to a pre-­in­di­vidual realm, which he saw as the sources of creativity, and which always occurred in some contact with an individual’s milieu, whether personal or material (as a crystal, in Simondon’s key example, relies on the solution in which it’s embedded to grow). Most importantly, Simondon saw the development of technics as having its own track, its unique line of evolution, apart from (and certainly not dependent upon) social or economical developments, one that can literally outpace culture’s ability to absorb these changes into art, philosophy, or behaviors, what Bourdieu would describe in his earlier anthropological writings as a society’s habitus.

Levels of Technicity Simondon divides technological objects into three categories: the element, the individual, and the ensemble. The element is relatively innocuous—it is the basic tool, like the cart or the hammer, and “its improvement causes no anxiety-­provoking confusion because of conflict with acquired habits” (5). The individual, comprised of several elements in the form, say, of a steam engine or diode, “becomes for a time the adversary of man, his rival, be-

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cause man centralized technological individuality in himself at a time when only tools existed” (5). The entire pre-­industrial era can be characterized by technological elements, while the rise of industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be characterized by the rise of individuals. The ensemble is something Simondon equates with what we might now call the “information age”—it can be the laboratory or the computer network—and that links several technical objects into chains of production, though each of the elements remains relatively autonomous. A technical individual can be understood as the several objects of an ensemble that have merged or concretized into a simpler, more efficient unit. The opposite motion, the breaking up of an individual into the pieces of an ensemble, never occurs except, perhaps, in the imagination of Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist whose “inventions” were elaborately inefficient ways to perform simple functions like, for example, a “Simple Way to Light a Cigar in an Automobile Traveling Fifty Miles an Hour” (see fig. 2.1). Michael North, in a nearly Simondonian spirit but also alluding to Bergson’s theory of laughter, writes of Goldberg’s drawings: “In fact, what the ‘inventions’ seem to suggest is not that people have been victimized by machines but that they were always somewhat machinelike. The ‘inventions’ are a vast catalogue of automatic responses, knee-­jerk reactions, and blind instincts, unleashed from the usual subordinate role in life through being lashed together in structures that raise their mindlessness to a higher level” (94). Goldberg’s inventions of­ten incorporated animals, plants, and other humans on the same level as machinic elements such as joints, levers, and pulleys—a true “democracy of objects.” In the case of “Way to Light a Cigar,” Goldberg tweaked temporalities (“corn grows until it reaches height” in the space of a microsec­ond), perverted causalities (a can of lima beans “jumps at corn on account of the natural affinity for succotash”), subverted biological and physical facts (the sardine “catches a severe cold,” its fever “set[ting] fire to the paper tank”), thereby marshaling a plethora of objects and events into an impossibly concentrated moment. Each invention is a parody of teleological thinking and technological desire, not to mention a reflection on the fact that matches and lighters actually work. If the technical in­di­vidual can be equated, as I will argue, with the economical, supra-­sum lyric, the technical ensemble, the Rube Goldberg invention, can be likened to Charles Bernstein’s poems in which he includes in numbered sections a variety of different types of writing, some “poetic,” some mundane—“Lives of the Toll Takers” in Dark City for example—sequences that are “anti-­poetic” not so much because the language used is uniformly boring, mundane, or vulgar, but because their heterogeneity resists the sort of concretization that I am arguing is central to lyric form. This aspect of Bernstein’s poetics (which also

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Figure 2.1. Rube Goldberg, “Simple Way to Light a Cigar.”

denotes his own brand of interruption) is something I’d like to pursue elsewhere and must only suggest here. “Infra-­in­di­vidual technical objects can be called technical elements,” Simon­ don writes, “They differ from true individuals in the sense that they have no associated milieu. They can be integrated into an individual. [A technical element] can be compared to an organ in a living body” (37). That is, there are certain technical objects that do not interact with an environment outside of the machine, but rather work as parts of a composite in­di­vidual like the heart or liver in the body. Technological individuals have the highest degree of technicity and are of most interest to Simondon as they demonstrate the movement of machines toward structures that seem nearly or­ ganic. “Strictly speaking, the only technical objects that can be said to be invented are those that need an associated milieu to make them viable,” he writes, meaning that they have their singular relationship with the environment and are not mediated through other technical objects: “Indeed, they cannot be formed part by part during the phases of a gradual evolution because they can exist only in their completeness or not at all” (32). Technological individuals are, for example, characterized by having elements that perform more than one function, as the following example of the internal combustion engine—one of the many detailed descriptions of machines in Simondon’s writing—illustrates:

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[T]he cylinder-­head of the thermal internal combustion engine bristles with cooling fins specially developed in the valve region and subject to intense thermal exchanges and to high pressures. In early engines those cooling fins are as it were extraneously added to the cylinder [and] fulfill a single function only, that of cooling. In recent engines, these fins play an added role of a mechanical kind, as ribs preventing the buckling of the cylinder-­head under gaseous thrust; in these conditions it is impossible to distinguish the volumetric unit (cylinder, cylinder-­head) from the heat-­dissipation unit; if by sawing or grinding one were to remove the fins of an air-­cooled engine, the volumetric unit constituted by the cylinder alone would no longer be viable, not even as a volumetric unit: it would buckle under gaseous pressure; the volumetric and mechanical has become coextensive with the heat-­ dispersal unit, because the structure of the ensemble has become bivalent [an associated pair]: the fins, in relationship with currents of outside air, through thermal exchanges, constitute a cooling surface: insofar as they are part of the cylinder, those same fins limit the size of the combustion chamber by a non-­deformable contour that uses less metal than a non-­ribbed shell would require. The development of this single structure is not a compromise but a concomitance and a convergence. (8) This multiple functioning of parts of a machine is of­ten the result of an “artisanal” ensemble of objects that has converged—his word is “concretized”— into a simpler, more elegant solution. Another example would be that of the wheel, which Simondon describes as having emerged from the primitive process of using logs as a sort of conveyor belt—taking a log from the rear and putting it up front—to move heavy objects. A wheel combines within it the properties of being circular, like the circumference of a log, fluid like water (or a bed of logs), and homeostatic (self-­regulating) in that no human has to return the log ejected from the rear to the front. Simondon writes: “Technical progress is achieved through a dialectical relationship between mediation (adaptation to the end terms: the path to be travelled and the load to be carried) and autocorrelation, the relation between the technical object and itself ” (qtd. in Chabot 11). The wheel does not resemble any form of mobility occurring in biologi­ cal evolution; it, like other objects of technics, is a new addition to the ontic universe—­what Simondon calls a “unit of becoming”: “The technical object is something that does not exist prior to its becoming. The petrol engine is not any particular engine produced in time and in space, but the evidence

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that there is a sequence or continuity from the first engines to those we know and to those that are still in evolution” (7). Technical objects aspire to integrity, or more fittingly, tensegrity in Buckminster Fuller’s terminology, as the technical object wants to maintain the tension among its parts (it is a force of negentropy) while nonetheless encouraging that each element serves several functions. “Internal resonance” is something like a version of recursion: a reproducing pattern utilizing a fixed, self-­same set of elements that permits something like evolution over time. Primitive, precedent forms of a technical object are abstract, a mere ensemble—the Rube Goldberg invention—to the degree that “each element comes into play at a certain moment in the cycle, and then it is supposed to have no effect on the other elements,” whereas in a concrete object—in which elements take on many functions as a result of the internal “convergence” described above—the ensemble rises to that of the individual. Technical individuals can, in turn, complete the cycle by transforming into an element, thus acquiring “that quality . . . that expresses what it has acquired in a technical ensemble and what it retains to be transported into a new era. Concretized techni­cal reality is what is transported by the element” (42). There is, in fact, an ontological limit to the number of possible tech­ni­ cal elements: “[I]t is this convergence that specifies the technical object, because an infinite plurality of functional systems is not possible in any age; technical species are far fewer in number than the designated uses of technical objects; human needs diversify into infinity, but the aims of convergence of technical species are finite in number” (9). One such technical element is the diode, which Simondon describes at great length; the appearance of a diode in all its variations resembles, indeed, some species of insect, suggesting that, even with equivalent levels of technicity, variation can occur between instances with none of them, in fact, resembling exactly their base diagram (see figs. 2.2 and 2.3). “The technicity of the object is the degree of concretization of the object,” (41) and given that there are a limited num­ber of possible technical elements available to an epoch, discover­ ing them—the task of the “inventor” in Simondon’s term—is a high order. As technicity increases, the object approaches something we might call nature or the organic, especially as the object is able to associate with a much more diversified milieu: “[T]he technicity of the spring is raised when it can withstand higher temperatures without loss of elasticity and can preserve without criti­cal modification its coefficient of elasticity within more extensive thermal and mechanical limits” (43). This is the opposite motion to what he terms the increasing abstraction of natural objects that, through human intervention, are rendered increasingly specialized such as hothouse flowers:

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Figure 2.2. “Audions and early triodes developed from them, 1918.”

“[A] flower that is grown in a hot greenhouse and that can only produce petals (a double flower) without engendering a fruit, is the flower of an artificialized plant; man has diverted the functions of this plant from their coherent development, to the extent that it can no longer reproduce except by processes such as grafting, processes requiring human intervention. The artificialization of a natural object has results that are opposite to the results of technical concretization” (24). Simondon’s arguments concerning the technological eventually reaches a highly speculative level when he considers what he posits as the third ma­ jor industrial revolution: “[Thermodynamic] energy is replaced by infor-

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Figure 2.3: “Fleming valve schematic from US Patent 803,684.”

mation theory, the normative content of which is eminently regulatory and stabilizing: the development of technics appears as a guarantee of stability. The machine, as an element in the technical world, becomes something that augments the quantity of information, that increases negentropy, and that re­sists the degradation of energy: the machine, a work of organization, of information, like life and with life, is something that opposes disorder and opposes the leveling of everything that tends to deprive the universe of the power to change” (5). Simondon posits information technology as inher­ently or essentially geared toward achieving states of homoeostasis, unlike the previous era’s technology, which brought on asymmetries between “man” and “nature” that have come to characterize the anthropocene. He also notes

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that this era of technology, for all of its reliance on code’s “elegant solutions,” is one of ensembles due to the connectivity and collaboration between units across great expanses of space.

Toy Made Out of Words This rehearsal the Language poets’ notion of the poem as commodity and the envisioning of a “third order of being,” that of the technical object, in Simondon and Stiegler should be suggestive to anyone with a basic knowledge of Modernist poetics, most explicitly of William Carlos Williams’s concept of the poem as a “machine made of words.” I will forego any deep engagement with Williams, however, except to say that his tendency to avoid abstraction, to avoid puns, clever wordplay, and literary allusion, demonstrates his understanding of the poem as “concrete” in Simondon’s sense. In a Williams poem, words are drawn from their respective milieus, shucking prior associations (not to mention uses in other poems), to become over­charged in an idiosyncratic, singular binding of grammar and ­prosody. The success of a poem by Williams in functioning like a “machine” directly correlates to their status as “objects,” as singular things in the world. The elements of a Williams poem can be an atomic image (“appletrees”), a simile (“Your thighs are appletrees”), an exclamation (“Agh!”), an apostrophe (“Which shore?”), and other poetic devices rendered strange, all remaining distinct events that work in correlation as organs in a larger unit, the individual. Ezra Pound’s valorization in the ABC of Reading of “inventors” whose “extant work gives us the first known example of a [new] process” over “masters” (who exploit inventions perhaps better than the inventors) and “diluters” (just okay) is also apposite (39). Simondon’s own notion of “invention” verges on the definition of “discovery,” as one simply can’t invent without “capitalizing [on] natural forces, laws, principles, materials, and their potential modes and transformation” (Boever 43). Most importantly, Simondon understands invention as a form of thought itself: “To invent is to make one’s thought work as a machine works, neither according to causality, which is too fragmentary, nor according to purpose, which is too unitary, but according to the dynamism of lived functioning, understood as a product, and understood also in its genesis. The machine is a being that works. Its mechanisms give material expression to a coherent dynamism that once existed in thought, and that was thought” (87). The highest form of invention in Simon­don’s view is epiphenomenal in that it derives from an extant set of materials a new form of essence: “The beginning of a lin­eage of technical objects is marked by the synthetic act of the constitutive invention of a technical essence. Technical essence can be recognized by the fact that it remains

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stable across an evolutionary line, and not only stable, but also productive of structures and functions through internal development and progressive saturation” (Boever 215). Jean-­Hugues Barthélémy notes that Simondon had in fact a similar understanding to Pound of the cycli­cal nature of the process invention sets in motion: [Simondon] will therefore distinguish between: 1. the first invention of a technical essence, as the absolute origin of a lineage, such as the technical essence of “the internal combustion engine” 2. the continuous, minor optimizations that take place within this technical essence as it progressively realizes itself 3. the discontinuous invention made necessary by the “saturation of the system” that results from a continuous series of minor optimizations. This discontinuous invention is that in which the technical object really “concretizes” itself as reality of a progress, such as the invention of the diesel engine within the technical essence of the “internal combustion engine.” (216) That is, a new essence, the “internal combustion engine,” is introduced by the inventor and goes through a continuous process of improvement, ultimately converging with other technical essences (machines exploiting ­diesel fuel) and making the discontinuous leap into the new individual, the ­diesel engine. Pound’s set of writings collected under the title “Machine Art (1927–1930)” provides an image of the poet having an almost mystical relationship to the operations of machines on a par with Simondon’s (and Marx’s, for that matter). Pound notes that “spare parts [and] assembled machinery” will “more readily awaken [the] eye” than “galleries of painting or sculpture” as the form of machines, not just their architectural quality but the “mobile parts [where] energy is most concentrated,” educates us in the experience of art, moving beyond wondering “whether they would like to know the lady who sat [or] whether the emotions of the painter were such as would ultimately produce a state of satisfied satiety” (57–58). Pound reverses the division initiated by Aristotle between the productions of nature (poiesis) and culture (technê), an act of linguistic manipulation for “in Greek culture, poieō and technê both include the meaning of an activity of generating, producing and of making something” (Ardizzoni 24). “The category of technê . . . is the new aesthetic dimension which destroys the idea of art as imitation, all the psy­cholo­­gisms inherent in the idea of beauty, and the idea of style as ornamental” (Ardizzoni 9). Pound’s famous anecdote of the writing of “In a Station of the

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Metro” is an allegory of technological individuation. Hugh Kenner writes: “[Pound] wrote a 30-­line poem and destroyed it; after six months he wrote a shorter poem, also destroyed; and after another year, with, as he tells us, the Japanese hokku in mind, he arrived at a poem which needs every one of its 20 words, in­clud­ing the six words of its title” (184). Pound’s poem is “a simile with the ‘like’ suppressed: Pound called it an equation, meaning not a redundancy, a equals a, but a generalization of unexpected exactness. The statements of analytic geometry, he said, ‘are “lords” over fact’ ” (185). Can we not suggest something of Simondon’s description of the elevation of a technical ensemble—in which separate elements of a machine perform their operations, moving some aspect of the product to the next element, without otherwise affecting it—to a technical individual—in which parts of the machine perform several functions in direct and specific interaction with a ­milieu—in Pound’s example of “condensare”? I would like to suggest that poems, particularly the lyric (or short poem), “succeed” to the level that they approach something like the technicity of a technical in­di­vidual (even as poets like Bernstein will write outstanding poems that resist this drive). Words and phrases in such poems invite multiple, distinct readings—they achieve a state of undecidability—while closing off other possible readings, an act akin to the notion in linguistics of “bind­ing” between a pronoun and the expressions with which they are co-­ referential. Poems can, in fact, be understood as a non-­machinic coming-­ to-­terms with the presence of technical essences, the continuation of life “by means other than life.” The Language poets, in a somewhat improvised way, merged two distinct, previously unrelated notions about poetry: the concept of the poem as “commodity” (object, machine, product of labor, subject to exchange) and the concept of the poem as a phenomenological investigation (unending, indeterminate, concerned with relations and not essences, an authentic examination of consciousness as it engages with the real). But the Language poets might have missed, due to an instinctual defense of “culture” against “technics,” the human “reality” in the technical object that, I am arguing, they associated (as did Olson) with the “closed,” “transparent” lyric. In their reading of Marx, in which the commodity is supposed to be entirely discredited as an object (some curse inflicted upon humankind by capitalism), and the instrumentality of words somehow corrupts a deeper essence, they missed another possibility: that the “disappearance of the word” doesn’t provide a window onto the “real” but, rather, conjures into visibility the technological essence of the poem. By discarding (at least in theory) the “instrumentality” of words, what is usually referred to as “reference,” in favor of a poetics of becoming, in which the poem unfolds

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in a field of indeterminacies but never fully arrives, the poet sacrifices the opportunity to invent, to engage in the forms of creativity in which scientists and technologists engage amidst the triad of element, individual, and ensemble, perhaps collapsing an ensemble into an element which, itself, can stand at the head of a new technological lineage. Examples of twenty-­first-­century poets foregrounding a form of technics, usually with the help of an algorithm (whether computational or acted in real life), are numerous. Flarf poets, for all of their boisterous energy, of­ten gravitated toward lyric forms—volumes by Michael Magee, Katie Dagentesh, and Sharon Mesmer are notable in this regard—while engaging the larger linguistic milieu of information production that Simondon describes as “regulating.” The recent vogue for conceptual and “Noulipian” writing suggests the possibility of deleting subjectivity nearly entirely from the writing process. The reading process might be threatened as well; as ­Christian Bök writes: “We may exalt the poets of the future, not because they can write great poems, but because they can program devices that can write great poems for us, doing so automatically within a digital economy of un­re­stricted expenditure. We may also want to keep in mind too that we are probably the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect to write poetry for inhuman readers, be they aliens, robots, or clones” (“After Language Poetry”). Notably, Simondon was not greatly interested in automata, and he was criti­ cal of cybernetic theory in the wake of Norbert Wiener, information theory as invented by Claude Shannon, and the hang-­up with robots and artificial intelligence, which are of­ten the markers, in the pub­lic mind, of the interaction of technics and culture. Simondon offers us, instead, a way to discuss all lyric poetry, not just the procedural writing of the “avant-­garde,” as a species of technology, suggesting new ground in the discussion of what makes a poem “alluring” (in Harman’s phrase) in a fashion distinct from anything found in prose.

Ben Lerner’s The Lichtenberg Figures Ben Lerner’s first book The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), a sequence of sonnet-­ like poems that, like Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, conjures a ghostly, invisible formal ideal over the course of its reading, is to me emblematic of a concern with the technicity of poems. Lerner methodically explores the vari­ ous forms of integrity possible to a constellation of words on a page, of­ten explicitly subjecting words and phrases to discreet, contradictory meanings, of­ten through the means of repetition (and not allusion). The Lichten­ berg Figures is also unique in that it does not forego many of the free­doms

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New York School poets such as John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan explored— playful indeterminacy, the collaging of different cultural and affective registers, the casual, if urbane humor, and so forth—but also signals a return to the notion of a lyric poem having a formal integrity, a finitude, a boundedness or completeness, that any New Critic would admire. The first poem runs in its entirety: The dark collects our empties, empties our ashtrays. Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way? Up in the fragrant rafters, moths seek out a finer dust. Please feel free to cue or cut the lights. Along the order of magnitudes, a glyph, portable, narrow—Damn. I’ve lost it. But its shadow. Cast in the long run. As the dark touches us up. Earlier you asked if I would enter the data like a room, well, either the sun has begun to burn its manuscripts or I’m an idiot, an idiot with my eleven semiprecious rings. Real snow on the stage. Fake blood on the snow. Could this go on forever in a good way? A brain left lace from age or lightning. The chicken is a little dry and/or you’ve ruined my life. There is much to observe in general about this poem, but I think it best to sketch its activities line by line to isolate its infernal machinations. The dark collects our empties, empties our ashtrays. [The most salient aspect of this first line is the doubled use of the word “empties,” which moves from being a colloquialism meaning empty beer cans to a verb being performed by the “dark” on “ashtrays.” This play on discrete definitions point to the excluded middle, the non-­ semantic border between meanings—the space of the undecidable. The dark is, of course, the void, and thus Lerner informs us early that “meaning” in these poems can bottom out into aporia over the space of a comma. Waste and anxiety—empties and ashtrays—are introduced as conceptual fig­ures.] Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way? [“This could go on forever” is a phrase that can mean, with a slight tonal shift, either that one wants something to not end or that one is

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in despair that something will never end. Unlike with the previous use of the word “empties,” the repetition is internal, and as we have entered, in media res, an intimate conversation. Having no access to a sound recording, two distinct meanings are put in play, and not polysemantic plethora or rampant “indeterminacy,” all without the use of a proper pun. Our narrator is suspicious, anxious, picking up on the theme of the first line.] Up in the fragrant rafters, moths seek out a finer dust. [This line is curious—“finer” to whom, the moths? “Fragrant” to whom (few of us spend time in the rafters)? Moths offer a suggestion of the non-­human, though not quite the machine (maybe Nagel’s bat?). This is Ashberian in its sudden turn away, as if distracted or wanting out, or shuttling of the camera eye to a completely unrelated location (“In a far recess of summer / Monks are playing soccer.”)] Please feel free to cue or cut the lights. [Lerner plays with a poetics of deconstruction or perhaps pure difference, as the word “dust” produces through paragrammatic play the words “cue” and “cut,” each of which is linked by two letters but have little semantic connection. A void is opened up by this sudden d ­ eixis, a gesture to the reader (again, Ashberian). The fig­ures of light and dark return.] Along the order of magnitudes, a glyph, portable, narrow—Damn. I’ve lost it. But its shadow. Cast in the long run. As the dark touches us up. [“The order of magnitudes” suggest a sort of pre-­semantic realm, not unlike Simondon’s concept of the pre-­in­di­vidual or Deleuze’s “plane of immanence,” which can generally be categorized as the void from which concepts and objects emerge. A “glyph” is only “portable, narrow” when it’s not subject to the sequential ordering of an alphabet (and, of course, a word); it must have sped by quite quickly or perhaps never fully entered existence—not quite potential, not quite concrete—­ unlike its shadow. Can this “glyph” be an element of a formal language, as in the supra-­alphabetic elements of Frege’s “concept-­language”? “Touches us up” returns us, finally, to the sort of wordplay that characterized the earlier part of the poem. Is this a cosmetic “touch up” (picking up on the cued lights) or being “felt up” in an unwelcome sexual way? The “dark,” done emptying ashtrays, returns as a character from the first line.]

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Earlier you asked if I would enter the data like a room, well, either the sun has begun to burn its manuscripts or I’m an idiot, an idiot with my eleven semiprecious rings. [“Enter” is either the mindless clicking of keys in a low-­level white collar job, the act of walking through a door, or (as if some synthesis of the two) immersing oneself in a virtual world (like the cyber-­cowboys of William Gibson’s Neuromancer)—three distinct meanings are put into play. Unlike the glyph but like the dark, the sun has somehow become a creative (and highly self-­criti­cal) individual, suggesting that all of history is merely writing by a frustrated mediocrity. The “I” moves from vague, general “idiot” to a concrete, narrativized idiot possessing ostentatious jewelry drenched in the aura of myth (like some cross between Forrest Gump, the Hobbit, and Liberace).] Real snow on the stage. Fake blood on the snow. [Another variation of the origi­nal technical element, linguistic doubling, but this time applied to the visual. The allusion is to a cinematic, rather than stage, simulacrum, as it’s generally only in film that one might find real snow. These two images merge into one, but operate like a Möbius strip: we are left somewhere quite specific, but are vulnerable to reversals with the flip of a word. (These lines are recycled as the final line of The Lichtenberg Figures, suggestively preceded by the line “Vallejo’s unpublished snow.”)] Could this go on forever in a good way? [Just before the sonnet’s volta, the narrator asks the question that the poetic sequence itself might be seeking: how to reconcile a poetics of becoming, the poem’s emergence as it draws upon the speed of thought, and the object of the poem itself which, in the tradition of the Language poets but extending back to the Romantics, aspires to escape technicity (or formality) in a bid for something like authenticity (communication of “essential” meaning, or vulgar communication). Lerner settles on a meaning for “going on forever,” namely the good version of play and pleasure, but knows the poem must indeed end. We are also reminded of the direct address—we are now included in the intimate conversation—introduced earlier.] A brain left lace from age or lightning. [I’m not quite sure what to make of this line. There is a suggestion of Alzheimer’s disease (associated with plaques and tangles in the brain)

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but with an aesthetic virtue, the intricacies of lace, evoking Eliot’s line about James: “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” Missing the Oxford comma, the line can denote two objects—it’s either a “brain” or “lightning”—or one brain incapacitated by one of two unrelated causalities.] The chicken is a little dry and/or you’ve ruined my life. [This seems to be a play on the “daily Surrealism” aspect of much later New York School poetry—just put down what’s in front of you as you’re writing, no observation is too trivial—but is also the final twist, extending beyond the game of the poem in the way the final sec­onds of a comedy sketch—the Queen enters in “Royal Family Doctor”—can just throw all the pieces into the air. The final phrase echoes Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (“You must change your life” in Stephen Mitchell’s translation) or James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” which also ends with a reference to the dark and a chicken: “I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. / A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. / I have wasted my life.” As the concluding line, it’s notable that these two options share an “and/or,” following through on the note of undecidability that the act of linguistic doubling creates.] The Lichtenberg Figures doesn’t fetishize technology or the machinic in the manner known from Flarf, conceptual, digital, or neo-­Oulipian writers, and yet its manner of evoking a limited array of distinct meanings from the repetition, or internal division, of words or phrases can be explained by Simondon’s emphasis on the multi-­functionality of parts in a technical object. The language manages to be denatured (or deterritorialized in Deleuze and Guatarri’s formulation) in a fashion familiar to anyone who has read New York School or Language writing, but manages to keep the option open for the sort of “personism” that Frank O’Hara advocated—the poem as direct address to at least one (or only one) other individual. Most of the poems in The Lichtenberg Figures display this feature of linguistic doubling, though some are also notable for fictional elements (a character named “Orlando Duran,” recalling Stevens’s vari­ous characters, appears on occasion), anaphora, pop cultural references (“Oops, I did it again”), notes of cultural or literary criticism (“Deliberately elliptical poetic works reflect a fear of po­liti­cal commitment after 1968”), and in one case an assault on the paratextual material of the book itself by setting it to verse.

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The author gratefully acknowledges the object world. Acknowledgement is gratefully made to Sleep: A Journal of Sleep. The author wishes to thank the foundation, which poured its money into the sky. A grant from the sky made this project impossible. Lerner, Benjamin, 1979–1945 The Lichtenberg fig­ures / Benjamin Lerner p. cm. ISBN 1-­556-­592-­11-­6 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. PS2343.E23432A6 1962 911’.01-­dc43 52-­28544 CIP The most extreme form of recursion in the volume, this poem has the distinct virtue of being partly true: though Lerner did not, of course, die in 1945, he was born in 1979, and the ISBN number is indeed 1-­55659-­211-­6. This poem is suspended by the invisible fig­ure of the Lerner sonnet, which we’ve encountered by this point through forty-­two previous poems. The poem asks at once to be verified by a renewed reading of the copyright page, but it also asks to be verified as fourteen lines long with some of the qualities— the punning, the linguistic doubling (“Sleep: A Journal of Sleep”)—characteristic of the other works. The poems of The Lichtenberg Figures can have the feel of being great improvisations—the colloquial, the associative, the trivial can make their way into any of them—but all of the phrases seem to get picked up, to be doubled, to be rendered ambiguous but also to acquire two or more specific meanings, while not losing their “instrumentality” in the workings of a highly orchestrated, condensed lyrical machine. I associate this practice with a type of technics that Simondon helps us describe with his language of abstract “ensembles” converging into concrete “elements.” Lerner’s poems are also agents in something I will call—picking up from Simondon in his description of technical ensembles, most prevalent in our own age of information technology—with “negentropy,” the movement toward form rather than toward the heat death of entropy with which the Language poets might have unwittingly become associated due to their resistance to formal closure (and the greater fame of novelists like Pynchon and DeLillo). These qualities mark The Lichtenberg Figures, along with Muse & Drudge, as symptomatic

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of a rapprochement of poetry and science, or writing and technics, even if that is not (as it is in Crystallography and other ‘pataphysical works in the Canadian tradition) a stated goal. Both sequences treat the poem as something of a function—the ghostly, invisible ideal—in which vari­ous values can be inserted for different effects. In both cases the actual function exists merely as a form of which each succeeding poem is a variation or instance; in ­Lerner’s case, this form is something resembling a sonnet, and in ­Mullen’s, a four-­quatrain ballad. Plays of interruption, suspension, and recursion are, naturally, prevalent in Lerner’s sequence, but The Lichtenberg Figures, being by turns syllogistic and full of non-­sequiturs, suggest a greater relationship with Simondonian technicity, as the poems appear to want to express arguments, albeit in a circular way.

Metapictures The Lichtenberg Figures is exemplary in its displacement of what is commonly referred to as indeterminacy characterized by semantic slippage with what I am calling undecidability—the movement of words between two or more competing, incommensurable yet absolute designations. To this degree, Lerner enacts something like an optical illusion, like the famous Necker cube that one can’t understand as both receding and proceeding at the same time. In his highly influential monograph Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell creates the concept of the “metapicture,” an image that comments upon its own status as a picture, here defined as a visual object that purports to depict something of “reality.” Like metafiction, the metapicture seems to break a fourth wall, though in this case merely pushing past the bounds of the “reti­ nal” (in Duchamp’s term) into a non-­pictorial other that can be either described as a concept that frames the picture (much as Joseph Kosuth, for example, will “frame” a chair with the dictionary definition of a chair in “One and Three Chairs” [1965]), or some Kantian a priori or cognitive proto-­ symbolic function to which there is no conscious access. In a metapicture, the “real” is denoted as transitioning into the “image,” but the horizon between the two is blurred—the real and the image don’t collapse into a single, stable whole but are situated along a continuum, the break in which is indiscernible. Mitchell notes as key examples of metapictures Magritte’s painting La trahison des images (1928)—the famous “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”—and more fittingly the later Les deux mystères (1966), which depicts La trahison des images itself on an easel in the lower right quarter of the panel, and suspended in the air (or painted on the wall) a much larger pipe that the image on the canvas reproduces (though of course, given the absence of a causal chain, the meeting of these two pipes could be as much a chance encoun-

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ter as the “meeting on a dissecting-­table of a sewing-­machine and an umbrella” celebrated by Lautréamont). To Mitchell, Magritte’s paintings are, in a sense, didactic, “designed . . . with all the connotations of pedantry and utility: it is a teaching aid, a piece of classroom apparatus, a point which is made explicit in . . . Les deux mys­ tères” (66). Mitchell’s other examples of metapictures include a Saul Steinberg cartoon depicting the artist, pen in hand, in the midst of drawing a self-­portrait—not having lifted the pen from the paper, the continuity between the gesture of the artist and trace of the image falls somewhere along a single stroke that moves from the artist’s foot into a spiral (the subject of the artist suspended in the predicate of the motion). He describes a New Yorker cartoon depicting a life fig­ure class in ancient Egypt in which the model is posed like a hieroglyph herself (the transformation of the real into the symbolic troubled as the real is already an icon much as a “real” stop sign is already a sign), and a Mad Magazine cover of Alfred E. Neumann, in full fig­ure with back to the viewer, flashing a mob at a nude beach driving the bathers into hysterics (the back cover, or reverse shot, reveals that he’s fully clothed and wearing a t-­shirt that says “Flashers Against Nudity,” a play on the mind’s internal splicing that spurs illusions of causality). A more canonical fig­ure is the famous “duck-­rabbit” drawing created by Ameri­can psychologist Joseph Jastrow to demonstrate the excluded middle of the human visual sys­tem (we don’t see something between the duck and rabbit, just one or the other) that fascinated Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. Arguing that metapictures are not confined to Surrealism or cartoons, Mitchell devotes several pages to a canonical masterpiece of West­ern painting, Las Meninas (1618) by Diego Velázquez, in which the artist appears to depict himself painting what he is seeing in a mirror that, as if confirming McLuhan’s arguments about Renaissance space, occupies the very space in which the viewer is standing. We are, in a sense, looking through the back of a two-­way mirror, and thereby are both included in the image but also studiously ignored. Rather than painting our portrait, Velázquez instead depicts a vignette of high bourgeois domesticity: a group of girls in puffy dresses, a dog lying in the foreground, an older couple of servants in the middle ground behind the children, and, far in the back, a nobleman, probably the patron, descending a staircase, pausing briefly to inspect the progress. A curious element is the dual portrait on the far wall next to the doorway that seems self-­illuminated—it barely breaks the gloom of the room inadequately lit by chandeliers, though the far window seems to be the only one from which the curtains are drawn—and could be mistaken for a mirror had the two fig­ures depicted within its frame also been depicted as within the room (a sort of reverse vampire effect).

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“Metapictures are notoriously migratory,” Mitchell writes, “moving from popu­lar culture to science, philosophy, or art history, shifting from marginal positions as illustrations or ornaments to centrality and canonicity,” (57) a quality they share with other forms of “meta-­“ visual arts, such as film in which cinematic “tricks” can appear at different cultural levels even within the oeuvre of a single artist. Michel Gondry, for instance, exhibits an endless passion for Méliès-­inspired in-­camera special effects and low-­brow humor in his shorts, but also engages in more complex technical experiments in his music videos that examine the analog/digital divide (“Let Forever Be” and “Star Guitar,” work he did for the Chemical Brothers in 1999 and 2002, respectively) and outright baroque foldings of narrative, pictorial, and cinematic space and time in his feature films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spot­ less Mind. Metapictures can be popu­lar because they are not abstractions— they aren’t diagrams, charts, or graphs, they don’t beg for resolutions in theoretical principles—but are mise en abymes (in Gide’s term), rabbit holes for those searching for objective grounding. In metapictures “the infinite regress of simulation, duplication, and repetition does not blur the distinctness of levels, except at the vanishing point; one simply has n-­levels of nested representation, each level clearly distinguished as an outside to another inside. Steinberg’s drawing is a kind of deliberate evocation and transgression of this clearly demarcated ‘nesting’ structure. The spiral form constructs an inside-­outside structure that is continuous, without breaks or demarcations or duplications” (42). Paintings like Las Meninas and Les deux mystères and videos like Gondry’s, not to mention the trend of “puzzle films” (Buckland) in digital features such as those by Charlie Kaufman or Christopher Nolan, could be said to concretize this spiral structure in a non-­pictorial way— they animate the very recursive style of human thought through a temporal and narrative abyss. Mitchell calls the “duck-­rabbit” image “multistable,” in that, as in the mental experiment of Schrödinger’s cat, they are both a duck and a rabbit (and several other objects, perhaps) when attention is unfocused, but have to resolve into one or the other when attention becomes, in Husserl’s term, “intentional.” Multistable images “tend to make the boundary between first­and sec­ond-­order representation ambiguous. They do not refer to themselves, or to a class of pictures, but employ a single gestalt to shift from one reference to another” (48). Mitchell’s term for recursion, “nesting,” appears in both the Steinberg style of metapicture, which refers to itself, and the “multistable” image, which doesn’t refer to itself but flips between two distinct images, something like a “multiplicity” in the one (to borrow Badiou’s terms). I would like to refer to the former type of image—which limits itself to n numbers of iterations prior to finding a break—as recursive in the sense

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associated with computer programming, in which a function can call upon itself from within itself. A recursive computer program is determinate to the degree that it does, indeed, find its end, at which point it either succeeded or failed to fulfill its function, but has at least exhausted a limited (not necessarily predetermined) set of possibilities. Due to its very conditionality, the fact that it is periodically evaluating a state, it maintains a relationship to the world as an object even if no impact is made on the world (beyond some human’s engagement with a data output). The latter type of image, the “multistable,” is undecided as it is, in programming terms, an “endless loop,” a bug of sorts, that won’t end until forced to a state, bound to a meaning (like “empties” or “enter” in Ben Lerner’s poem) by stopping the program. The term “multistable” begs for comparison with Gilbert Simondon’s notion of the “metastable,” which he argues is a new category, obscured by the privileged terms “stability” and “instability.” The “metastable” is a key element to his understanding of individuation and creativity—the possibility of becoming in the world. I quote at length: Individuation has not been able to be adequately thought and described because previously only one form of equilibrium was known—stable equilibrium. Metastable equilibrium was not known; being was implicitly supposed to be in a state of stable equilibrium. However, stable equilibrium excludes becoming, because it corresponds to the lowest possible level of potential energy; it is the equilibrium that is reached in a sys­tem when all of the possible transformations have been realized and no more force exists. All the potentials have been actualized, and the sys­tem having reached its lowest energy level can no longer transform itself. (“The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis” 6) In a sense, Simondon could be said to agree with Whitehead on a basic idea: that thinking has grounded itself on that which seems stable—the object, or our understanding of it permanence—and yet should set as its pri­ mary task, prior to others, the description of that which is in reserve, that fount of events and occasions that generates these illusory stabilities. Simondon continues: Antiquity knew only instability and stability, movement and rest; they had no clear and objective idea of metastability. In order to define meta­ stability, the notions of order, potential energy in a system, and the notion of an increase in entropy must be used. In this way, it is possible to define this metastable state of being—which is very different from stable equilibrium and from rest—that Antiquity could not use to find

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the principle of individuation, because no clear paradigm of physics existed to help them understand how to use it. We will try therefore to first present physical individuation as a case of the resolution of a meta­ stable system, starting from a sys­tem state like that of supercooling or supersaturation, which governs at the genesis of crystals. Crystallization provides us with well-­studied notions that can be used as paradigms in other domains; but it does not exhaust the reality of physical individuation. (“The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis” 6) The metastable is a system—it is a set of relations among atoms or parts—but not one that has been fully actualized or exhausted of its potential. Simon­ don’s notion of a “resolution” in the sys­tem is akin to my understand­ing of the cognitive decision that collapses contradictory (or maybe “indeterminate”) meanings into stable, if only provisional, “meanings.” As we will see later, a nomogram—a form of paper computer replete with grids and relations that, once engaged by drawing on it, provides specific fig­ures for on-­site engineers—is something like a visual analog for the meta­stable sys­tem. The metastable sys­tem is, consequently, a more concrete, if less poetic, description of the “plane of immanence” in Delueze and Guattari’s ­formulation—­in fact, the concept is foundational to it. Alex Galloway makes a similar argument, if in an entirely different context, in The Interface Effect. Like Mitchell, Galloway examines a particularly recursive image from Mad magazine, a parody of a Norman Rockwell painting in which the artist depicts himself painting a self-­portrait: we see, from left to right, the mirror which frames the artist’s upper torso, the back of the artist himself, and then the large canvas on which the portrait is emerging (lacking, in a note of vanity, the eyeglasses apparent in both the mirror reflection and the “actual” artist seen from behind). In the parody (which steals a motif from Magritte), we see Alfred E. Newman in the mirror, then the back of the artist himself, and then, in the canvas, the emerging portrait of the back of the artist’s head—what the “artist” could not see in this imagined Renaissance space but, rather, a repetition of what the viewer, as voyeur, already had available (drawn, notably, in the exact same style). Galloway uses this image to describe something he calls the intraface: Speaking aloud, the Mad image says: “I admit that an edge to the image exists—even if in the end it’s all a joke—since the edge is visible within the fabric of my own construction.” But the Rockwell image says: “Edges and centers may be the subject of art, but they are never anything that will influence the technique of art.”

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The intraface is the word used to describe this imaginary dialogue between the workable and the unworkable: the intraface, that is, an interface internal to the interface. The intraface is within the aesthetic. It is not a window or doorway separating the space that spans from here to there. Gerard Genette, in his book Thresholds, calls it a “ ‘zone of indecision’ between the inside and outside.” It is no longer a question of choice . . . It is now a question of nonchoice. The intraface is in­ decisive for it must always juggle two things (the edge and the center) at the same time. What exactly is the zone of indecision? What two things face off in the intraface? It is a type of aesthetic that implicitly brings together the edge and the center. The intraface may thus be defined as an internal interface between the edge and the center but one that is now entirely subsumed and contained within the image. This is what constitutes the zone of indecision. (40–41) Galloway, if I understand him correctly, is arguing that the interface need not merely employ tactics of indeterminacy in its war against the ideology of transparency—it need not transform data into capta—so much as contain within itself a mechanism that acts like a deixis to point to an “outside” that will always be a remainder—inassimilable to the symbolic order, the real—to whatever promises the interface holds in its bid for comprehensiveness. “The existence of the internal interface within the medium is important because it indicates the implicit presence of the outside within the inside,” he writes, “And, again to be unambiguous, ‘outside’ means something quite specific: the social” (42). In some ways, this “indecision” is the very evental moment that I associate with lyric poetry: it lacks the criti­cal content that one associates with Brechtian forms of Verfremdung, for example, and even permits the functioning of the interface as machine, but nonetheless articulates a zone of undecidability—not a plethora of semantic slippages so much as the imperative to make a choice.

The Poem as Interface One can think of the poem as a sort of thought experiment, not merely in linguistic terms on the one hand (word, sentence, form, etc.) or on episte­ mological terms (how does this poem relate to the world, its language to other languages, its thoughts to its author) but as something like a ­function—­a producer of events—and as a variation on some hidden diagram, the actual to an invisible virtual. This meditation on philosophical and programming

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objects offers a new way, to my mind, to think of a common theme in the study of literature in the wake of poststructuralism, namely intertextuality, which in general (and excepting the particular notion proposed by Julia Kristeva in the “Semiology of Paragrams”) argues that literary works are never “origi­nal” to the degree that they are composed of, or exist as a node of relation among, other texts. This stands in contrast to what most writers would want to argue for their works: that they are truly novel, attributable to a unique genius, a discrete artifact of a process enacted in a space and time. Intertextuality ends up, in this formulation, standing as a critique of subjec­ tivity, arguing that the subject is itself comprised of a series of relations, preformations, societal codes, master signifiers, and so forth. A theory of poetic objects suggests that a spectral, suspended class—the never-­revealed ballad form in Mullen, the archetypical sonnet-­like thing in Lerner—acts as something of an engine for producing variations, the in­di­ vidual poems, each of which acts as a link in the chain in sequences such as Muse & Drudge and The Lichtenberg Figures. The in­di­vidual poems bear relationships to each other as they are suspended in the common relationship to this unrevealed fig­ure which, in itself, has positive features to the degree that it grants an image of what a future poem in the chain can be and negative features in that it limits how far the poem can extend beyond this fig­ure. A lyric poem, as I will later argue, draws upon source texts; it is a poem to the degree that it works like a technical object. This ghost class that I am attempting to describe can be understood as something like a diagram for how to build this new poem without itself being a poem, even if it is what is most remembered of the poem itself. To this degree, intertextuality should not argue against the novelty of a poem, even one not embedded in a sequence, as poems will always acquire a unique relationship to its milieu regardless of the program at the heart of its origin—poems are always su­ peradded to the set of possibilities that preceded them. Consequently, even an exhaustive tally of the intertextual qualities of a poem, or an imaginative technical description of the diagram behind a poem, its base class and subclasses, will never approach the event that should, and does, lie at its core.

3 Pilots of the Pharmakon Bodies, Precarity, and the Milieu

The Cantos Pound’s “poem in­clud­ing history,” the unfinished sequence The Cantos, enacts a manifold of assays, the most obvious of which, perhaps, is to utilize many different languages, in­clud­ing non-­alphabetic ones, in the same poem as exemplar of a sort of synchronicity, not just across time but cultures. The poem also sought to develop Pound’s initial insight in the Spirit of Romance concerning “luminous details,” those that “give one a sudden insight into circumadjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence, and law,” a method which, he writes in 1912, is “most vigorously hostile to the prevailing mode of to-­day [sic]—that is, the method of multitudinous detail, and to the method of yesterday, the method of sentiment and generalization” (Spirit 21). This preference for the resonant, perhaps anomalous, “detail” carried through his imagism project of the “direct presentation of the thing” to the Cantos, as it is a poem largely consisting of what are mistakenly called, even by Pound himself, “fragments,” but which are in fact tex­ tual objects in an exhibition suspended by the form of the poem, meaning both its lyrical tensegrity—Buckminster Fuller’s portmanteau of “tensional integrity” coined in the 1960s—and its material support in a very large book. Each canto was intended, consequently, to satisfy what are of­ten considered contrasting agenda, to be both lyrical and epic, both something that is brief and can be sung or chanted and yet also encyclopedic, a series of references constitutive of some new social order. No canto runs longer than can be read at a single sitting (satisfying Poe’s description of a poem), and

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yet the whole, even if not displaying the symmetries of the Commedia, exists as a monument (at least in Pound’s mind), something that reforms the canon and also finds a place within it. Departing from Pound’s own description of his poem (which he also noted was constructed “fugally,” that is, as a series of motifs and echoes), one can also say that the Cantos, when they are not engaged in acts of creative translation as in “Canto I” (more or less true to the origi­nal in Homer through Andreas Divus’s “crib”), are suggestive not only of montages—­sequences spliced together like film strips—but also informational streams, chunks of data ranging in size from the granular single word to the block of direct quotation or translation (“A Lady asks me . . . “) nestled in a fast-­moving continuum. But the poem is also, to borrow a concept from Lev Manovich, a composite: not a chain of elements linked by splices, like a classic montage, so much as an arrangement of images and concepts woven into each other, blended into a single flow. That is, Pound did not merely “include” bits of his­tori­cal data, translations, letters, chunks of Chinese history, and so forth but also integrated, more clearly in some moments and less in others, his own personality, the voices of his many “personae,” as a sort of overtone. This compositing is perhaps most obviously exhibited in the first canto, a translation of Homer that employs some of the Anglo-­Saxon idiolect he developed for his translation of the “Seafarer,” which, after a sustained period of imagistic account (“And drawing sword from my hip / I dug the ell-­square Pitkin”), finally descends into “fragments,” punctuated by the gravelly, indecorous Pound voice—“Damn blast your intellex” (from a later canto)—that erupts on occasion through­out the poem. Understanding the Cantos as a stream and not a montage, as a composite and not assemblage, offers a different light on how the method of the Cantos survived into Olson’s Whitehead-­inspired theory of the Maximus Poems— that the words on the page represented concretizations of actual occasions, that the body of the poet was understood as an object among objects—but also through durational, conceptual poetics as practiced by, for example, Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer in the sixties and seventies. The model of the Cantos still serves (if only through a sort of osmosis) for many writers today, even if they have sacrificed many of the more arcane or “difficult” elements that closer followers of Pound adopted. These elements include (in reductive, diagrammatic form): the use of translated and untranslated passages from a variety of literatures (which we see in Robert Duncan), the dramatization of the poet’s plight as he seeks to critique and reset cultural values (which we see in John Berryman), the esoteric articulation of new aesthetic values (which we can see in Louis Zukofsky), and the description of larger cosmological orders that transcend disciplinary divisions (which we see in

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Charles Olson). Though enacted on a less-­hubristic scale, “poems containing history,” which exhibit other Poundian properties—an essentially lyric character, an easy transport between personal and pub­lic matters, a deeply ethical (if of­ten merely cranky) tone, and a “resistance to closure,” using Lyn Hejinian’s language—has survived in some form into the early twenty-­first century, even if it is not nearly the dominant form of poetry written today. The poets I want to discuss, Alice Notley, Kevin Davies, and Wanda Coleman, do not position themselves as masters in the way Pound and his immediate inheritors did, but as subjects or “pilots,” in the sense that, like Rimbaud in the “Drunken Boat,” they mainly depict themselves as negotiating or navigating their respective milieus from a position of precarity, transforming them, if at all, merely as an effect, and not an intention, of writing. In the meantime, I’d also like to test a series of concepts by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, particularly that of the pharmakon, that part of the world (comprised largely of technical objects, in­clud­ing those of fire and writing) that is neither internal nor external to what he calls the “soul” but in fact, by turns therapeutic and toxic, makes possible the very interiority one traditionally calls the “self. ”

The Pharmakon Stiegler’s philosophy, articulated in over thirty books since the first volume of La technique et le temps in 1992, exhibits a remarkable consistency in interests and terminology, even as certain books seem primarily conceived as foundational—the three long volumes of Technics and Time, for example— and others as tracts or manifestos, such as the recent For a New Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy. Recalling Isaiah Berlin, one could say that Stiegler seems like the hedgehog to Badiou’s fox, as Stiegler’s work single-­mindedly clings to the same set of terms whereas Badiou can devote a volume to a discourse on mathematics, another to Samuel Beckett or the “Age of the Poets,” another to a quasi-­journalistic or popu­lar account of the twentieth century, another to the truth condition of “love,” and yet others to self-­consciously monumental or summative works such as Being and Event and the Logic of Worlds. To me, this element of Stiegler’s style is suggestive of one of the major themes of his work, which is the discussion of the milieu in relation to the human organism over time. Each of Stiegler’s volumes puts into circulation the same set of terms, in the same relationship to each other, the terms sometimes employed to describe elements external to the philosophy (a po­liti­cal event, the state of education), at others becoming subject to a sort of intense focus (as in asides about the pharmakon itself). If Badiou is the philosopher of the event, setting up his volumes to both support and inter-

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rupt each other, Stiegler’s approach is ecological, dramatizing through discourse the very relationship of self to world in the relationship of reader to the pharmaka of Stiegler’s terminology. The concept of the pharmakon finds its roots in Plato’s Phaedrus, in which the Egyptian god Theuth (or Thoth) offers King Thamus the gift of writing as an aid to memory, a gift that is refused, ironically, because written script itself induces forgetfulness. Writing, in this dialogue, is thus described as both poison and cure—the Greek word pharmakon means both—a procedure which renders us amnesic while also offering an avenue toward increased memory. Derrida famously revisited this concept in his essay ­“Plato’s Pharmacy,” offering neither a defense nor condemnation of writing in relation to memory but rather, characteristically, describing writing as that sphere where binary meanings exist in an undecided state, that is, in reserve: If the pharmakon is “ambivalent,” it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/­ forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.) . . . The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the différance of difference. It holds in reserve, in its undecided shadow and vigil, the opposites and the differends that the process of discrimination will come to carve out. Contradictions and pairs of opposites are lifted from the bottom of this diacriti­cal, differing, deferring, reserve. Already inhabited by différance, this reserve, even though it “pre­cedes” the opposition between different effects, even though it pre­ exists differences as effects, does not have the punctual simplicity of a coincidentia oppositorum. It is from this fund that dialectics draws its reserves. (172) For Derrida, language as pharmakon is a site that precedes linguistic indeterminacy, the realm of chance and semantic slippage, as it is popu­larly understood in Ameri­can literary studies since John Cage’s use of the term (and in M ­ arjorie Perloff ’s Poetics of Indeterminacy), a site in which words are as yet unbound to the rigors of ratio, or binding and decision, which Derrida calls “the process of discrimination.” Deleuze and Guatarri’s notion of the “plane of immanence,” which describe a preindividualized layer that serves as the generator of forms and concepts, is akin to Derrida’s pharmakon, even as the later philosophers did not restrict their thinking exclusively to the operations of language. Stiegler’s innovation is to expand this understanding of pharmakon out

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of a solely textual context and, rewired through the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger and theories of technics by André Leroi-­Gourhan and Simondon, apply it to the entire technological milieu. “Writing—as hypo­ mnesis, hypomnemeton, that is, artificial memory—is that pharmakon whose artificial and poisonous effects Plato combats by opposing them to anam­ nesis, to thinking ‘for oneself,’ that is, to the autonomy of thought. Derrida has shown, however, that this autonomy nevertheless always has something to do with heteronomy—in this case, that of writing—and that, while Plato opposes autonomy and heteronomy, they in fact constantly compose”(2). The notion here is that the transcendental imagination (as described by Kant), or the subject, Dasein or “soul,” cannot be understood as distinct from the varieties of “artificial memory”—which for Stiegler are not just writing or media but the ethnographic memory as it is persists in tools—but that imagination, memory, the sense of self, is an epiphenomenon of the individual’s interaction with technics. The autonomy of the self and the heteronomy of technical memory form through time together, which is to say compose or, as he notes elsewhere, consist rather than exist apart. Stiegler expands upon Husserl’s notion of two forms of retention: pri­ mary retention, which might be described as one’s first experience of something (a melody, for example) in which each moment is both something that is present but that also contains a sense of its immediate pastness by overlapping briefly with a new present, and sec­ondary retention, which involves one’s memory or recall of the initial experience, what one actually memorized, if involuntarily, of the melody and which comes into play when the melody is heard again. Stiegler’s pharmakon is situated in his own innovation, tertiary memory: the entire ensemble of externalized memory in­clud­ ing writing, other recording devices, tools, and other cultural practices that predate one’s birth, a regime of memory that precedes primary memory, that both transcends the subject and yet also suspends it. Stiegler’s argument is against the misuse of these externalized forms of memory, primarily by the forces of capital that seeks a “proletarianization of the spirit” by severing the subject from what he calls an “infinitization of thought” that promises the subject some degree of agency—or more dramatically, a “reason to live.” In one of his manifesto-­like shorter works called What Makes Life Worth Living, Stiegler writes: I have striven in vari­ous works to establish how the noetic [mental, intellectual] environments through which the soul is trans-­formed are already arrangements of primary and sec­ondary retentions and protentions, arrangements themselves conditioned by tertiary retentions, that is, by hypomnesic systems. It follows from these analyses

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that every­thing that opposes the anamnesic to the hypomnesic, such as transcendental memory or transcendental imagination, leads to an impasse. The fact remains that there is an his­tori­cal and po­liti­cal necessity at the origin of such oppositions: Plato struggles against that sophistic that had caused the spirit of the Greek polis to enter into crisis through its misuse of the pharmakon—through bypassing and short-­circuiting thought, that is, anamnesis, thus depriving the souls of citizens of that knowledge lying at the foundation of all citizenship (all autonomy). In this regard, the pharmakon was a factor in the proletarianization of spirit (in the loss of knowledge) just as the machine tool would later be a factor in the proletarianization of the bodies of producers, that is, of workers (depriving them of their know-­how, their savoir-­faire). Likewise, it is a sys­tem that proletarianizes minds that Adorno and Horkheimer denounced in the Hollywood imagination machinery of the citizen-­become-­consumer (even though they did not analyze it in these terms). (19–20) Stiegler doesn’t share with Adorno and Horkheimer their negative view of the techno-­cultural milieu—“They see in the pharmakon only its poisonous character, which means that they don’t see it as pharmakon,” he writes, and later, “They ignore the pharmacology of spirit by taking the pharmakon in general as a pharmakos: a scapegoat”—and further departs from the Frankfurt School by jettisoning, as noted earlier, the Kantian notion of the transcendental imagination. His thesis is not that the images and relations that the cultural industry produces corrupt a pure or natural form of social relation, but rather that the temporalities of a pharmakon in thrall to the demands of capitalism differ from those forms of thought involved in the process of individuation or “creativity” in a peculiar sense that he adopts from the psychologist D. W. Winnicott. Echoing philosophers like Michel de Certeau and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Stiegler argues that the expansion of the rational, bureaucratic ideal into all forms of employment, especially intellectual, is a “proletarianization of spirit” akin to an earlier industrial age’s “proletarianization of the bodies of producers,” though naturally they ­overlap. “Meaning only exists infinitely,” Stiegler sloganizes, and later: “The thought of desire and of the Thing, which is not a thought of ‘lack’ but of default, that is, of the pharmakon, is a thought that remains yet to come: it is the question par excellence of a century—ours—that has not begun well. It is the question of that which does not exist, but which, inspiring trust, ties together relations of fidelity in this economy of the infinite that is the only economy of true value, that is, an economy which is not just sustainable but in prin-

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ciple ‘to the infinite’—and which makes life worth living beyond the calculating fiduciary sys­tem which ratio (reason) has become in all its forms” (75). Thought aspires—regardless of the content or qualia that is of­ten considered the body of thought—to the infinite, a property one associates with numbers. And later: “What did we mean by saying that we risked this infin­ itive statement, that is, one that in French begins with an infinitive verb? We wanted to say above all that no existence is possible without infinity, and more precisely, without that which grants the power to infinitize—which in turn presupposes knowing how to infinitize” (77). The field of po­liti­cal struggle, in Stiegler’s by turns concrete and speculative view, is between this capacity to infinitize and the forces of the pharmakon that would want to “short-­circuit,” to dice and slice into granular finitudes, this illuminating power. In a chapter titled “Disposable Children,” Stiegler writes of something he calls the “immense systemic stupidity” of the present age. Market forces pro­ letarianize, forcing children into a state of adaptation that: destroys pharmacological knowledge, spreads toxicity. To adapt is to proletarianize, that is, to deprive of knowledge those who must submit to that to which they are adapting themselves. . . . A process of protelarianization is the destruction of an associated milieu, that is, of a milieu of existence. It is only possible to exist, for a psychic individual, by contributing to the individuation of its milieu and by co-­ individuating with other psychic individuals. This contribution begins with the name given to the newborn, through which he or she is initiated into a new circuit of intergenerational transindividuation—the condition of all psychic singularity. (130) In layman’s terms, Stiegler is arguing that the pharmakon as toxin dissolves what might be called “social bonds,” and that the creative self—one not mired in indifference or depression—only thrives in state of “contributing to the individuation” of the milieu, of contributing to a “collective individuation” (a concept he shares with Simondon). But connection to the past is also a “condition” of the productive “psychic individual,” a connection that starts with the name but is also the essence of tools, the media, and other conveyors of ethnographic codes and identity. The opposing term to adaptation, adoption, is “the condition of individuation of the pharmacological being— so that the poison can become a remedy.” “Adoption establishes a situation of fidelity” to the milieu, a fidelity that approaches infinitization, but it is fidelity that “is precisely what defines consumerism insofar as it constitutes a systemic infidelity that, when the hegemony of consumerism reveals its carelessness [incurie], installs a situation of mistrust that is generalized and

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spread as an apocalyptic feeling without God” (131). That is, the long-­circuit form of fidelity1 (that to the milieu and the generations) is hijacked, diverted into short-­circuit fidelities—the forced “adaptation” to the pharmakon.

Transitional Objects These concepts lay out a basic idea of what a Stieglerian ethics as pertains to poetry could comprise: not the reestablishment of “natural” relations (suggesting an organic order) or the emancipation of the image from the bounds of commodity (as Language poetry or Situationist theory suggests), but a reenchantment of the world through de-­proletarianized forms of attention, enabling the long-­circuit, or the infinite, to neutralize the impositions of this tertiary regime of memory, its most nefarious element being equated, in Stiegler’s view, with the market that seeks, in a variety of ways, to create dissociation, for instance between generations: “Having become categories targeted by marketing, ages no longer form generations—as if they are a degeneration of (the) generation itself ” (What Makes Life 129). Stiegler’s use of child psychologist D. W. Winnicott suggests another link, however, which is that one could think of poems, as one would the entire pharmakon, as “transitional objects,” the major conceptual contribution of Winnicott to psychological theory. Transitional objects are those things that an infant adopts after being weaned from a dependence on the mother (or the mother’s breast) that substitutes for the mother, but also that initiates the development of an “objective” relationship to the outside world. Transitional objects, like P ­ iaget’s permanent objects, are not experienced in the conventional ways one associates with adult experience—as having a color, a shape, a weight, behaviors, a “bundle of qualities”—and are also not referential (infants don’t substitute, in an act of imagination, the transitional object for the absent mother) so much as the initial ground of a nascent subjectivity. We’ve all seen infants adopt, apparently irrationally, some obscure object—a piece of string, a broken doll, a torn blanket (as I did)—as a “comfort object,” not so much as something to play with (like a ball or Batman toy) but as an object through which to situate experience—as a tool for mediation with an apparently infinite (or at least featureless) outside, and to this degree “infinite” itself. Winnicott writes: There is a wide variation to be found in a sequence of events that starts with the newborn infant’s fist-­in-­mouth activities, and leads eventually on to an attachment to a teddy, a doll or soft toy, or to a hard toy. It is clear that something is important here other than oral excite-

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ment and satisfaction, although this may be the basis of everything else. Many other important things can be studied, and they include: 1. The nature of the object. 2. The infant’s capacity to recognize the object as “not-­me.” 3. The place of the object—outside, inside, at the border. 4. The infant’s capacity to create, think up, devise, originate, produce an object. 5. The initiation of an affectionate type of object-­relationship. I have introduced the terms “transitional objects” and “transitional phenomena” for designation of the intermediate area of experience, between the thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral erotism and the true object-­relationship, between primary creative activity and projection of what has already been introjected, between primary un­awareness of indebtedness and the acknowledgement of indebted­ ness. (2–3) The transitional object absorbs some of the powers of the mother’s breast, its only predecessor in the object-­world of the infant, being both outside provider and yet synonymous with the extension of the infant beyond itself. Importantly, the transitional object does not work in the absence of the mother for long periods of time, and in fact, after a certain length of absence, the transitional object loses any sort of meaning for the child at all and can never reacquire it. The baby does not sense the transitional object—it is neither exterior nor interior (like a pain) but really an invisible prosthesis, the “first pharma­ kon” (What Makes Life 2) in Stiegler’s words—which means that, in some ways, the transitional object is resistant to theory, to being considered in the abstract. As Piaget argues, it is in the manipulation of not-­me objects that logic first takes root in the young child; transitional objects, slowly acquiring the qualities of closure and distance, marks the threshold leading to pure thought. “The transitional object has a distinct virtue: it does not exist,” Stiegler notes: What holds and is upheld as this link through which these two beings become incommensurable and infinite for one another, is what, by allowing a place for that which is infinite, consists precisely to the immea­ surable extent [dans la mesure et la démesure] that it does not exist— because the only things that exist are finite things. This consistence [as opposed to existence], more than anything else, and before anything else, is what a mother protects when she protects

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her child. This protection, which is care par excellence, is grounded in the knowledge the mother has of the extra-­ordinary character of the object—and that Winnicott calls transitional precisely in order to designate this extra-­ordinariness. Such was Winnicott’s great discovery: the fact that maternal knowledge is knowledge of that which, in the transitional object, consists, though it does not exist, and which gives to the child placed under this protection the feeling that “life is worth living.” (What Makes Life 2) Stiegler’s notion of the “infinite” here is not related to the infinite-­transfinite diad central to Badiou and Meillassoux’s philosophy; it is not related to set theory or mathematics, though Badiou himself describes a relationship between the infinite, thinking, and politics in a book titled, appropriately, In­ finite Thought. Stiegler’s argument is that this primitive relation between the infant and objects produces a phenomenon of “infinitization” that, as Stieg­ ler notes later, combats the nihilism, malaise, and melancholy of the contemporary condition (“ennui” and “alienation” are two earlier terms for it) in the adult. “This relation of care constituted by the transitional object, that is, by the first pharmakon, forms the basis of what becomes, as transitional space, an intermediate area of experience where objects of culture, the arts, religion and science are formed.” Poems are, of course, part of “culture” and yet, distinct from the other arts, have the unique quality of being at once present and absent, of staging its effects while concealing, invariably, the actual supports behind its material instantiation. That is, a poem is neither truly external (a stone, a dog, the weather) nor internal (proprioceptive, or a spontaneous illumination of the soul) but constitutes a certain threshold, or perhaps is outside of any simple binary. Further, a poem is both a product of technics—a member of the ensemble of tertiary retentions—while also a tool, one that, like a toy, conjures the prospect of infinite thought.

Process Poetics This late stage of the Poundian tradition of the “open” poem that “includes history” while superimposed with the authorial voice offers a window onto the subject consisting with the pharmakon, offering perhaps a test of Stieg­ ler’s hypotheses. Can we look at the operations of poems that chart consciousness (as Ashbery says that his own poems do) but are also attuned to the material conditions of an author’s situation—perhaps criti­cal of the notion of a transcendental imagination even if marking its points of corruption and intensification—as negotiations of the slippery nature of the phar­

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makon as both poison and remedy? Do people go to poems that articulate grievances and distribute negativities with the knowledge that, as is of­ten the case, poems that say nothing “positive” nonetheless provide something like comfort—the sensation of a universe of care? Returning to my notion of “speculative prosody,” I would like to describe how the interactions of interruption, suspension, and recursion are essential to these forms of process poems and make visible points of contact between the Dasein and the Umwelt (or the subject and its milieu) through the medium of the pharma­ kon. The domestication of this form of Poundian lyric-­epic will be traced in the writing of three poets: an enemy of masters who refuses mastery herself, Alice Notley; a latter-­day Kafka, who seems subject to a world of invisible, inconceivable machinations, Kevin Davies; and a poet who describes the precarity of human situations, both hers and a collective, with humor and poignancy, the late Wanda Coleman.

Alice Notley, Disobedience Ameri­can literature has never been short of poets who structured their works like running commentary of their spiritual sojourns, from the weekly “Preparatory Meditations” of the Puritan Edward Taylor (“My Soule had caught an Ague, and like Hell / Her thirst did burn”) through Emily Dickinson’s secret fascicles and the hallucinogenic “beatitude” of Allen Ginsberg’s journal poems. With Disobedience, a book-­length work written in Paris during the years 1995–1996, Alice Notley created a new mold: that of the pilgrimage of spiritual and social negation, a poem that records in prismatic detail and shotgun wit the poet’s efforts to divest herself of everything society has handed to her, and to resist—these lines appear near the very end of the poem—what’s ahead: This is the beginning of a new spiritual and ethical position. For a woman. Based on the supposition of harmful intent— that another, male or female, even without realizing it might very well want to hurt me, cause my subjugation. I don’t propose an equalitarian lovingkindness or compassion. I propose, for women, always an instinctive wariness. I propose, further, meditation in separate closets, without instructions. That’s the whole religion. It never has to be proposed again in order to exist. It has no organization and no beliefs. (272)

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The very portability of Notley’s creed—“That’s / the whole religion”—highlights the activities of the human animal merely circulating within a milieu, blind in the Umwelt, armed only with an “instinctive wariness” but otherwise treating all social or structural allegiences as inherently alien. Like her previous long poem, The Descent of Alette (1996), Disobedience derives many of its themes and imagery from dreams, and conjoins the description of a subterranean journey with a concerted effort against the day world of oppressively bureaucratic, of­ten male, society. The irreverently, of­ten histrionically, titled sections of Disobedience are constellations of fragments and shorter poems, some only single sentences that resemble barbed fortune-­ cookies—“Starving because there are ‘jobs’ in our consciousness” runs one—­ and others as long as a page. As in her previous volume, Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), a suite of sixty-­nine poems that chronicled significant events of her life, Notley freely writes from an “I” with the forthright, even defiant, lyric subjectivity she feels has been subsumed under the projects of collagist poetics with which she herself—as a member of the “sec­ond generation New York School”—had been partly engaged. In Disobedience this “I” becomes a troubled site, represented at some points as total absence—the soul is the “universe’s asshole” (143), and later: “I am exactly material and in fact non-­ / existent as a self, am everyone else” (146)—and a singular, rebellious presence, as when she revisits Rimbaud’s famous “I is another” with a formulation that reflects the friction between the “exactness” of the refreshed identity that she is pursuing and the anonymous, troubled commonality she can’t do without: “What’s exact / is I, whose particulars may not be mine. / I is never another” (243). What occurs with a merging of the “dream” method of Descent and the reality-­based method of Mysteries is an explosion of the dream world—its overlapping timelines, its unpredictable mixtures of comedy and horror— into that of the everyday. But unlike the Surrealists, for whom the dream world cast an estranging, aestheticizing aura over objects and emotions, Notley uses dreams in a manner that is both very ancient (they take on the importance of prophecies) and very contemporary, as her dreams operate along libidinal economies of meaning—fluid and exposed rather than categorized and decorous—that critique the life of mere survival, charting a path through the pharmakon: away from the toxin of timesheet-­driven monoculture to the flawed but bountiful cure of an urban arcadia. She presents her dreams with all the clarity of “reality” and not with the Vaseline-­lensed penumbras of early cinema, her visions in sleep glittering with detail and laced with attitude. The transitions from waking life to dream world and back are of­ten startling, the essence of Rimbaudian interruption, as Notley, like Saint-­Pol-­Roux in the “First Manifesto of Surrealism,” is as busy sleeping as

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she is awake: “Because I work on my poems all night in my dreams I’m / always tired” (267). In fact, the project of disobedience continues in dreams: Dreamed the street artist’s talent, at Les Halles, was to make a big purple wig. Yarn dreads in an 18th century arrangement. Some demented woman behind me indicated I must worship, even wear this new atrocity; another impossible heavy head. (156) Perspectives shift radically—questions are posed, concepts are questioned and of­ten dismissed, shouting matches ensue—but the dream world is not presented as a sec­ondary, more liberated reality; pursuit, not escapism, is the rationale for these subterranean dips. Notley invents something like an architectonics in flux, for, in addition to the dream and waking lives, there is the space of the “cave,” which she equates with imagination and independence, perhaps even with a search for innocence. The cave is a more voluntary and fictional space than the dream world, its defensive posture taking on an odd resonance in our time of desert warfare: People keep trying to foist Greats on me—oh Wordsworth Melville Langston Hughes, James Joyce, or some girl, Bradstreet Dickinson, Stein Toni Morrison Fuck ’em – They aren’t “great” on the newly discovered planet beneath Orion; and deep deep inside me, in the caverns I haven’t heard of them. I’ve only heard of the unnamed there (92) In this cave appears one of the most prominent imaginary tropes, a male protagonist who is named, among other variations, “Hardwood,” “Harwood,” “Hardon” and “Mitch-­ham” (because he looks like the actor Robert Mitchum, famous for his role as the murderous Rev. Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter) and is equated with the theme of the “will.” The “soul” and the “will” dance contentious, if seductive, circles around each other, at times merging—“I’m Hardwood himself now / filling a great coat” (43)—and at other times clashing, or simply morphing into new concepts: “I lost Soul­girl, as character, a long time ago / simply became her” (213). Another trope is that of the “E”, a radiant glyph that she finds on the cave walls, and which she

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equates with the theme of “commonality” because it is the most used letter in the English language and recurs with regularity in her own name: Alice Elizabeth Notley. She writes, “Have I fed anyone.  / Have I changed Your image of what a poem might be / and so, in some part, changed ‘reality’ ” (293). “Don’t be an E,” she asks at one point, feeling the self threatened by the fast-­food reproductive methods of digital repetition; later, she implores (she tends to exclude question marks): “Where are the E’s of exactness.” All that stuff about E’s was because all that stuff about E’s was because I kept seeing E’s graven on the cave walls a most common letter? E is for pee, the flood of commonality produced by tea, commonality The rich always have to have some of everyone’s. (217) The E is a perfect illustration of the featureless polloi, the “swarm” that exhibits as a buzz in the poetry of Rimbaud according to Kristin Ross—a concept I’ll return to later—or the preindividual, the yet-­unformed, in Simondon’s (and later Deleuze’s and Stiegler’s) philosophy. Notley’s interruptions are only matched by those of the media, which, as in Stiegler, seem poised only to disturb the long-­circuits of her thought, the infinite of dreams, with honed distractions. A running strand in Disobedi­ ence is the poet’s reactions to news accounts: car bombs in Paris, the lives and doings of celebrities (Whitney Houston, Ursula Andrews, and Demi Moore “nearly moored” make appearances), and anything to do with “big fat America.” If the cave and the dream world return Notley to her particularity and Whitmanic sense of commonality, then the mediascape is the opposite: it abuses both her empathy and her narcissism to the point of replacing the interior mirror with ephemeral, packaged events and model, even ageless, doubles—and a home country she refuses to recognize. The aggregate effect of these manipulative but humanistic forces takes on proper-­noun status for Notley, becoming “The Emotion”—“Society is / a huge / c­ ohesive / emotion” (201) she writes at one point. “The Emotion” might also be a homegrown double for Guy Debord’s “spectacle,” that all-­invasive sys­tem of mediations that he believed are imposed upon the in­di­vidual and which, in his mind, are an elusive obstacle to free­dom. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes, but “ a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (2). Fellow Situationist Raoul Vaneigem offers a more novelistic, Notley-­esque description of the concept:

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Inauthenticity is a right of man; such, in a word, is the triumph of socialism. Take a thirty-­five-­year-­old man. Each morning he starts his car, drives to the office, pushes papers, has lunch in town, plays pool, pushes more papers, leaves work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses his children, eats his steak in front of the TV, goes to bed, makes love, and falls asleep. Who reduces a man’s life to this pathetic sequence of clichés? A journalist? A cop? A market researcher? A socialist-­realist author? Not at all. He does it himself, breaking his day down into a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the range of dominant stereotypes. (133) Notley writes: “I go about / just detached from The Emotion—am not / in Your story. When I remember,” the last word meaning both remind myself to disobey and, in Stiegler’s sense, establish the long-­circuit of fidelity to the mi­ lieu and generations. Remembering is “a physical / sense of d ­ etachment—­a sac no / longer adhering to a flesh wall,” (216) as if her own birth were dependent on how willfully and severely she could excise herself from her own proletarianization. But Notley (or the protagonist of her poem) is not always able to do this, and the interruptive nature of Disobedience—in which phrases drop in like kamikaze flyers—amply dramatizes her vulnerability. One news event takes on dream-­like proportions when it is replayed on the TV one year later, but renews its traumatic charge given Notley’s ignorance of the occasion: Blonde ferretface on Channel 3 announces a bomb’s exploded at St. Michel . . . many injured, a few dead . . . no, it’s just the anniversary of last year’s bomb. A scary trick of journalists . . . assholes. (248) Unlike the repetition of dreams, even vivid ones like Notley’s, the replaying of a videotape—the exemplar of tertiary rentention—maintains the power of a primary experience, digital fidelity to the origi­nal never waning, for the simple fact that it’s been forgotten. Mingled between, within, and among these many strands—a symbolic cornucopia rich enough for any sixteenth-­ century English allegorical epic—are other motifs that take on symbolic resonance, such as her fascination with dressing up campily or revealing herself nude before others (“A rosary of amber beads is really / a G-­string or pelvic tassle, / ‘for exotic dancers only.’ Of course / I buy it. / [. . .] I have defined degradation.” [249]); the appearance of “futurist” and postmodern poets who, among other things, cavalierly deny the “self ” (“Any one of us / is

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the one ground of life, / the only true point-­of-­view.” [276]); her engagement with a particularly female tradition in literature (Margeret Yourcenar, Anna Akhmatova); and her rejection of male terms of knowledge, echoing Hejinian’s arguments against “Faustian” mastery. Highlighting these inversions of toxin and cure, human consumption and defecation are also prominent—­ food, “goo,” shit, and pee (loaded, as it is, with “e”s), not to mention menstruation (“Hardwood says, You should stand up soon / I’ll help you / I say, I have cramps / I say, I’m using my period, to get pissed off and to Know” [50]) are all recurring presences in this poem, which makes you wonder why the bodily fluids (with the exception of blood) occur as infrequently in poems as they do in the movies. Notley’s restless, aware, and candid personality, along with the structure of the poem—almost like a collection of emails, with subject lines, deep chatter, dialogic moments, and to-­be-­continueds—allows her to change frames rapidly and to improvise the poem’s movement like a journal without ever losing site of the motion forward. This might be the definition of “infinite” thought: non-­teleological, it nonetheless exceeds the bounds of the finite mind, not to mention the objects and events of the world that populate it. The book has a unique pacing that is both centripetal—her imagination could take us anywhere—and centrifugal, as the breaks return the reader to a familiar place, to a closed set of obsessions. Disobedience is structured, in this way, like the city of Paris itself—famous for epiphanic walks through miles of arcades, birthplace of the science of psychogeography—as the poem’s five main sections form the roads leading out of a center that is, itself, heavily symbolic but largely empty, like the brass compass star in front of Notre Dame that is the fabled “center of Paris.” The titles of the separate poems are suitable for some provocative, if cryptic, graffiti: “I Suppose This Is All a Left­hand Path,” “Dante’s Ass a Noble Prize,” “The Morbid Managers Are Serving Trays of Charnel Flesh,” “Meet Me At La Chapelle for Some More Salami,” and “Echoes the Past Fucks Me Over and Over” are just a few examples. The table of contents reads like a pretty good Language poem, and the Dada charge of each of them keeps the depths of the poem—the introspection, the po­liti­cal stances, the symbolism—aerated and public, reminding the reader of the mission overall. Breaking up this thought are a final architectural embellishment, what Notley calls her “lacunae”—her “space[s] between official places” (277)— which are the periodic breaks, represented by em-­dashes, that allow her to dart to any one of her chosen modes: “These lacunae are really great, most restful. / Do I really want to fill them in with suppressions?” (23). Of course she doesn’t: it is these spaces where she is most fully exercising her will, where she creates a garden, a “retreat,” out of her poem. What might dis-

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tinguish Notley from earlier Ameri­can spiritual sojourners such as Taylor and Dickinson is the pragmatist’s “duty to believe”—the injunction to move forward without a doxa, to experiment with one’s life, in a state of unknowing. The voids provide the cover (even a search engine will miss them) from which the poet, like a panther crouching before its prey, strikes, unleashing language that has had time to formulate at a distance, but which is nonetheless “untested,” with unpredictable returns. In a secularized culture that has lost touch with the traditional languages of the “soul” and that has offered no replacement except to silence its entreaties by dulling it with pills and the evening news, Notley possesses and transports her selfhood like a priceless contraband—like a loaded gun, like a lethal opiate—as if fearing that it, too, will be subject to the indignities of control through regulation, confirming Negri and Hardt’s formulation in Empire that “the general right to control its own movement is the multitude’s ultimate demand for global citizenship” (400). Like the ex-­patriot Apollinaire in “Zone,” Notley, for all the mirrors and self-­reflection, is particularly poignant about the unassimilable: All the sans papiers, the illegal immigrants, Af­ri­cans who’ve been holed up in St. Bernard Church for weeks, on hunger strike until they receive legal papers, will be forced out today for deportation. They laid in the church last night, in blue sleeping bags, receiving visitors. Sit up briefly, shake hands, lie back down. (271–72) For the poet, this is, of course, a movement that is best unmonitored, sans papiers, difficult for a personality as opinionated as Notley, but perhaps the only way to preserve the “feral tooth” of expression when it is threatened on all sides.

Kevin Davies, Comp. Comp. enjoyed a rare reputation among readers of “alternative” poetry as a book that was both humorous and po­liti­cal, informed and elegant yet colloquial and engaging, with little or none of the misgivings—that the syntax/ society homology of poetries no longer adhered if it ever did, that cultural capital accrues as readily around experimental work as that of the “mainstream”—that greeted much writing in the tradition of Language poetry in the late nineties. Kevin Davies published his first full-­length book, Pause Button, in 1992 when still a resident of Canada’s west coast. Comp. was his first book published in his adopted home country (he’s resided in New York

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since the late eighties), and the equally lauded collection, The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, appeared in 2008. While Davies’s style has changed somewhat since Pause Button, his three books all share a heightened concern for a heterogeneity of expression, an Olsonian interest in the line-­by-­breath (or at least the exploitation of Olson’s prosodic gestures), and a pinpoint accuracy of tone and reference that he might have adopted from Bruce Andrews in such works as I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up, or his peers in Vancouver (many members of the Kootenay School of Poetry) such as Jeff Derksen and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk. Unlike the work of Andrews and Derksen, Comp. is both recognizably lyrical and yet rigorously, economically unsentimental, progressing like a soft barrage over the course its 106 pages. Davies is, if anything, a comedian, but his humor is never glib or self-­ satisfied; his basic mode might be that of Frank O’Hara’s “meditation in an emergency,” one that can be, in a uniquely Cold War compromise, both amused and anxious about the prospect of complete annihilation. Despite its reach into po­liti­cal critique and the inclusion of recalcitrant facts, Comp. is geared toward a more positive, communal experience of disgust with the social world than, say, the work of Andrews, where “negative capability,” the free fall among meanings without search for a moral core, is distinctly aligned to a program of counter-­socialization. Davies’s poetry can seem, if only in flashes, traditionally Romantic or early-­Modernist (à la Williams’s Spring And All), in this way written out of emotional (or perhaps neuro­logi­ cal) necessity, with no patience for baroque flourishes. Humans illustrating their own goals giving frustrated slide shows, knowing something —Who are they? whose platitudinous résumés begin so hopefully, whose distinguishing features float free and enlarge in character, us? No way! (36) The musicality of Davies’s writing, apparent in the careful line breaks, staccato rhythms in the prose passages, and distinctive orchestration of different modes of address, not to mention the conjuring of a protagonist of sorts, makes the poetry approachable by readers not given to experimental work. As if in response to the ubiquity of info-­avatars and hip techno-­geek millionaires, Davies eschews any sort of easy countercultural bonding; like a

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George Oppen with flights of Dennis Millerish tirades, plucking tunes on the rhizomic interconnections of a freebasing economy, Davies may be the poet who still best expressed the mixed emotions of the progressive youth just prior to 9/11: the optimism and anger of the Seattle World Trade Organization riots, the anxiety and awe of such developments as mapping the human genome and our first hologram president (George W. Bush), and the pathetic but predictable denouement of the dot-­com meltdown. Davies mobilizes every element of the poem—the syntax, the white space, the non-­sequiturs, the references, etc.—in the project of social critique. Because each piece takes the site of the poem, and not the fact of the poet (as Olson might say), as the prime mover, Davies adopts a satellite’s view of social relations: he never centers his writing around a specific personal perspective, but instead lets the heterogeneous elements play off one another— a juxtaposition of vectors of meaning, a “collage” of tones and approaches, is in constant motion. He also permits a vulnerability in his writing, which makes him more a dramatist of Stiegler’s notion of adaptation—the very image of the poet as proletarianized, as having been seized by capital—rather than adoption, which Notley represents with her calls to commonality, her recourse to dreams, and her constant, convulsive remembering. Davies’s laughter is partly pointed at the failed project of personal enlightenment, some desire to transform oneself, or “the self.” My heart—the one I never learned to notate—flips flapjacks in the trailer camp of a Yellowknife gold mine. It doesn’t know why. And if I want to feel good all over again I give up and feel good giving up all over again. No he said probably the guy is changed somehow for the better or worse, or dies or, is blackmailed. Because if it’s an experiment who’s monitoring? Or maybe he’s a woman. I don’t know. Was the details in the middle that

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interested him or her. Easier to fill out a form that’s already replaced you. Information wants to be me. O K. (32) If this is “humanism,” it’s not that of the bourgeois subject that can humor the idea of autonomy, of personal sovereignty, and a return to “nature.” Instead, it’s that of the subject permeable by forces of the panopticon, monitored— the “information [that] wants to be me”—like Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner that was more illuminated by passing spinners than its own ­inner lights. This protagonist who “never learned to notate” stands a hair’s width from the “information”—not socialized and yet not not socialized—and yearns for some sort of spiritual or psychological assurance, or perhaps merely a place for thought, in a world of opaque, socially indifferent economic exchange . Davies’s protagonist is almost always a worker (certainly never in power), almost always filled with thwarted utopian strivings, almost always very angry—and yet has some sense of personal flaw, finding power in words and their “lines of flight” but never taking flight for long. The heteroglossic nature of Comp., its rapidly shifting rhe­tori­cal modes, grant it some sort of narrative structure; one could imagine this protagonist as a cross between a laboratory chimpanzee (“it’s an experiment”) and Milton’s Satan. The hero is a fig­ure who is either totally helpless to act and is subsumed under total observation, or who does threaten to act (or at least think) even as he’s immediately rebuffed by the pharmakon he can’t quite evade; knowledge, in­ clud­ing self-­knowledge, is a mixed blessing, since any visionary perspective, any anticipation of pleasure or self-­control, is invariably thwarted. The shifting frames in Comp., especially in the long middle poem, “Karnal Bunt,” are more than the ticks of “postmodernism” displaying the interrelations of different social vectors, but rather permit Davies (or the protagonist of the poem) to mess with the welter of smaller theatres in which power exposes its machinations. The in­di­vidual page-­long sections of this poem, such as fig­ure XX, are perfectly balanced images of textual presence and absence, like Calder mobiles, and allow a sort of leapfrogging across frames without leaving the reader too much in the dark about what’s happening (see fig. 3.1). The “god” in the last line of this page is not just a trope; there are periodic references in Davies’s work to certain perspectives—call them Platonic and metaphysical, religious, or scientific—that exist beyond that of the pragmatic, experiencing individual, offering a mirror to Pound’s interests in Medieval scholastic philosophy. Davies’s jokes about the unknowable nature of these

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Figure 3.1. Kevin Davies, page from Comp.

perspectives are serious and pained; unlocking the key to the “tentacle-­held paradigm” could offer a promise of liberation even as one’s faith in essences is thwarted by the “sophistry” (in Badiou’s estimation) of the later Wittgenstein. Christopher Nealon makes a similar point about Davies in The Matter of Capital, noting that the poetry “involves the twining together of a cosmological interest in the appearance of matter in the universe with a rhetorician’s concern for making a counterargument to the ‘argument’ of matter’s arrangement by capital” (155) and that the word “universe” occurs quite fre-

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quently in his writing (158). Davies is certainly obsessed with capitalism and its discontents, and yet, to my mind, despite the aggression and even belligerence in some moments, the precarity of Davies’s persona in this book is so pronounced, I don’t see much of an “argument” emerging, even a “lateral” one conveyed in “lists [and] cross-­referenced links [that] mimic the laterality of a network” (Nealon 154). In the worldview of this book, poetic power is best displayed in tiny bursts of illuminating mischief; nowhere, except perhaps in the long final poem, “Untitled Poem from the First Clinton Administration,” does he attempt to overwhelm with literary pyrotechnics, rhe­tori­cal overload, or final descriptions. And even that poem, which floods the gates with a sort of pomo duende, consistently deflates and cuts itself up “like unanswered mail in a bag of doughnuts.” One of Davies’s more extended satirical passages appears in the Golden Age of Paraphernalia, and seems a perfect illustration of the protagonist’s wavering between adoption and adaptation. Any surface at all, inside or out, you touch it and a scrolled menu appears, listing recent history, chemical makeup, distance to the sun in millimetres, distance to the Vatican in inches, famous people who have previously touched this spot, fat content, will to power, adjacencies and further articulations. And each category has dozens of subcategories and each subcategory scores of its own, all meticulously cross-­referenced, linked, so that each square centimetre of surface everywhere, pole to pole, from the top of the mightiest Portuguese bell tower to the intestinal lining of a sea turtle off Ecuador, has billions of words and images attached, and a special area, a little rectangle, for you to add your own comments. It is the great work of a young-­adult global civilization, a metaliterature culture with time on its prosthetic tentacles, at this point slightly more silicon than carbon, blinking vulnerably in the light of its own radiant connectedness. (58) Eight years after Comp., and that many years deeper into the encroachment of the “symbolic logic” of the database, Davies finds the perfect allegory for the Triffid-­like assault of information on the precarious self: the scroll menus, proliferating windows, links and “little rectangles” of comment boxes on the web. Most poignant is Davies sending up the lingo of “radiant

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connectedness” that was endemic in the early days of the internet and survives in the bromides that social media moguls like Mark Zuckerberg lay on his users when an uproar ensues concerning some new invasion of privacy on Facebook. Notable among the bits of information appearing in the “recent history” is the “will to power”—was the Nietzsche toggle flipped?— which is something Davies seems not to exhibit, or at least to achieve in his poetics of objects. If anything, there is (in Schopenhauer’s sense) a “will to live,” a movement among objects along with their pursuit of continued existence—an effort at consisting—even as the frames of his venture, the bounds of his thought, are constantly reducing in scale and size, from the “distance to the sun in millimetres, / distance to the Vatican in inches” to the “little rectangle” of a comments box. Davies’s list of cultural detritus (Nealon writes that this part of the poem is “emphatically scholastic” [155]) is suspended in the careful flow of the metrics and mischievous tone, but it stands in stark contrast to the enumerations of exhibits in, for example, Pound’s “Usura Canto,” the one in which “None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;  / Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered / Emerald findeth no Memling,” even as both poems occupy the same general genre of free-­ verse rants about the toxic nature of contemporary culture. Nealon notes something of a convergence of Davies’s poetics with the creation of code: [T]he bullet points and vertical bars [of The Golden Age of Parapher­ nalia] that separate shorter sections of the poem highlight . . . something like the subsumption of poetry by software, or the poetic line by the line of code. The bullet point [is] familiar to us [as] a marker for listed items in Microsoft’s PowerPoint. . . . As for Davies’ use of the vertical bar, Joshua Clover has pointed out that it not only serves as the traditional mathematical marker of absolute value (so that |3|, say, is the absolute value of both +3 and -­3), but as the “pipe” or command marker in UNIX, routing, organizing, or transforming information from one side of the bar to functions or destinations on the other side. (157) Whether or not this puts Davies’s poem in the vicinity of that synthesis of poetic and programming language known as “codework,” Nealon’s observations position Davies’s writing on the continuum between the lyric and the sort of formless source-­text poem I call an “undigest” in the next chapter. Nealon later links Davies’s methods with the once-­controversial methods of Petrus Ramus, a form of schematic or diagrammatic thinking that was intended to supersede syllogistic argument as the main method of logic.

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Davies “takes up the Ramist tradition, in­clud­ing making ‘argument’ methodical by the deployment of schematization and of varied typefaces, to pit his poems, not against a ‘technologization’ per se, but against the social relationships out of which that technologization has grown” (164). Nealon quotes Walter Ong, who lamented the “hypertrophy” of visual thinking in Ramism: “This reduction of the elements of intelligibility to the spatial arrangements of printing of the topical logics suggests a further general theorem: the printer’s font corresponds to the locus of the topical logics, and the printed page to methodized discourse” (310). Davies might indeed represent a synthesis of those two elements of Olson’s poetics noted earlier, the “poem by breath” and the diagram charting the connectivity of all things in the “human universe.” Like Pamela Lu’s band of precocious outsiders in Pamela: A Novel, D ­ avies may also claim to be “living structuralism,” for he appears to have natur­ alized a plethora of viewpoints that once might have seemed incompatible. But whereas Lu, in her self-­consciously distended sentences that echo pre-­ Modernist prose styles, provides of­ten circular elaborations of her dilemma, Davies demands a reassertion of the “agent,” if not the histrionic “I” of Dis­ obedience, the cubicle worker that shucks off his proletarianization with doses of toxic irony and humor. Comp. is an anthem of this denatured, alienated, but multi-­valenced subjectivity, and whether or not his comedy is liberating or fatalistic, it is begrudgingly transcendental.

Wanda Coleman, Mercurochrome Wanda Coleman introduced her review of Maya Angelou’s 1986 memoir All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes with the following reflection: “Celebrity autobiographies? Ugh! Too many are self-­aggrandizements and/or flushed-­ out elaborations of scanty press packets. Titillation and allusion shape the redundant seduction of the reader already seduced by fame. Confessions and pseudo-­confessions are of­ten embarrassingly hollow and juiceless. Rare are the weighty sojourns into soul/self or the rich evocations of an era. Too of­ten sanitizing the past for pub­lic consumption is meticulously done to the point of tedium. Or so full of emotional ooze and odious expose [sic] as to arouse suspicion re authenticity. Rarely do they resonate” (“All God’s Children”). Interestingly, the context into which Coleman places Angelou is that of a “celebrity,” the reader “already seduced by fame,” as ostensibly this is not a reflection on poet’s autobiographies. Coleman’s disgust, “Ugh!,” seems, however, not directed at the prospect of reading a celebrity biography but of writing one, and given that she was born and raised in the vicinity of Hollywood (she was briefly employed as staff writer for Days of Our Lives,

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for which she won an Emmy), Coleman, under-­recognized nationally but known in Los Angeles as the “unofficial poet laureate” for decades, no doubt understood anyone’s autobiography as being potentially that of a celebrity. “Fame” precedes anyone, given that frames of reference such as “poet” or “Af­ri­can Ameri­can” already populate the world as paratexts for potential writing. Though Coleman approved of Angelou’s writing in 1986, attempting to reconcile Angelou’s affect of fragile propriety with Coleman’s own propensity for more radical stances—“You can feel her not saying certain things. Her posture is discreet and ladylike as prescribed by Protestant tradition. Sans philosophical weight, Angelou nevertheless recreates her attitude with dramatic clarity”—Coleman, infamously, is not so generous reviewing Angelou’s A Song Flung Up to Heaven fifteen years later, lamenting that the “writing . . . is bad to God-­awful . . . a tell-­all that tells nothing in empty phrases and sweeping generalities. Dead metaphors (‘sobbing embrace,’ ‘my heart fell in my chest’) and clumsy similes (‘like the sound of buffaloes running into each other at rutting time’) are indulged. Twice-­told c­ rises (being molested, her son’s auto accident) are milked for residual drama. Extravagant statements come without explication, and schmooze substitutes for action” (“Coulda Shoulda Woulda”). Coleman, for all of her interest in metaphors and similes, is not so much offering a lesson in writing as a description of the affective shield, the sheen of spectacle, that stands in the way of what she refers to as the “authentic.” Authentically, Coleman can’t help but twist the knife at the end of the review: “Something is being flung up to heaven all right, but it isn’t a song.”2 Though Coleman’s poetry since her first volume with Black Sparrow press, Mad Dog Black Lady, had always included autobiographical elements (even if conveyed fantastically, as in “Under My Desk”), Coleman had been thinking quite a bit about “confession” and “rich evocations of an era” in the late nineties. Coleman’s seventh book with Black Sparrow, Bathwater Wine, was (as I wrote in an earlier review) an “encyclopedic, moment-­by-­moment accounting of rage, witness and transcendence that moves agilely from a tragic but comedic resignation—a seductive blues or be-­bop style—through fecund rambling hijinks that show off her verbal acuity, through postmodern collage and pastiche mimicking of traditional genres (such as the newspaper account), on to direct, sixties-­and rap-­inspired in-­your-­face declarations of resistance and anger” (Stefans). The opening sequence, “Dreamwalk,” is a poignant, quasi-­confessional, free associative account of the author’s adolescence: “ugly and more ugly. you are a card carrying / member of the FBI (Fat Black Idiots) and you arrest and / jail them in your mind for crimes against your heart” (18). Later in the sequence, the need to escape inspires a fecund, but suspicious, alternate reality for the young poet: “you become

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a shadow in pursuit of shadows. you / smoke imaginary imported Ger­man fags while sipping  / imaginary English sherry barely clad in blood red  / silken fantasies while straddling a rattan chair on / the balcony of a Cuban bordello.” Engaging in a little time travel, Coleman reflects on her very particular propensity for negativity, for drawing apart wholes, for destroying for the sake of reassembling, that characterizes her best writing, celebrating, amidst a host of names not wanted in the “good parts of town” the “weird Wandas [who] belong to the back of / the class among the badniks who destroy the future” (17). The opening passages to “No­vem­ber’s Song” contain many of the elements characteristic of Coleman’s later style: i am planetary with sugar and double vision. the compulsive consumption of frustrated power rings the Saturn of my sys­tem / the subsumed wildness of a woman too long unembraced / underappreciated erupts thru my skin, weeps & oozes salveless nonspecific accusations leave me asplash in grand & defensive speculation stale odors of coriander & vanilla ill-­shelved over summer (44) Despite a general attitude of always being on the offence, as the uncompromising “mad dog” with the stand-­up chops of Richard Pryor, Coleman of­ten depicted herself as persecuted by “nonspecific accusations”—an only sporadically described superego—as well as being something of a permanent orphan (her partner, the painter Austin Straus, doesn’t appear in too many of these poems3). Notably, skin is not just the horizon of representation— she is not a “black” poet because of her black skin, she is much more interested in the “eruptions” from inside than the categories of appearance—but the pained border between self and other (object or lover): “i still cherish the ghost of the purple bruise / where his silver Alamo belt buckle / painlessly caressed my virgin mambo thigh” she writes in a later poem (which might not be autobiographical). This excerpt from “No­vem­ber’s Song” ends with a Coleman specialty, the clash of the decidedly philosophical—her “grand & defensive speculation”—with the irremediably sensual, a stray qualia or perception as non sequitur: “stale odors of coriander & vanilla ill-­shelved over summer.” Planets appear in Coleman’s poetry frequently, as she is both “planetary,” a wanderer, but also visionary—“Saturn filled / my bleak window as it does most nights,” she writes elsewhere—the only real note of Romantic nature,

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even of the pastoral, in these poems by an urban renter. If anything, planets are preferable to helicopters, as the sky in general marks the place of the social in freeway-­ridden, segregated Los Angeles. A visionary, if also journalistically accurate, evocation occurs in the later sequence “The Ron Narrative Reconstructions”: helicopters whirl around, claim this lesser heaven, wolf-­eyed pilots with an infrared snoop, scope for a collar. coal-­colored mountains of thunderhead, gather. there’s rumbling in the recesses of distant west­ern panorama. a single small aircraft threads the vista. (175) This poem opens with a pastoral couplet—“a half hour before the advance of sun / the red-­winged sparrow begins its song”—that invokes an ideal “poetic” setting, but as if to emphasize the absence of such an organic unity of nature in her native Los Angeles (and in the mode of the pastoral itself). Matching, and hence countering, the power of the panoptic gaze of the police helicopter (and other forms of technological control, in­clud­ing that of normative syntax), “The Ron Narrative Reconstructions,” with their vignettes (“in the midcity laundromat, we two-­step to a piped-­in salsa...”) and wry theoretical musings (a digression on “poetoerotic rape”: “the plundering and transmogrification of another’s form... a physical release akin to sexual orgasm”) succeeds in mapping the activity of a poet’s mind where the less generous and attentive have failed. The possibility of autobiography, or the assurances of mimetically re­ cord­ing either memories or sense data, is complicated by Coleman’s followu ­ p volume, Mercurochrome, published in 2001. Memory itself is depicted as fractured, and the writing begins to mix abstractions and concrete details in a manner reminiscent of Notley and Davies. The first sequence is titled “Canned Fury,” an allusion to the “canned laughter” that once riddled the soundscape of television sitcoms. “Fury” is thus depicted as something it shouldn’t be, an automaton behind the affect, but likewise, the fury is “canned” like any form of energy in a compressed state, merely potential in reserve. Coleman shares with John Ashbery a tendency to open books with reflections on their present state of creativity, but if Ashbery’s steps to the temple are texts that celebrate the return of spring and hence renewed creativity (“The pen was cool to the touch. / The staircase swept upward,” he writes in “Vetiver”), Coleman feels less assured in “Canned Fury”: nothing comes to mind. i am dispersed on a page of ugly newsprint

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the faraway noise of a child’s cry in the eleventh hour. i wait. it seems it will take another five hundred years this side of Eden for shapelessness/to take form and fashion. i wait. and the darkness stains my eyes as i read the fine print and footnotes. where is my history/the full blood minus bromides and falsities? who has stamped happy faces over my sorry and broken erratic prose? (19) While not nearly the most impressive poem in Mercurochrome, this opening sonnet-­like lyric contains the seed of the method of the rest of the book. The central question is that of form: her self is “dispersed” across the pages of a newspaper, as if the media that she once courted had shattered the Cartesian self, but looking forward—to her poems, to some evolutionary tick— she states that it “will take another five hundred years  .  .  . for shapelessness/to take form / and fashion.” In contrast to Shelley depicting the poet as a lyre brushed by the wind, Coleman despairs that she is a mere participant in the flow of media, something of a parasite on the pharmakon, of the sys­tem of tertiary retentions over which she has no control. “Memory divides me against myself,” she writes in the next poem, “without resolution. ­injunctions / from the court of pub­lic opinion / deny me access to light” (20). In the poem following, she is “guilty / of nonconformity and the wickedness of high thought,” the pub­lic asserting that she is an “outlaw” with “a ten-­digit number stamped on my frontal lobe” (21). “Canned Fury” seems to record a sequence of thinking that occurred after the controversy of her Angelou review; her request for her “history / the full blood / minus bromides and falsities” reflects an aesthetics of the anti-­spectacle, a pure “eruption” into the “broken erratic prose” of what, in fact, turns out to be Coleman’s most experimental phase of writing.

The Swarm Sacrificing the autobiographical and journalistic tendencies of Bathwater Wine, Coleman opts for an immanent poetics of “dispersed”—one might say “fragmented”—language finding, in itself, a “form.” This openness to

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atomic units of meaning allows an even greater bridging of the collective and the individual, and suggests something that I would like to call the poetics of the swarm. In the Emergence of Social Space, Kristin Ross describes what she calls the “insect verse” of Rimbaud’s poetry: The frantic, busy immobility of latency resonates again in [Rimbaud’s] “Chanson de la plus haute tour,” where the prairie, a collective unit that does not consist of men but that is still “felt” to be a swarm, has been consigned to oblivion, and thus freed or liberated for overgrowth, increase, uncultivated or uncontrolled expansion: Ainsi la prairie A l’oubli livrée, Grandie, et fleurie D’encens et d’ivraies Au bourdon farouche De cent sales mouches.

[So the green field To oblivion freed Overgrown, flowering With incense and weeds And the wild noise Of a hundred dirty flies.]

The flies preside over a hypertrophic disorder; the words sales [wild] and farouche [dirty], which describe them, have connotations of savagery, barbarianism. Linked as it is to a landscape of excessive growth and teeming unproductive life—weeds and incense are not precisely useful—the bourdon farouche [wild noise] suggests a unit of collective, virtual, and similarly disorderly action. (108–9) Coleman shares many of Rimbaud’s qualities, both in writing and life: they both have a strong tendency for synaesthetic imagery, both depict themselves as some “wild” margin, both felt persecuted by a contemptible society, and both were witnesses and/or participants in revolutionary activity, the Paris Commune for Rimbaud (the subject of Ross’s book) and for Coleman the Watts Rebellion (as she refers to it). Ross suggests that the wild noise— the buzzing of flies, which either is language moving too fast or an entirely sterile immobility—are expressions of a collective will in reserve, a sort of “canned fury,” “excessive growth . . . teeming [with] unproductive life.” Ross’s notion of the swarm derives from a notable paragraph from Nietzsche: Behind the glorification of “work” and this tireless talk of the “blessing of work” I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the pub­lic benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work—and what is invariably meant is relentless industry, from early till late—that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in harness and power-

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fully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one’s eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. (Ross 100) In a sense, this is Stiegler’s criticism of the pharmakon in a nutshell: in contemporary times, the pharmakon of media induces “short” over “long”—and potentially infinitized—thinking. Nietzsche’s laundry list of the core human behaviors—“reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred”—­also describe the lineaments of Coleman’s (not to mention Notley’s and Davies’s) writing, though her tendency is to compress all of these elements into a single poem. Coleman is obsessed with the call of “industry”—in Hollywood, a common question to ask is “are you in the industry?”—and reflections on her job pepper her work. Most important to a poetics of the “swarm,” however, is the pre-­individual, pre-­symbolic, connection of the self and collective will through the mere buzzing of language that is, perhaps, merely moving too quickly for human comprehension but from which, as a plane of pure immanence, a revolutionary form or concept could emerge. Coleman’s “The Souled Out Generation,” an elegy for a lost fervor and a manifesto for future movement, starts with its own sort of buzz: befuzzment those assassins’ bullets tore through our skulls splattered the brains of our courageous fortune all over the TVland tuck & roll sent all-­Ameri­can youths into decades of post-­traumatic stress syndrome the sun of our future forever eclipsed betrayal was rampant as disillusionment denial denigration set in tora tora tora was declared against the naive the insincere & the mental / a silent napalming stateside as the cities became demilitarized zones (you will get your effing free­dom niggahs wiggahs and what-­have-­yous left of center

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but it will be nulled & ungroovy as failure & reversals become a way of suspended animation—life at its least if not fullest denied in an avalanche of drugs disease & moral downsizing you will either surrender, conform or suck God) (57) The poem announces from the very first italicized, single-­neologism line, “befuzzment,” which echoes the buzzing of Rimbaud’s flies, that it will hover just above nonsense: “tora tora tora,” which echoes the “tohu bohu” of Rimbaud Le bateau ivre, descends on the mind with the toxicity of napalm, and her peers, presumably her addressees, don’t even rank a name, merely being approximated as “niggahs / wiggahs and what-­have-­yous.” The elegiac opening, lamenting perhaps the failure of the Watts Revolution and the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, indicts the media for dispersing collective will into fragments, anticipating Žižek’s repeated assertion that post-­traumatic stress disorder is the signature disease of our time. The sec­ond part of “The Souled Out Generation” engages a theme that has been common to Coleman’s poetry, at least since her most famous poem “Where I Live,” which is the excessive and unproductive creativity of ghetto life: at the lip of a big black vagina birthing nappy headed pickaninnies every hour on the hour and soul radio blasting into mindwindow bullets and blood see that helicopter up there? like god’s eye looking down on his children barsandbarsandbarsandbarsandbars (Mad Dog Black Lady 13) An evocation of urban decay as evocative as T. S. Eliot’s in the Waste Land, with a touch perhaps of Gerald Scarfe’s art for Pink Floyd’s The Wall, “Where I Live” captures many of the qualities Ross describes in Emergence: the linking of speed and stasis, of buzzing (“barsandbarsandbars  .  .  . “) as channel to the collective, of “excessive growth and teeming unproductive life,” these “nappy headed” babies like “weeds and incense . . . not entirely useful.” In Mercurochrome, Coleman offered a more sober diagnosis, as “an / avalanche of drugs disease & moral downsizing” leads to a mindset “nulled

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& ungroovy . . . / a way / of suspended animation” (57). Coleman is no fan of religion—doing her best Spiro Agnew, she later writes that “religion / is material / perpetuation of a plaguing purposelessness”—this poignant critique of in­di­vidual will, what she terms “afro-­agony,” is amplified through­ out Mercurochrome: “the new underground is sterile, / devoid of dangerous rhythms, and strewn / with the grotesque bones of riotous fists” she writes in “Essay on Language” (7).” The phrase “moral downsizing” reflects another tactic of Coleman’s humor, which is the use of the language of business and the economy (largely gleaned from newspapers) to describe human values and aspirations, as earlier she is “on that hairpin curve / of credit and industry . . . i nightdrag cloud-­lined bluffs toward / the destination i’m building on installments” (27). Ross notes that “the virtuality of the swarm can also be erotic in nature,” and tellingly, in her agonizing over her own creativity, Coleman claims “i have learned / it pays to be more selfish with desire” (23). A poet employs the ego, unleashes the libido, to conjure selfhood in the midst of a media world flipping between toxin and therapy—“a sense of purpose is this week’s ­disease / symptomatic of dislocation trauma” she writes in “Hollywood Theology (2)” (29). She conjures the famous je est un autre of Rimbaud, again through media, linking it again with the panoptic eye, this time not of the helicopter but television: “prisoners are watched / on TV monitors, a camera in each cell. if i move / i see the wisp of my movement on the monitor”(23). But these reflections on the crippled will find energy in the strength of the swarm; Coleman’s poetics always manage to dip into the pre-­in­di­vidual potentiality of sound to break through the corrupted ratio of pub­lic speech. As Ross writes, “The threat of the swarm and the threat of in­di­vidual desire are the same threat; the swarm’s collective desire masks the desire of the individual” (100). In “The Children (2),” Coleman states that “the doctors found a strangeness in my children,” only to learn that they were, in fact, elephants. The doctor nonchalantly continues: “This is a serious matter. In a short time, they will become far too dangerous for mundane containment, demanding a significant amount of nourishment and attention.” “and then,” he whispered, “there exists the very serious potential of stampede” (44) Writing in another poem that “the least passionate people are poets” (60), Coleman doesn’t herself argue for social uprisings with the furor of, say, Amiri Baraka—the poems move in too many directions, occupy too many

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tonal registers, and in some ways are too funny, to be serviceable as anthems. She is both fascinated and disgusted by a sort of cultural ennui, but is not quite sure if she can separate it from her own sense of thwarted creativity. In any case, even if Coleman doesn’t appear to want to lead us to revolution, she reminds us that it could be in the air, or if not, shipped next day from Amazon: it’s another day of dancing at the holocaust the same ol’ cold-­blooded bloodlessness enervating the unlucky the weak the poor—jes another mundane bash to inspire upper-­class yawns the four horsemen have capped the fortune five-­hundred and the apocalypse is in the mail (81) Coleman’s civic sense, her responsibility to the black community, the community of Watts in particular, possesses something of a traditional element—­ diagnosing the problem, documenting the successes and failures, addressing “America” in grandiose apostrophes—but is probably most singular in this evocation of transformational energies that she won’t call “revolutionary” so much as (for the moment) “canned.”

The Poetics of Care Stiegler argues in What Makes Life Worth Living for “a new way of life where economizing means taking care” (81). Focusing on the “socio-­digital networks” of the technological milieu which “now bring together, at lightning speed, hundreds of millions of psychic individuals in a collective individuation process,” Stiegler insists that “[t]aking care of the collective . . . is the only worthwhile definition of po­liti­cal action” (83). “Care” in the Stiegler lexi­con has a specific meaning: “I, along with Ars Industrialis, have argued in previous works that the great contemporary techno-­industrial alternative is the reconstitution of associated milieus, and the struggle against the dissociation of social milieus induced by generalized proletarianization. Associated milieus are relational (and dialogical) strengths, whereas dissociation consists in short-­circuiting and bypassing those relations required for the establishing of transindividuation circuits. Such relations are the condition of formation of trust and fidelity without which no society and no economic sys­tem is sustainable” (97–98). Like Simondon, Stiegler argues that the concretization of personhood or the subject, the lifting of the spirit from an imperative of mere survival to one of creativity and fulfillment, is based on a

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collective individuation as much as on the personal. In other parts of What Makes Life, he argues that this “short-­circuiting” is primarily inflicted on society by the forces of advertisement and marketing; the “long view” is a form of fidelity (a major term in Badiou’s lexicon) to a vision of the infinite, which he traces back to the transitional object. As has been noted by critics of Language poetry, the quick-­edit movement from fragment to fragment seems to imitate, rather than combat or resist, the logics of late capitalism—that is, in Stiegler’s terms, to extend rather than repel the circuit of short-­circuiting. The pilots of the pharmakon, as I have described them, might very well fall prey to a similar argument, as a “long view” rarely surfaces from their epistemologically poignant, yet decidedly pointillist, poetics. A model for a “poetics of care” might be Juliana Spahr’s notion of “collective reading” in her volume of criti­cal essays, Everybody’s Autonomy, where she writes: “I am interested in works that encourage communal readings. I would include identificatory moments in this, but I would also want to include moments that are non-­identificatory: moments when one realizes the limits of one’s knowledge, moments of partial or qualified identification; ­moments when one realizes and respects unlikeness; moments when one connects with other readers (instead of characters). I am interested in works that look at the relation between reading and identity in order to comment on the nature of collectivity” (5). Claiming that these sorts of works (by Gertrude Stein, Harryette Mullen, Bruce Andrews, Theresa Cha, and others) and reading practices are “consciousness raising,” Spahr’s concern, like that of the Language poets, is to merge the seemingly alienating or disruptive practices of “avant-­garde” writers with a set of social priorities, namely the negotiation of the in­di­vidual with the collective, or the collective with an entire ecology. The poignancy of this effort is expressed years later in Spahr’s poem/ memoire The Transformation, which chronicles in a characteristically run­on, Steinian style Spahr’s (and her two partners’) years living in Hawaii, their first experiences with the politicized nature of language usage—the face-­off of pidgin versus mainland—in an island community that sees itself as brutally colonized, along with her changing feelings toward the community of poets who, in the wake of the Language poets, are either growing increasingly confident in the po­liti­cal efficacy of their techniques or insular, redundant, and unaware of where they stand. She writes of the aftermath of 9/11: At this time the world felt divided between two types of humans: they who wanted an end to killing and they who wanted even more killing. And because some they had respected or at least had seen for years as having a certain po­liti­cal sensibility such as a poet who was a self-­

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proclaimed lefty who had been involved in grassroots organizing for years, a critic who was devoted to work that used fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on, another poet who was prickly and intense in their hatred of hierarchical systems, were all calling for more killing very vocally in vari­ous e-­mail messages to vari­ous discussion listservs or in letters to the editor of vari­ous prominent newspapers, they didn’t know as a result who they were, who they could trust. (195) The internal consistencies of the “poetry community” in which Spahr had a deep investment—as a publisher of a major journal (Chain), editor of a large collection of “poetics” by younger writers, as graduate of the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo and, at this time, professor at the University of Hawaii—had begun to unravel once po­liti­cal beliefs had to confront the quickly unfolding reality of a country going to war because of a terrorist attack. The dilemma that those working in the Language tradition, or those who wrote criti­cal appreciations of this work, did not all share the pacifistic beliefs of Spahr, raises the question of how much the techniques valorized by Spahr in Everybody’s Autonomy, and which she practiced herself, could be said to always have the effect of enabling progressive social communities. An element of Spahr’s style is to repeat several phrases, even very long ones, as a sort of refrain; her categories of “modernist techniques” reappear with some frequency, as in: “A work that was radical was a good work. At the time it was difficult to describe what being radical meant. It meant more a feeling, a hard-­to-­read feeling. Eventually they would define what they had meant by radical as writing that used modernist techniques of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on. A work that was radical used more modernist techniques than other works” (112). Spahr, in any case, anticipated the turn toward “wholes,” not to mention a simpler, accessible writing style that came under many guises, notably “ambient poetics” and “conceptual writing.” While some critics have championed this and other returns to “pub­lic poetry,” I wonder whether the rejection of all poetic practices equated with dif­ ficulty in favor of accessible rhe­tori­cal fig­ures reflects a distrust in the work that a poem, as poem (and not speech, eyewitness account, or mission statement) can do. Is Spahr’s method of connectivity synonymous with Stiegler’s idea of adoption—the attaining of long-­circuits of memory, the fidelity to the milieu across generations—or is there something of adaptation in the sacrificing of what are, to my mind, the great properties of poems: their ability to be more than the sum of their parts and to inspire their own sorts of fidelity that require time and patience and draw us away from the “Emotion.”

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For all of their courting of formal disorder, Notley, Davies, and Coleman still reserve a place in their poetics for several of the fig­ures I’ve introduced, namely suspension and interruption. If the final outcome of these engagements is a series of “fragments,” an epistemological imperative still exists— these are records of an organism’s interior milieu interacting with an exterior. Perhaps this is merely a defensive posture, one of naming and negation, for which Spahr’s intervention into the pub­lic sphere, her “consciousness raising,” is an antidote. But I wonder if this non-­negotiable retention of the purity or autonomy of the spirit against the technological has not, in fact, reaffirmed a simple, but outdated, binary—nature (“man”) against technics (“poetry”)—reflecting an impasse.

4 Fictions of Immanence Undigests and Outsider Writing

In Search of Lost Margins The first website was created by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-­Lee, on August 6, 1991. Though this page no longer “exists”—the machine on which it was housed was most likely destroyed long ago, and Berners-­Lee himself updated the page frequently—the first lines of the earliest version available (No­vem­ber 3, 1992), housed on the servers of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which Berners-­Lee founded, are fairly mundane: “The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-­area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents. Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, in­clud­ing an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists , Policy , No­vem­ber’s W3 news , Frequently Asked Questions.” However, the real first text sent out into the universe of the internet was seventy-­ three lines of primitive (by contemporary standards) source code, the text and mark-­up language (HTML) informing the client computer what to present on the screen.

The World Wide Web project



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World Wide WebThe WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-­ area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, in­ clud­ ing an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists , Policy , Novem­ ber’s W3 news , Frequently Asked Questions . This is the page as it appears cut-­and-­pasted from the page source, in­clud­ing the hard returns that are ignored by the browsers. Berners-­Lee clearly didn’t intend his HTML page to be viewed from the perspective of aesthetics— these aren’t “line breaks”—though these ignored characters will play a role in works described later in this essay. While most of these tags—, , , etc.—are still functional HTML (or are simply ignored by contemporary browsers), this page illustrates as a whole what has really been hunted to extinction in the transforming ecology of the internet, what one could call the “hand-­crafted,” or perhaps “artisanal” (after Simondon) HTML page. Given that Berners-­Lee’s was the first web page, it would by definition have had the highest amount of traffic on the network; in the present day, it would be hard to imagine anyone sitting down with a text editor, a batch of images (even if Berners-­Lee had the option—images were not yet supported by browsers), something compelling to say, and a short-­ list of HTML tags, even peaking above the basement of internet rankings. Web 2.0 transformed the internet from a congeries of such hand-­typed HTML pages of varying aesthetic qualities to the algorithmically-­generated “on the fly” pages powered by PHP (a server-­side scripting languages) and shaped by CSS (a stylesheet language), or other more proprietary forms of

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automated page creation. With this exponential increase in page production, a prospect that had hitherto only been speculated became a reality: the production of authoritative texts—texts that can be used to ground the “real” in the experience of its viewers—by machines. The production of seemingly limitless amounts of texts by algorithms, complex or mundane, and based on other texts (if not merely strings of words and instructions for conjoining them), seems to realize, more than the linked “lexia” of academic computing, George Landow’s arguments in Hypertext (1992), that a swath of concepts—­intertextuality, death of the author, heteroglossia, the readerly and writerly text, and so forth—associated with mid-­century criti­cal theory by writers such as Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, and Bakhtin had been concretized in the hypertextual environment (then still off-­line, limited to software such as Storyspace). “In the future,” Landow argued, mapping one of many views that he himself later considered technologically determinist, “there will be more metatexts formed by linking in­di­vidual sections of in­di­ vidual works, although the notion of an individual, discrete work becomes increasingly undermined and untenable within this form of information technology, as it already has within much criti­cal theory” (40). The excitement about the promises of the link, the demise of the model of the lone genius working in a garret, Thomas Chatterton-­style, as the true image of the artist, and the fear that human authors (especially students) of the then-­future would merely plagiarize other texts as a general practice, masked a less properly literary phenomenon: the burgeoning of a world of immanent texts, texts devoid of the transcendental “author,” that fell outside of any of the common economies associated with literature. These texts can be seen as engaging in a process of individuation that is not only akin to, but is part of, the same process of the individuation (and, naturally, destruction) of natural, non-­organic objects. Craig Dworkin’s ‘pataphysical essay, “Tectonic Grammar,” replete with diagrams and specialized vocabulary, aptly describes this textual immanence: “Tectonic grammar, which has so profoundly influenced linguistic thinking since the early 1970’s, provides a valuable insight into the mechanisms by which language’s semantic floor and surface crust have evolved. Tectonic grammar is a unifying model that attempts to explain the origin of patterns of deformation in the crust, asemantic distribution, semantic drift, and mid-­morphemic ridges, as well as providing a mechanism for language to cool (in simple terms, language is just an immense spheroid of magmatic inscription which has crystallized into solid words where it has been exposed to the coldness of space)” (1). In this way “writing,” unlike the work of literature but like the growth of moss, the waxing and waning of the moon, or the population of Bangladesh, merely, but meaningfully, happens—it contracts, expands, generates

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form and dissolves into entropy, all regardless of the subject’s desire, ability, and temporality. Steve McCaffery writes of a similar venture, possibly the ur-­text of the ‘pataphysical merging of sign and stone, Christopher Dewdney’s A Palaeozoic Geology of Lon­don Ontario (1971): “To see word as fossil is to see a signifier detached from signified . . . [D]ewdney brings word and fossil into symbiosis: as word is the vehicle of fossil in the text, so fossil describes the signifying state itself. Just as fossils verbalize so words fossilize, both are ‘blind forms’ whose existence is after the fact” (191). It is here, where writing appears to happen apart from a mind, not to mention society’s vari­ous determinants, that I’d like to locate, initially, “outsider writing.”

Conceptual Porn With this release of textual production from human temporalities comes a divorce of text from human forms of morality, which suggests a connection of algorithmically-­written works with the excessive novels of, for example, the Marquis de Sade. The prolific aristocrat was a key player in McCaf­fery’s arguments for a “general” or “libidinal” as opposed to “restricted” economy of textual production in his collection of early essays North of Intention, though his perspective then was disapproving of mimetic, even bureaucratic, narratology: “Sadean libido freezes into represented libidinal content. De Sade is anxious to contain the excesses within a reactionary machine of language, a machine that linearizes and itemizes the excesses in a highly differentiated, articulated and quantified movement: ‘in less than three hours . . . one hundred times apiece’ ” (95). De Sade “can never question the pristine, virgin power of representation,” (105) in contrast to poet Bill Bissett, who understood ink as “discharge,” as “waste product, sperm, blood, sweat” resisting circulation in a common linguistic economy. McCaf­fery’s views on De Sade grow properly ecological in his later appreciation, concluding that in De Sade “[n]o thing or subject has being—only becoming. In his demonized cosmology crime and deviation are expressions of human nature following Nature. The libertine’s actions are natural when Nature is understood as stochastic forces in perpetual movement. Morality must take its place inside—and be modified by—the ferocious ecology in which absolute death is impossible” (Prior to Meaning 147). De Sade seems to move from a reactionary writer in the early days of Language writing, when McCaffery was trying to establish a poetics of the non-­referential, to a fig­ure of the world-­without-­us, the dissolution of the human within the immanent world of nature’s will, perhaps an anti-­Christ, and to this degree—here is where the “referential” returns as a positive quality—a moralist, a philosopher. A more direct argument for a link between algorithmically-­produced

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writing and excessive, libidinous, and ultimately transgressive forms of literature appears in Susan Sontag’s famous essay on De Sade, “The Pornographic Imagination”: “The universe proposed by the pornographic imagination is a total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative. All action is conceived of as a set of sexual exchanges. Thus, the reason why pornography refuses to make fixed distinctions between the sexes or allow any kind of sexual preference or sexual taboo to endure can be explained ‘structurally.’ The bisexuality, the disregard for the incest taboo, and other similar features common to pornographic narratives function to multiply the possibilities of exchange. Ideally, it should be possible for everyone to have a sexual connection with everyone else” (66–67). Some obvious homologies exist between pornography and network culture: the “total universe” is that of ontologically-­privileged cyber­ space, the “one negotiable currency” that of bits and bytes (or perhaps code and data), the refusal of “fixed distinctions,” that of the anonymity or heteronymity (Pessoa’s coinage for his numerous personae) of web personae, and the possibility for “everyone to have a sexual connection with everyone else,” either through social network sites or online pornography itself. But even if one rejects such concretizations of Sontag’s concepts (much as Landow’s grafting of certain concepts from poststructuralism onto hypertext eventually faced rejection), two works seem to offer justification for the link. The first is by interdisciplinary artist Paul Chan, whose font (an extension of his Alternumerics project) “Sade for Fonts Sake” one could purchase and install on their computer to transform the keyboard into a “pornography” generating machine. Comprised of sexual phrases and sentence fragments linked to letters on the keyboard, Chan’s fonts with names like “Oh Bishop X” and “Oh Justine” are based on characters in novels by Sade, while others are (in the words of the press release) “inspired by characters from the news (Monica Lewinsky), porn stars (Michael Lucas), and ­poets and writers (Gertrude Stein, Hölderlin) whose work conflates sex with the rhythms and shapes of words.” An example of a text transcribed from the “Oh M ­ onica” font is as follows: “I need it, yes oh sir god yes, so good yes yes please sir you like that? as you like, yes yes please sir teach me, yes shape me, god yes, yes yes oh sir go on yes shape me, yes Jesus yes go on go on like this? yes yes you like estate? as you like, yes please sir teach me, tell me, yes please sir so good yes teach me, yes oh sir more sir, you like that? as you like, yes oh sir yes shape me, yes o sir yes more sir, you like that? as you like, yes so good you like that? yes you like that?”1 Not great literature, but in any case a transition is charted: the finger twitches and strikes a key; the striking of the key creates a single electronic pulse; based on what material key was struck,

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the motherboard of the computer gives it a number; this number is translated by the operating sys­tem into a Unicode number; this number then informs the word processor which of the elements in the font should appear on the screen. Given that a cat, a falling stone, or even a glitch could cause the emission of this pulse, “pornographic” meanings (and not merely letters) are brought into the world without the necessity of desire or even cognition.2 My sec­ond exhibit appears in the “u” chapter of Christian Bök’s Eunoia, where most of the “taboo” words of the English language seem to have collected: “Ubu hugs Ruth; thus Ruth purrs. Ubu untucks Ruth’s muumuu; thus Ruth must untruss Ubu’s tux. Ubu fluff ’s Lulu’s tutu. Ubu cups Lulu’s dugs; Ubu rubs Lulu’s buns; thus Lulu must pull Ubu’s pud. Ubu sucks Ruth’s cunt; Ubu cuffs Ruth’s butt. Ubu stuffs Ruth’s bun (such fun). Ubu pumps Lulu’s plush, sunburnt tush. Ubu humps Lulu’s plump, upthrust rump. Ubu ruts. Ubu huffs; Ubu puffs. Ubu blurts: push, push. Ubu thrusts. Ubu bucks. Cum spurts. Ubu cums” (79). There is an implicit pornography in “objectifying” the letter as one would objectify a sexual organ—the vaginal glyph of the “O” (the title of Pauline Reage’s infamous erotic novel), or the phallus of the “I.” Eunoia, for all the Protestant strictness of its method, show what happens when the libidinal economy of deconstructive poetics, in which words spiral paragrammically toward and out of each other, and the limited lexi­ con of the letter “u,” root sound of numberless English-­language obscenities, clash and meld with each other and, well, hump.3 Sontag writes that pornography of the Sadean nature is a response to “something more general than even sexual damage. I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-­temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-­transcending modes of concentration and seriousness” (70). Paradoxically, and for reasons that have as much to do with the forces of neoliberalism as Web 2.0, the cultural and academic fascination with writers who have crossed psychological and social boundaries—writers of the “abject” in the tradition of Sade, Rimbaud, Burroughs, and Acker, for example—faded even as early gurus of the internet promised a liberated agora, free of censure and market concerns, for experimental and deviant writing. “What was once a subversive medium is now a spectacle playground like any other,” Alex Galloway writes, “The first phase of web culture . . . carried a revolutionary impulse; call it the Saint-­Just to today’s imperial era,” noting that the “ ‘California ideology . . . coalescing around the neoliberal impulse to open source everything . . . and the promise to liberate mankind in ways only dreamed of by our forebears contributed to a ‘process of leveling’ which no ‘revolutionary’ discourse could survive” (2). Despite this brief flirtation with radical, and decidedly left, forms of libertarianism in the mid-­

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to late 1990s, in which writers like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), and Jean Baudrillard were considered something like prophets, after 9/11 the attentions of the digital vanguard moved away from classic forms of the counterculture in favor of something amenable to the culture of start-­ups, in­clud­ing the transformation of artists into “creatives” and a seamless melding of alternative lifestyles—the “temporary autonomous zones” of Bey’s phrase—with corporate subsidized week-­long “escapes” such as, most visibly, Burning Man.

Outsider Writing Outsider writing stands somewhere between fiction, poetry, and conceptual art, much like William Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy of cut-­up novels or the novels of Pierre Guyotat such as Eden Eden Eden, and, if not full of countercultural brio, can be enjoyed in the same way one appreciates “outsider art.”4 Initially characterized by a disregard for conventions of style and a baroque graphomania (the obsessive impulse to scrawl signs), outsider writing fills out the quickly disappearing margin that was once valorized as the saving, central grace of a liberated publishing economy in the digital age, the techno-­anarchist vision that drove much early net art experimentation. I’d like to view “outsider writing” as a rapprochement of literature with the vulgar, and also as having contributed to its dialectical other: a marked desire among poets for a return to the well-­formed, autonomous lyric and the properly produced book. How can specimens of non-­normative literature, akin to “outsider art” in its naive spirit, lack of concern with the market, and mere eccentricity, reveal the collaboration of human agents—let’s call them writers—and digital technologies that, in turn, open a window onto what Deleuze and Guattari call a “plane of immanence”? Antonin Artaud, best known for his concept of the “Theatre of Cruelty,” and certainly no “outsider” in the social sense, composed a series of poems during his years in Rodez that agonized over the nervous flesh’s relationship to thought and God—the Cartesian mind has been banished from the “schizophrenic” body—that can be seen as a touchstone for any notion of “outsider writing.” What is the body? It’s this a-­um this ah-­na this ha mah this ah-­mah

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which isn’t mä but lä-­h-­ which isn’t ah ou ha but SL— It isn’t worthy of God to be a body to have a body. Who is it who is worthy of being SLASHED? The slasher. (203) to be born again in yr plagiary of innate essence yr Being innate by presupposition at the bottom of yr innateness supposedly above all creatures you get yr creature comforts forked to you with yr fecal monkey hand) dirty old punk monkey that wd lend yrself to anything at all but never made anything alone ever & didnt even know how to make yrself be born with the tonsure of yr hole god you filthy old monkey (212) Sartre’s writing on Baudelaire illuminate the peculiar admixture of the here­ ti­cal and the retreating, the articulatory and the opaque, that is characteristic of these excerpts from Artaud: “In order for liberty to be complete it has to be offered the choice . . . of being infinitely wrong . . . [H]e who damns himself acquires a solitude which is a feeble image of the great solitude of the truly free man. In a certain sense he creates. In a universe where each element sacrifices itself in order to converge in the greatness of the whole, he brings out the singularity, that is to say the rebelliousness of a fragment or a detail. Thus something appears which did not exist before, which nothing can efface and which was in no way prepared by worldly materialism. [. . .] The deliberate creation of Evil—that is to say, wrong—is acceptance and recognition of Good” (Bataille 36). Artaud, resisting the “plagiary” of God’s “innate essence,” whose body is nothing more than a string of guttural signifiers—­“ha mah . . . ah-­mah . . . which isn’t mä / but lä-­h-­”— seems to me the image of the “singularity . . . [the] rebelliousness of a fragment or a detail,” enraged perhaps at his dropping ex nihilo into the world

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of symbols, enslaved to God’s “innate essence.” It is in this separation from the womb—either of religion, philosophy, or the state—that I think is the starting point for a theory of outsider writing. Maria Damon’s meditations on the “outsider poet” in The Dark End of the Street, while closely linked to social and his­tori­cal realities, contains some hints of the ontological aspects, the properly essential qualities, of “outsider writing,” and can be used to bridge the lived writing of her subjects and the decidedly stranded or speculative story of my own. “No one can live in the perpetual and unqualified ‘outside,’ ” she writes, “not only because it is difficult enough to strain ordinary human resources beyond their limits but because such a ‘place’ does not even exist . . . [T]he poets of this study attempt just that: to live perpetually in the nonplace, the constant currency, of language” (1). To explore a “nonplace” with an extensional body will never be graceful—“the margin of constant error that permits no mistake but failure, which is not a mistake but inevitable and not unexpected”—and given the natural contradiction between that which possesses mass and that which, by choice even, wills its own invisibility, “the margin is not a habitat but an event, a state of becoming and devolving in constant flux”(3). Damon’s poets are a natural “vanguard,” despite a wish to withdraw entirely from the habitus of literary fame and memory, as one of her exemplar poets, Bob Kaufman, once stated: “I want to be anonymous. I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvement, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten” (36–37). Damon notes that Kaufman’s “anonymity constitutes a rich, if sometimes conflicting, plurality of themes through­out his life and work that radically undermines the hierarchic logic of dominant Euro-­Ameri­can metaphysics and its attendant po­liti­cal and aesthetic organizing principles” (37). Damon doesn’t pursue this line of conflict between a wish for total anonymity—which by extension means a wish to be the exception (“infinitely wrong” in Bataille’s phrase, which in itself suggests an atomic integrity, that which stands against the divisions and categorizations of abstraction and will always have to be encountered as the “other”)—and the standards of West­ern metaphysics. Damon does return, somewhat, to a speculative stance reminiscent of McCaffery’s approach to the writings of Bill Bissett when she notes that, within Kaufman’s poetry, “outbursts of fragmented language joining sorrow, defiance and (king) pleasure suggest the immediacy of the body and its expulsive processes . . . His jargon is both the special code of initiated hipsters (the underground cultural counterpart to an elite of educated expertise) and the origi­nal ‘jargon’: etymologically, the babble of (yard)birds gurgling—the bubbling up and over of untamable sounds” (40–41). She also notes that “Kristeva has used Artaud’s term ‘expectora-

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tion’ (kauf-­ing) to describe this boiling over, a pulsating gush of poetic language as so much bodily excess” that creates and “reinvents the real” through the “physical contortions of expulsion and release” (40–41). “The outsider poet is both excruciatingly close, intimate with the world, and cast out of it,” Damon writes, returning to the impossible conjunction of an extensionless monad and a writing career: “The consequence of not being allowed to take up space is that one knows the ins and outs of spatiality, and the consequence of being a poet is that one can use that knowledge to advantage” (49).

Sketch of a Taxonomy Though outsider art is of­ten art made by disenfranchised or otherwise socially marginalized people—street people, folk artists, the mentally ill, etc.— it is possible to recognize something called an “outsider literature” as an aes­ thetic category, maybe even a genre, rather than merely as a social category defined by self-­styled “outsiders”—i.e., those writers who take it as a point of pride that they have avoided MFA programs or even higher education and are not involved in literary circles, the rounds of awards, and conventional publication. I’d like to sketch, briefly, a taxonomy of outsider writing that either predates anything like “internet culture” or was co-­originary with its rise.

a. Rebels Scholars and readers of Ameri­can poetry in the mid-­twentieth century would most likely identify two main strands, that of the “mainstream” (characterized by formal integrity and adherence to New Critical paradigms, located in the academy) and the vari­ous poets collected in Donald Allen’s anthology New Ameri­can Poets (1960), most famously the Beats. But as Hugh Fox argues in The Living Underground: A Critical Overview (1970), “the Beat Revolution has become stabilized, permanent, perhaps even a kind of ‘establishment’ ” (4). The New Ameri­cans exposed a rift between the “aura of wealth” and the “imminence of nuclear destruction,” (2) the aristocratic main­stream and those poets educated through the G.I. Bill, and identified with the still underground black arts and gay communities, who explored drug use and synthesized occult and esoteric philosophies and European avant-­garde practices into their work. But by 1970, argues Fox, a new pocket of activity had opened up: “This other alternate tradition resists incorporation into the slick-­surfaced, mass-­produced commercial U.S. world. For many of the underground poets, even COSMEP [Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers] is too much of an ‘institution,’ too much of a ‘computer.’ The Underground WANTS to remain rough, poor, isolated

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within its own members. In a recent note to me D. R. Wagner wrote that he’d gotten out of COSMEP because it was getting to be too ‘efficient.’ The real Underground wants to remain inefficient, because efficiency too of­ten means standardization and standardization means the complete loss of individuality” (12). While many of Fox’s “underground” succeeded in eluding a wide audience (Dick Higgins and D. A. Levy are the only two of twelve I recognize), he does identify here a perennial geist in the world of poetry: the rejection of anything like an establishment, even at the risk of, on the one hand, obscurity, and on the other (as Fox notes in his chapter on Douglas Blazek) a persistent immaturity. Not surprisingly, an internet search of the term “outsider writers” brings up several hits for Charles Bukowski, who probably expresses the “rough, poor, isolated” ethos as much as any nationally-­recognized writer. “Rebels” operate at the margins of established literary culture but nonetheless identify as “authors,” publish books, and partake in other social elements of the literary life, if on a much smaller scale. These are the types of poets collected in anthologies such as The Outlaw Bible of Ameri­can Poetry, which market themselves as the visceral alternative to the cerebral and “effete” cosmopoli­ tanism of, say, the Best Ameri­can Poetry series. A small group mostly located in Los Angeles informally known as the “Meat School,” such as John Thomas, Al Masarik, and Steve Richmond, followed Bukowski’s lead in writing verse that was decidedly lowbrow, misogynistic, and scatological, like him avoiding anything like the cosmological elements one associates with, say, Allen Ginsberg (the bookish Thomas, whom Bukowski called “the best unread poet in America,” being an exception). Characteristic of these writers is, in fact, not just a rejection of the establishment but, at times, an obsession with it. As Blazek wrote in a letter to Fox: “We need our poetry to be SOMETHING! If a cardboard box is beat up and sags then say it looks like your old Bulgarian grandmother with thick smelly stockings rolled up to her knees instead of comparing it to some Greek god that never existed in the first place. If you’re going to write then write about things people can recognize, things that are REAL. If words don’t have earth in them they are as useless as a broken light switch” (62). Poets in this general category want to find a ground—here called simply “earth”— to poetry and will operate according to a certain austerity plan to achieve it. They confirm Badiou’s contention in The Century that artists, like revolutionaries, were largely inspired by a “passion for the real”: [W]e are in the realm of suspicion when a formal criterion is lacking to distinguish the real from semblance. In the absence of such a criterion, the logic that imposes itself is that the more a subjective conviction

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presents itself as real, the more it must be suspected. It is thus at the summit of the revolutionary state, where the ardent desire of free­dom is incessantly declared, that the greatest number of traitors is to be found. The traitor is both the leader and, ultimately, oneself. In these conditions, what is the only certainty? Nothingness. Only the nothing is not suspect, because the nothing does not lay claim to any real . . . This is why our century, aroused by the passion for the real, has in all sorts of ways—and not just in politics—been the century of destruction. (54) The rebel risks nihilism, for despite all the hard work of infusing words with “earth,” his or her suspicion of any formal extravagance, any flight of pure fancy, and taste for the nothingness that is truth, demands that the poem be mute as earth itself. Many slam or spoken word writers who define themselves against a stiff, allusive, page-­based formality of “page” poetry in favor of an immediate relationship to an audience face a similar dilemma, but this drive toward the “earth” is naturally mediated by an emphasis on accessibility and entertainment.

b. Other Traditions Paul Verlaine started something of a tradition in French poetry by pub­ lish­ing his short volume on the Les poètes maudits in 1884, announcing a lineage in­clud­ing Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Aloysius Bertrand, the Comte de Lautréamont, and Alice de Chambrier, all notable for having gone “against the grain” of fin-­de-­siècle French culture. In 1924, André Breton, in the “First Manifesto of Surrealism,” presented something like a roll call of proto-­Surrealists, a line that “[begins] with Dante and, in his finer moments, Shakespeare,” runs through “[Edward] Young’s [Night Thoughts] . . . Surrealist from one end to the other,” and picks up somewhere around Isidore Ducasse, the self-­styled Comte de Lautréamont. In his collection of Norton lectures, Other Traditions (2000), John Ashbery, extending this propensity for constructing hagiographies of the damned, describes the influence on him of neglected or “minor” poets such John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. However, Ashbery’s predecessors are not visionary monsters but rather a modest, even discontinuous, side current, a tug on the “tradition” of the masters. Ashbery writes that “Schubert’s rare and poignant verse is like opening a window in a room that had become stuffy without one’s realizing it,” a metaphor he was delighted to discover that Williams had used forty years earlier in a letter about Schubert. Ashbery doesn’t tell us much about what he means by “other tradition” except that it sounds less pompous

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than “The Other Tradition” and that it “shores up [his] feeling that the poets (and of course this could apply to people in any line of endeavor) who become known and are remembered and put in anthologies are there as much from happenstance as intrinsic merit” (123). Despite Ashbery’s coyness at offering a sure definition of his term, I’d like to co-­opt it to name a general tendency among poets to identify with alternative currents of writing that, unlike the writing of the “rebels,” can possess refinement, even a visionary capacity, and engage with politics, philosophy, or religion. Often, the writing is characterized by excessive technique or abuse of particular techniques, along with other elements that, perhaps if modified slightly, could have brought them wider acceptance but in fact will always make them coterie or “poet’s” poets. Many of Ashbery’s poets, in fact, are not terribly radical in technique—the greatest criticism one might leverage against a few of them, like David Schubert, is that they died too young to gain any recognition—and yet they don’t, like Verlaine or Breton’s poets, announce a new era of literature. The poet Larry Fagin’s term “neglecterino” might best name the type of poet that only other poets read, revere, and collect as talismans against the world’s encroachment. I would like to extend this notion of the “other tradition” to also include writers who have engaged with poetry communities but who, absent this arena of appreciation, might have been mistaken as simply insane. Even if lacking a theorization of the “normal” and “pathological,” Ameri­can experimental poetry has made room, for reasons of technique, social identification, or egalitarian spirit, for writers who can be said to exist on the edges of normative consciousness. Notable among these writers is John Wieners, particularly in his book Beyond the State Capitol or Cincinatti Pike, which, famously, was typeset from his drafts with nearly no editorial correction. Though Wieners is best known for his careful, delicate lyrics, this volume was replete with typos, irregular stanza/paragraph formation (and lack of distinction between the two), transitions from the poem into footnote, and interminable sentences that do not parse (see fig. 4.1). Beyond the State Capitol, published by the ephemeral press Good Gay Poets, is the epitome of a form of “outsider writing” that populates the other tradition. Other poets of roughly the same generation who have been embraced by experimental writers, especially the Language School, are Hannah Weiner, who began to transcribe words she saw on people’s foreheads (among other textual sources), and Bill Bissett, whose work is, in McCaffery’s words, “a coagulate of forces to be experienced, but not elucidated” (93). One writer with a different form of cognitive variation who had a modest career is Christopher Knowles, the autistic writer who created the libretto for Robert Wilson’s opera A Letter for Queen Victoria as well as performed in it. Ash-

Figure 4.1. John Wieners, page from Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike. Courtesy of the Estate of John Wieners.

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bery once wrote of Knowles: “Christopher has the ability to conceive of his works in minute detail before executing them. There is nothing accidental in the typed designs and word lists; they fill their preordained places as accurately as though they had spilled out of a computer. This pure conceptualism, which others have merely approximated using mechanical aids, is one reason that so many young artists have been drawn to Christopher’s work” (88). The poetic qualities Knowles exploited, namely repetition and recombination, were also key to Bryon Gysin’s early experiments with computer-­ generated writing, and hearken back to Beckett’s schematic, recursive writings in Watt. This “autistic” practice is exhibited in the poetry of Vito Acconci, which of­ten involves tedious processes carried out over decidedly “inhuman,” perhaps grotesque, amounts of time.5

c. Codework The logics that exhibited in the writers of the “other traditions,” notably the transgressing of normative understanding of lyric economy, both anticipate and inform a practice known as “codework” that emerged in the early days of internet art. “Codework refers to the use of the contemporary idiolect of the computer and computing processes in digital media experimental writing, or [net.writing],” Rita Raley writes, noting of central fig­ures, “Mez composes in a neologistic ‘net.wurked’ language that she has termed m[ez] ang.elle; [Talan] Memmott uses the term ‘rich.lit’; [Ted] Warnell names some of his JavaScript poems ‘codepoetry’; [Brian] Lennon refers to ‘digital visual poetics’; and [John] Cayley produces algorithmic, generative texts, or ‘programmable poetry.’ Writers and artists who have taken up the general practice of codework heed the mandate—‘use the computer; it is not a television’—­and strive to foreground and theorize the relations between interface and machine and so reflect on the networked environment that constitutes and is constituted by a digital text” (“Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework”). Married to this propensity for spontaneous, excessive neologism are the forums in which the works appeared. Mez’s m[ez]ang.elle is something like a private language (in Wittgenstein's sense) but with a bridge toward comprehensibility extended through networks and protocols: _cyberspace_ b-­ came siphonspace, cypherspace, psychastheniaspace. Mz Post Modemizm’s birthe pre-­ M-­ ted her knowledge ov avatarian statez. 96 bought aff.[terra]firma.tion; mailing lizt act.ion became de rigueur; until 98 the projectz flowed N the mails spreade bac N

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4th, 4th Nemble///fleshfactor//7-­ 11//American Express//recode//rhizome//nettime -­u name it, avartarian statements where there. avatarz breeding in this trubbled space where mani, with psiborgs b-­ cumming sciborgs b-­ come. in[here] sighborgz. [if mez = mezchine//emauler//mz post mortemism/ modemism//flesque//mezflesque.exe//etc then i.d.entitee = flow = _internal damage report_ & _fleshistics_] Usenet groups (in the time before Web 2.0) and other subcultures on the internet teemed with writers who spoke to each other in deviant forms of language, and though codework is of­ten described as a “creole,” it could be described, as well, as an “argot” in Alice Becker-­Ho’s sense: a cryptographic script that allowed easy identification among insiders.6 Codework marks out a territory between two contrasting textual practices that appeared in the early days of the internet. The first is writing that is completely algorithmic, sometimes not even intended for the human reader. The creator of the website Sugarplum described it as “an automated spam-­ poisoner. . . . Its purpose is to feed realistic and enticing, but totally useless or hazardous data to wandering address harvesters such as EmailSiphon, Cherry Picker, etc. The idea is to so contaminate spammers’ databases as to require that they be discarded, or at least that all data retrieved from your site (in­clud­ing actual email addresses) be removed” (“The Sweet Poison” 2). The program didn’t succeed in anything more than offering, for our purposes, the far side of a particularly granulated literary texture: “Redan when iri­date be Rhinanthaceae, chaffman: proaudience ben­zal­phenyl­hydra­ zone riving, uncleanness billon did Ascanius, glottic bipunctual masturbatory crime and knar Maypole! Antisporic syncline Hahnemannian un­til ever­who milleflorous uncourtly achenium. Margaropus be disaccordant. Rhap­sody, depository! Pawnbrokerage monochromist wild” (1). Neil Hennessy, who discovered Sugarplum accidentally while looking up the word “bi­lini­grin,” notes that much of the output of Sugarplum resembled Language poetry in its fight against (quoting McCaffery) “referential fetish,” as its lack of grammar encourages “the possibility of meaning being an active, local agent functioning within a polymorphous, polysemous space of parts and sub-­particles” (1). In a section titled “Sugarplum Politics,” he concludes,

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“Sugar­plum participates in a general economy of waste by producing voluminous texts meant to be ignored. If the texts are successful at thwarting spambots, Sugarplum will achieve its own apotheosis and never be read by human or machine: a completely unproductive expenditure that never enters into exchange,” and further echoes much of the avant-­gardist lingo of the day (or at least of McCaffery’s) by attributing ideological virtues to the bot: “Sugarplum’s texts directly counter capitalist forces within their medium of exchange” (2).7 The sec­ond brand of poetry that emerged in early internet culture was described by the Critical Arts Ensemble in The Electronic Disturbance, a book notable largely for its very literal reading of Deleuze and Guattari, the prescient (if not very origi­nal) emphasis placed on the acts of recombination and plagiarism, and its techno-­anarchist politics. In plagiarism “lies an epistemology of anarchy, according to which the plagiarist argues that if science, religion or any other social institution precludes certainty beyond the realm of the private, then it is best to endow consciousness with as many categories of interpretation as possible” (88). “Rather than being led by sequences of signs,” they argue, echoing some of the earliest hypertext and Situationist theory, “one should instead drift through them, choosing the interpretation best suited to the social condition of a given situation” (88). Unfortunately, their actual “plagiarist poetry” was cripplingly deflated: Like a Big Dog * A big dog stands on the highway He walks on confidently and is run over by a car His peaceful expression shows that he is usually better looked after— a domestic animal to whom now harm is done. * * But do the sons of the rich bourgeois families who also suffer no harm * * * have the same peaceful expression? They were cared for just as lovingly as the dog which is now run over. (104) A series of annotations notes that the lines with asterisks come from the Dia­ lectic of Enlightenment, Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” and an old German expression (“the wealthy fear harm for they cause most of it”). While the Critical Arts Ensemble moved quickly past their flirtation with poetry, it appears that, for all their talk of “drifting” and “choosing interpretations,” they couldn’t help but be as dogmatic in their poetry as in their manifestos.

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Peter Manson, Adjunct: An Undigest Scottish poet Peter Manson is the first of a group of artists who, I would like to argue, have fruitfully exploited some of the practices outlined above. Manson’s 2004 volume Adjunct: An Undigest, names in its title something like a new mode, if not a genre, of writing. In linguistic terms, “adjunct” refers to something that is auxiliary to the main part of a sentence, but its definition in the context of logic is more suggestive: “something joined or added to another thing but not essentially a part of it” (“Adjuct,” Merriam-­ Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary). This language of essences relates the two terms of Manson’s title, as a “digest” is a compilation or summary of material or information—that is, the essentials of some larger, composite, conceptual object—or, in terms of “digestion,” the incorporation of external (hopefully nutritional) elements into a body. An “undigest” is, therefore, the mere accretion of stuff that doesn’t on the one hand support or merge with a larger organizational structure or on the other settle into a sys­tem or relationship with itself—i.e., evince a pattern determining the rules of inclusion or exclusion. In symbolic language, an undigest would always be the remainder after the parameters of a sys­tem of meanings has been understood, and absent such parameters, or a paradigm, all elements would essentially be the remainder. Adjunct begins: The Game of Life played on the surface of a torus. Guilt. Concept album about garlic. Some verbs allow clitic climbing and others do not. The natural gas produced was radioactive, which made it unattractive for the home user. Jimmy Jewell is dead. But we are all Lib-­Labs now, and in 1997 New Labour’s triumph will free Labour history from its sectarian socialist and classbound cocoon and incorporate it fully into British history. Athletic Celerity. Martin McQuillan sings chorus to Tubthumping by Chumbawamba during paper on Derrida, apparently. Eric Fenby is dead. Manet’s Olympia as still from X-­rated Tom and Jerry cartoon. Julian Green is dead. Dick Higgins is dead. Must try not to get killed before finishing this because nobody else’s going to be able to read my handwriting. (1) At first blush, Adjuct appears to be an exercise in the “new sentence” as coined by Ron Silliman; indeed, the self-­reflexive note about the author’s handwriting appears to reference the pen in the early pages of Tjanting: “Last week I wrote ‘the muscles in my palm so sore from halving the rump roast I cld barely grip the pen’ ” (1). The only recurring refrain within Manson’s poem, the noting of dead fig­ures, is a distant echo of David Mark-

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son’s 1996 novel Reader’s Block, which itself recounts in single sentences a number of notable deaths. But there are elements in Adjunct that belie these associations, such as the presence of entire poems (“Delinquist,” page 29), the eruption of lists (“AG van Busbeck; Auger Ghiselin de Busbecq; Auger ­Ghiselin van Busbeq; Auger Ghislen, seigneur de Boesbeeck” etc., page 27), a 9x12 block of seemingly random numbers (starting “7 10 1 2 9 12 8 3 6 4 5 11,” page 31), linguistic bits that can’t be resolved as sentences or even phrases (“S PETITE PARISIENN, S/ FOCACCI CHSE+ON, MELON GALIA” etc., page 16), library calling numbers (“C. Brook-­Rose NPB1.87.914 Xoran­der 1987 A History,” page 54), shout outs to excellent poets (“This sounds exactly like Brian Kim Stefans,” page 44), and a sort of graph of word-­endings: -­ant -­a -­ace -­ections -­and -­ision -­ocous -­ock nor ask who owns (8) Adjunct moves quickly between moments of high granularity, where language is expressed in its very atomic components (in­clud­ing non-­meaning­ ful marks such as the hyphen) and moments resembling prose, as if leaping the divide between quantum behaviors and everyday physics. The only nods to convention occur in the paratextual elements—cover, back cover blurbs, Scottish Arts Council logo, page numbering, regular margins, etc.—­ in­cluding something not normally present in a book of poetry, an index to all of the proper names in­clud­ing eleven entries for the notoriously productive, nearly logorrheic band led by Mark E. Smith, The Fall. The ultimate humor of the piece lies in this paratextual apparatus, as it is this material that gives the text anything like “form”—a particularly Aristotelian notion of form imposed from an outside via the most bureaucratic (certainly not “organic”) means. Manson, much like his distant peers the Conceptual writers, employs context-­granting signs to barge in on the continuum known as “poetry” thereby halting what would otherwise be a spillage of language (acquired stochastically over a seven-­year period) into an entropic mist. “The content in Adjunct,” Craig Dworkin writes, “is what makes the form legible. In fact, content here seems to be a necessary condition for any sense of the form to emerge. . . . [T]he dynamic in play here is paradoxical, and familiar: a certain inscription is only able to be apprehended because of the ground which that same inscription, in turn, abolishes—proving and destroying its own possibility at one and the same time. . . . [A]djunct is thus a particularly slippery text, moving from a content that renders form legible to

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a form that flows the content, therefore making itself disappear precisely at the moment of its manifestation by erasing the very ground that permitted its emergence” (“Poetry Without Organs” 25–26). Dworkin fig­ures Adjunct as something like an ouroboros: rather than producing extension as would a proper poem, even one that seeks its own “form” as an extension of “content” in the phrase of Robert Creeley that Dworkin references earlier, Adjunct at once seems to both provide the field in which its elements are suspended and to withdraw this very field, leaving the in­di­vidual elements “arranged in a palpably random distribution,” a mere “style . . . not yet sublated to form” (26). Adjunct is at once grounded and ungrounded, depending, I think, on what one might want to do with it—simply point to it, as would a critic (in which case Adjunct is a “work”), or draw from it, in which case it is an array, a set, or a “source text.”

Toadex Hobogrammathon, Name: A Novel A more radical variation on the “undigest” is the scattered work of an as-­yet unidentified author who goes (or went) under the name of Toadex Hobogrammathon. I don’t remember exactly how I or my peers at the time discovered these works in the late nineties; I did, in fact, briefly have an email correspondence with the individual, but those emails have long since vanished. The first work to catch our attention was an HTML page containing a single work titled “Name: A Novel,” the first paragraph of which lies somewhere on the axis of the Comte de Lautréaumont and Al Jarry: Jade Foreskin stepped off the plank. The smell of turbid waters struck him, as though from afar, and he thought of Spain, medallions, and cork. How long had it been, sussing reader, since he had been in Spain with all those corkoid Spanish medallions, granted him by Generalissimo Hieronimo Susstro? Thirty, thirty-­three years? Or maybe eighty-­ seven? Anyhow, as he slipped a whip clap down, he thought he might greet REVERSE BLOOD NUT 1, if only he could clear a wasp. And the plank was homely. After greeting a flock of fried antlers at the shevroad tuesday plied canticle massacre with a flash of blessed venom, he had been interviewed, but briefly, by the skinny wench of a woman. But now he was in Rio, fresh of a plank and trying to catch some asscheeks before heading on to Remorse. We have a character with the improbable, Pynchon-­esque name of Jade Fore­skin (a few paragraphs later, it is revealed that “Foreskin” is a play on

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the phrase “whore-­forsaken”), something like coherent sense impressions (“smell of turbid waters”) not to mention other accoutrements of conscious­ness, memory (“he thought of Spain . . .”), doubt (“Thirty, thirty-­three years?”), and desire (“he thought he might greet . . . “), etc. Of course, knotty details intrude—“REVERSE BLOOD NUT 1,” a “wasp” that needs to be “cleared,” and the a-­grammatical “shevroad tuesday plied ­canticle massacre”—­though the paragraph ends relatively normally. The third-­person perspective disappears in the sec­ond paragraph: “I first came in the twilight of the S­ oviet. Swigging some muck, and lampreys, like a bad dram in a Soviet plezhvadya dish, licking an anagram off my hands so the — — woundn’t foust a stiff trinket up me. So that the Soviets would find out. ‘Fuck, Peer Robert,’ I said gutfully, as I tabbed a cigarette, ‘this motherfucker thinks he can, etc.’ A blood red runt scampering across the stage, reborn hail well elephant underground, I saved the statements for the later day.” Despite the resonance of a word like “anagram,” most of this eludes anything like sense or close reading. The first person perspective continues for another few paragraphs— “God damn have I got to scrape up some rash!”—before a suggestive single-­ fragment paragraph appears: “Alalalala alaluivalve. Said the stork kindly. Alalabalamat as said by the” (it ends without a period). We finally return to the hero of the first sentence: “—‘Oh goody goody gumdrops,’ thought Jade Foreskin as he stuffed a fuck in a gondola (in Venice (Italy), the one into which off the plank had he stepped, ‘now I can dit to gavel this ham shovel!’ But it so heard to the Venetian young-­lady-­of-­weak-­knees, and what it had actually said was, ‘now I can get my giblets off one more time!’ or perhaps, ‘now I can dig the gamble into this ham sandwich!’ All hearsay.” To this point, the “novel” seems decidedly Joycean with its puns, seemingly colloquial language (“now I can get my giblets . . . “), onomatopoeic elements (“Alalalala alaluivalve” harkens to the sounds of the Liffey), and hints that this might be an internal monologue. I can’t help but think of the opening pages of Alain Robbe-­Grillet’s The Voyeur, which depicts over seven pages the protagonist, Matthias, disembarking from a boat while subjecting vision to a geometrical cruelty: “Measured and even, despite slight variations of amplitude and rhythm perceptible to the eye but scarcely exceeding ten centimetres and two or three sec­onds, the sea rose and fell in the sheltered angle formed by the landing slip” (12). Evoking Wittgenstein’s meditation on the word “Platte” (slab) in the early pages of the Philosophical In­ vestigations, the only real key word in this opening section is “plank”: the hero is depicted as stepping off a plank in the first sentence, then considers that the plank is “homely” during his rumination about the passage of time, is described as “fresh of plank” at the end of the first paragraph and, upon

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the switch back to the third person, is depicted as in a “gondola . . . the one into which off the plank had he stepped.” Initially, the plank seems to suggest disembarking onto solid ground, but in fact, the reader soon learns the plank leads to the total flux or fluidity of pure verbiage. The beginning of the long final paragraph of “Name” runs as follows: We leave our dear Jade Foreskin, whore-­forsaken, full of cud and these red Brazilian vegetables, reflecting on his fortyninethousand adharmic elements: ‘Apperil franc drape pekan rosehip unsuspectedly Malpi­ghian bathrooms Atherton galoped outgates avec plaisir scrawlingly oggin rejoicers docents verbalist antecedents hand-­knit bigeneric loss adjusters nitratine muniment arrogant khurtas Yokohama hoses ­Orni­thischia floatants sclaff chiffonnier carried through numerably slight­ingly channelise phosphorous anhydride statute miles pineta suda­tory ministerium Minitel horsemeats dice-­coal praemunire teocalli frenzical grips bases acalephas corpulence sjambokked refuellable primi­parous labiovelar weather forecaster blethers gremolata collocate Lord Chancellor shoogles misogynists parklands Sabbath prefixes . . . . . . and so of for 53,280 words (roughly 147 pages when formatted for 8.5 x 11). This word list seems to beg for the types of qualitative analy­sis that “digital humanities” has to offer, as no pattern emerges to the human reader, even as the fruits of such an analy­sis would not be a story or even a structure but charts and diagrams denoting mental landscapes of possibly robotic origin—in a sense, groundless. “Dagmar Chili,” a kaleidoscopic blog created by Toadex Hobogrammathon in 2000–2001, further explores this netherworld between the pure algorithmic creativity of Sugarplum and the extremes of avant-­garde consciousness exposed by Jarry in the scatological Ubu Roi and Beckett in the solipsistic Watt. Notable about this site is that every paratextual feature associated with blogs, such as the date, the stylesheet, and any general concessions to accessibility have been overcharged with vibrant colors, indecipherable glyphs, cryptic poetry, inscrutable pronouncements, arcane references, and just sheer garbage (see fig. 4.2). At times, the creator exhibits knowledge of literature, cryptically quoting Eliot (“A heap of broken images”) and citing literary movements (“Lake a bad dream in a Cymbalist petri dish”). Lautréaumont gets a shout-­out—“the most famous critic of maldoror sez ‘I am presently translating the Entire book into Esperanto’ & then some say too many tie up your hands.”—as does his contemporary Mallarmé, but even the Master is not immune to sudden drops to puerility.

Figure 4.2. Toadex Hobogrammathon, “Dagmar Chili.”

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oe|e|ep[] and to pulverize ground chuck, a throw of the beans will not tempt fate I know where all mammy’s schoolkids are I’m trying to think what I forgot in the toilet, but I can’t. And it was relllllllll y gold I cannot believe that you’d do such a thing I cannot believe that you’d eat asshole meat Elsewhere: “Poisone my well: ever since I read page forty-­eight of Ben Marcus’s shifty but literary eighty-­paged novella ‘The Ages of String’ I’ve two heads latently aflame,” he writes (Marcus’s novel The Age of Wire and String appeared in 1995), though the later “celebrity endorsement” isn’t quite so ambivalent: “So. Marcus is good. If you like books, and like to read them even if they are opaque and humorless, you will like the work of Ben Marcus, a writer. Also: He has a pisshole penis, and he says it’s accurate all the time, just like grandpapa’s (miraculous) always-­accurate mandolin.” Another entry reads: oe|e|ep[] P Guston: Painting, Smoking, Eating & for recoard ao I THink that Gerhardt Mannlich Hopkins pretty consistently overdoes it, wouldn’t you? I’d put three drakes on it, buzzard conditional, a bottle is a dolphin Addressing Hopkins directly, he even adopts some of his tone: “I’m sorry, dapper dinglehead, but this Beggar’s Butte is the only polehold I can find in reality.” Just an entry later, “reality” seems to totally vacate Toadex Hobo­ grammathon:

­

Lordy, lorday I”M give you a BA;AST FROM THE PAST, viz and be wise: Tuesday, April 18, 2000 it’s time pwope usedn the peitas fowkejrh ahs w hauwh 1103 wiqu fe w appppoiqw jp1oj fjnv akdjf hbk az,.xcm q wpoekb a apo HIHP qhwph HOGa pph wwpio1073 b0—)&% 11111111s fy HPHP

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asgw ge Sga gq fh h hhoa eh q qeh t hppp POh ht hejhasdkx,cv,vk la ww1 32i4y08ynnnnnnnn skapow pow ke eht eeet the aoishe wowkwoosk o shw kshpw oknmz ;laksjdf 1077gbh te apth bt ttttt ehw agsbwpje bhte wgaptj ffffffff; jhg he6 cha tto wh bawa tn wfrom by by form t tot ott wjher ggoi fubt fubt wast the wotjht e toght ehaisjht sijw ethspzzzpON htokne Thw woskPj wh toWke ^ Wisnt kwpajnwt.e thpON tin ww wW iht Toha seb wait let me run that by you again, Tuesday, April 18, 2000 it’s time pwope usedn the peitas fowkejrh ahs w hauwh 1103 wiqu fe w appppoiqw jp1oj fjnv akdjf hbk az,.xcm q wpoekb a apo HIHP qhwph HOGa pph wwpio1073 b0—)&% 11111111s fy HPHP asgw ge Sga gq fh h hhoa eh q qeh t hppp POh ht hejhasdkx,cv,vk la ww1 32i4y08ynnnnnnnn skapow pow ke eht eeet the aoishe wowkwoosk o shw kshpw oknmz ;laksjdf 1077gbh te apth bt ttttt ehw agsbwpje bhte wgaptj ffffffff; jhg he6 cha tto wh bawa tn wfrom by by form t tot ott wjher ggoi fubt fubt wast the wotjht e toght ehaisjht sijw ethspzzzpON htokne Thw woskPj wh toWke ^ Wisnt kwpajnwt.e thpON tin ww wW iht Toha seb At some points content and markup text merge, as when we read: “imagine this space is colored BGCOLOUR=“#BeanCurd.” This was purposeful, for as Toadex knows, “BGCOLOUR” is not a functioning HTML tag (sorry, Brits), BeanCurd is not a color option, and the text is embedded in a well-­formed table (a challenge by hand). He mocks the tight-­assed nature of trademark agreements—“DEAR SIRS and so forth, please me make attention to, that if you’re linking to BE SURE TO USE allcaps, because dagmar chili lowercase is exclusive tmk owned by datmar chili cod gam disc., and it’s illegal to use except in all caps. And you do it for NQPAOFU, so what the fuck? Be reasonable folks”—and politics occasionally enters with references to “dubya” and “Rummie.” It’s truly surprising, however, when a delicate translation into synthetic Scots of a poem by Sappho makes it through the noise:

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{}oe|e|ep[] Frae the Aiolic o Psappho Caller rain frae abune reeshles amang the epple-­trees: the leaves are soughan wi the breeze, and sleep faas drappan doun. —trans. Douglas Young, 1947 Toadex’s exploitation of the liberated economy of the web, especially the ability to cut-­and-­paste to excess (enacted in a more modest way in Charles Bernstein’s “An Mosaic for a Convergence”) is an assault on the limited economies of the page, where the repeated entry above seems especially wasteful. As an artifact of the heady early days of internet culture, Dagmar Chili is something like a anti-­monument as it floats silently and unvisited (yet strangely paid for) in the far reaches of the web, occasionally flicking a bit of radiation toward readers like myself who return to see if it is still live.

Ambient Stylistics Tan Lin’s first book, Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (1996), glided along on meters that seemed as if Gerard Manley Hopkins’s dapple-­dawn-­drawn falcon had gotten stuck in John Yau’s English-­as-­a-­Stammered-­Language Slurpie machine. Take this passage from “Talc Bull Dogface”: Lu Hsun chews geisha cup. Giesha spits cup. Clouds form on back   like worms in planetarium. How is tap-­dancing nightingale distinguish from cleaning rag? Sofa silkwork choo choos to camera. Bamboo ready to baby poo nudie shade. Lu-­lu jade dude pingpongs really Rovely. The knees crumple like newspapers. Can’t push on courtyard gardens in hardness. The purse snaps. God snap mouth. (89) The energy here isn’t ecstatic so much as scattershot. The poem makes a bid for total compression that ends up taking in as much as it severs off; the aural effects are serial rather than counter-­pointed, the alliteration cloying in a way that Hopkins’s is not. But like Hopkins, Lin wants almost every syllable to pop in some way, either through flawed reduplication or the harsh foregrounding of consonant sounds, and to have the line draw itself across the page quickly, impatiently, challenging the ear to assimilate its bounding prosody. Beyond its corrupting relation to the lyric, what appears to be happening in “Talc Bull Dogface” is that the poet is treating his writerly

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output like a text-­dump, organizing his words according to some hidden, reptilian algorithm—in this case, an attention to lots of internal off-­rhymes ­(“nightingale / distinguish”) and the “l”/”r” switches that mark the Chinaman in the clinamen—until they glow with radium-­like intensity. “There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, / Like the clashed edges of two words that kill,” wrote Wallace Stevens in kinder, analog times (“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”). Lin seems to suggest that two words can do the trick, but if you have a willing database and enough paper, why don’t you use a hundred just in case. Lin eventually professed a desire to shake off the trappings of the “avant-­ garde”—linguistic difficulty, the suspicion of beauty, all manners of formal estrangement—and create poems that are “relaxing.” The run-­on, never entirely uninteresting but hardly gripping paragraphs of “Notes for an Ambient Stylistics” were the exact opposite of the neon-­punk effects he sought out in Lotion: “I continue to believe to this day that she was a terrible liar in person, although I am probably lying to myself, and of course this is the main reason I fell in love with her after we had ended things, and this is the main reason I still, years later, remember her voice when I am on the telephone and am lonely and am waiting for someone on the other end of the telephone to tell me they love me. One can wait for years to hear a beautiful lie like that” (“Ambient Stylistics”). Lies, the deception of surfaces, along with “boredom” and the beauty of things entirely forgotten, have since become recognizable Tan Lin themes, like bureaucracy for Kafka or the sea for Melville. His volume BlipSoak01 begins with a prose introduction (“Beauty is over-­appreciated; boredom is not”) in which Lin distinguishes his new work from “most literature and especially poetry,” which he characterizes as “fundamentally false forms of excitation and dread” (11). The introduction runs down the right-­hand pages with an occasional phrase or word exiled to the left-­hand page, followed by a series of quick rev-­up pages (hints of the countdown that start each of Yong-­Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Flash movies) made up of words in huge sans-­serif type that are missing some, but not necessarily key, letters. One of them goes like this: THIS WAS SAM L D (4) This creates a sort of optical illusion as if we were engaged in one of Claude Shannon’s experiments in pulling information from noise; clearly we want to see the phrase “this was sampled,” but if we add those two key letters to the last word, what about the extra spaces in the first two lines? Even beyond the

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marshaling of this ludic visuality, a sort of homage to the useful dysfunction of electronic storage and retrieval is paid in the invocation of “sampling,” which was a form of capturing small bits of audio and reusing it in loops and sequences that thrived in the days before iPods and mp3 compression made capturing (and pocketing) entire symphonies a pedestrian affair. Notably, this passage is, in the spirit of Magritte, a metapicture in W. J. T. Mitchell’s terms, as one must ask: what is being sampled here, the letters or the phrase? This sort of shuttling of reading between the “text” and the atomized bits that make it up—letters, and behind them, chains of 0s and 1s—animate this book, which is a testament to what the layman can do with a passing acquaintance with Quark. The poem’s couplets start on the left-­hand page like any normal poem, but rather than break and flow to the next line when they reach the margin, they continue over to the right-­hand page, which otherwise would be entirely blank. But they rarely are: the left-­hand pages function as a factory for curious miniatures, hanging strays from the idiosyncratic and, indeed, dysfunctional sys­tem of page layout. Page 243, for example, has just the words “glue / effervescent noodles,” which could be an exile form of Ashbery’s “Europe” in The Tennis Court Oath. Other bits of text not produced in this fashion (there is an interesting interaction between fragments produced by accident and those that Lin, one supposes, “made up”) and the seemingly random appearance of numbers that evoke either CD tracks or track lengths—“06” and “16:07” for example—place the scene of this poem, in my mind at least, somewhere within the depths of a CD-­R that has either been incorrectly burned or—in the spirit of Japanese audio artist Yasuanao Tone and “glitchworks”—has been wrapped in Scotch tape and put back into the player. Lin’s technique is not collage, in which the bleeding edges of the assembled fragments scream out as loudly as the content, but a sort of all-­over mixture of numberless untraceable sources that can run from the atomic—the letter, the dash, the diacriti­cal mark—to the word and phrase with little of the poignant estrangement of the source text (or ironizing of its tone) that occurs in, say, Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets. Lev Manovich’s description in The Lan­ guage of New Media of how the digital “composite” took over from film’s reliance on the edit is useful here: “Rather than keying together images from two video sources, we can now composite an unlimited number of image layers. A shot may consist of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of image layers. These images may all have different origins—film shot on location (‘live plates’), computer-­generated sets or virtual actors, digital matte paintings, archival footage, and so on” (133). The splice—both connection of, and break between, two streams of images—is replaced by the composite; an entire movie can be made without a single “cut” and yet be the product of several

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hundred shoots. If a poet opens herself to all varieties of personal writing, “found” writing, accidental or purposeful productions of computer algorithms (such as Sugarplum), and anything else that swims into the laptop’s ken, then one could potentially layer an infinite number of distinct texts into a poem, in the fashion of a sort of poor-­man’s Finnegans Wake, or, indeed, in an “ambient” and decidedly non-­avant-­garde (read: “threatening”) version: A window shot out with a bb gun This writhes Every evacuation lays like a topography cantilevered By heroes of rust I fall in love and a diamond on her quit suggests I fall in love, oh, day in the bleachers JFK passes through Texas I don’t dictate the slips that must be inside inside must be incarnate and left _______________of not listening _______________over water, Of given and glistening, the geishas remove the gentleman’s pants I merge from this form, yellow warblers necks like writing on a stone Greeting cards left on the table inside the outlines of a football field The sound of a radio tapered and slender as candlesticks in the kitchen before he awoke at night (172–73) “The surface is beautiful because it can be forgotten one moment at a time,” Lin writes in the introduction, and the lines quoted above are, indeed, eminently forgettable, at least for moral edification, concise imagism, and all those other good, poetic things people like. Like Williams’s three-­tiered “variable foot” in his later poetry, Lin’s couplets provide a soft sense of measure, but they also have a renga-­like quality, in that the first half of the couplet calls out for a response, but one that doesn’t offer closure so much as a continuation of its own effects, a sort of mirror-­life after the linebreak. The couplets also provide a method for Lin to promote a practice of reading as a sort of parsing—one of­ten scans the sec­ond half of a couplet strictly to record the differences (punctuation, vo-

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cabulary, and other formal aspects) from the first half, reducing the act of reading to a light existential discipline. Cuts are implicit in the bizarre juxtapositions within single lines—“yellow warblers necks like writing on stone” is textbook Surrealism—and the stray poem-­lets that the right-­hand page collects, as a sort of parallel thread, for later consumption—for example “gentleman’s pants  / ke writing on stone.” The poem runs through many such jams in the flow, at one point breaking off, like Adjunct, into columns of text, at another only letting in single letters and bits of words, forcing the reader to change reading strategies, to read up, down, and across, but never breaking with the basic formality of the couplet. BlipSoak01 celebrates the quickness of modern life while also relishing the ability to change the channels, to control and “sample” the thousand broadcasts—to accessorize one’s consciousness. Lin’s pharmakon is, to this ­degree, the beneficent type: he is hardly incognizant of its composing in the form of websites, cable stations, streaming audio and video, and spam, and so he can muster Canto-­length works in a matter of weeks, days, even hours. This information free-­fall, or “blip soak,” within the comfort of one’s home implicates any sort of experimental poetry predicated on a conflicted, hall-­ of-­mirrors consciousness, the fragmentary or “elliptical” lyric poet manipulating the market of comprehension by simply keeping information back, letting out bits at a controlled drip. Lin whips the poem into “form”—or, in the motion described by Dworkin, allows form to both extend and retreat, its elements being both suspended in, and constitutive of, ground. Lin’s later project, HEATH (plagiarism/outsource) exploits this prospect further, as it incorporates imagery (cartoons, screen caps, consumer items), plagiarized literature (Samuel Pepys’s diaries, journalism concerning Heath Ledger’s death), and found texts (warranties, disclaimers, copyright symbols, URLs) with no differentiation—all of the elements merely persist, suspended by the material support, as if a blank white ninety-­six-­page book with cardstock covers had been dipped into the internet and then pulled back with the random detritus of culture glued to it. In contrast to the slow gestation of Adjunct, HEATH was, as Danny Snelson notes, “quickly compiled, the book was written between May 8, 2007 (commissioned by Manuel Brito for his Zasterle Press) and July 14, 2008 (when the manuscript was delivered for design)—with the significant bulk of material composed on or after Janu­ary 22, 2008 (the date of Heath Ledger’s death)” (HEATH, pre­ lude). A colophon states: “This book was art directed by Danielle Aubert and designed by Tan Lin in Microsoft Word. The text is set in Courier except where text was imported directly from the Internet, in which case the origi­nal formatting is preserved” (96). But the pages don’t look “designed” at all, and along with the web formatting—color and sizes of typefaces, no-

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Figure 4.3. Tan Lin, page from HEATH Course Pak. Courtesy of Tan Lin.

tably—hard returns, as in Berners-­Lee’s HTML quoted at the head of this essay, were also carried over, such that paragraphs that should justify look like poorly-­formatted poetry, a long line spilling over into the following because of even one extra character (see fig. 4.3). HEATH, and its successor HEATH COURSE PAK, might be Lin’s response to the freewheeling energy of the Flarf poets and the call to plagiar­ ize by Kenneth Goldsmith and other conceptual writers, even as Lin’s earlier work foreshadowed these interests. Even so, HEATH (plagiarism/outsource), which lists seven further contributors on its back cover, is notable for its utter artlessness (this is further from lyric than even Dagmar Chili), its convergence of high and low (the phrase “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” lifted from Eliot, appears on the cover), and its illegibility (many of the fonts are just too small, the screen caps blurry and pixelated), and so stands as the furthest exploration of the “undigest,” at least by someone who identifies as a “poet.” Snelson writes: “The glitchy formatting irregularities of the cover, multiplied by a quick flip-­through of the pages, gives the reader confused impressions of carelessness, haste, and untampered collage. Ampli-

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fying this unresolved unease, the grossly enlarged copyleft and RSS icons with their attendant pseudo-­HTML code are uncannily remediated onto the page, larger than life and out of place” (HEATH, prelude). The “unresolved unease” might be the most salient aspect of an experience with HEATH, as the reader/viewer is left pondering: Why did the book take this form and not one of several other—think of the book as possible world—equally valuable or worthless? Given another time period for composition, and maybe a writer or writers with different predispositions, what other celebrity death would have been memorialized (if that, indeed, is what HEATH does)? If an anthropologist of the future were to retrieve this book from a destroyed library, the final and only remnant of United States culture, would they have thought we subsisted on Jackie Chan’s XTRAGREEN Green Tea Beverage Mix, Blimpies, and Ecstasy? Had the hypomnemeton, the “artificial memory,” of the printed page reached such a crisis that authors no longer nurtured, curated, or otherwise edited and revised written expression, ceding the responsibility for cultural memory to films and computers?

Immanence A model for such an analy­sis of outsider writing can be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s influential essay “What is a Minor Literature?” from their book-­length study of Kafka. In general, the essay concerns writers of religious, cultural, and linguistic minorities who write in a “major” language that they don’t consider their own. In Kafka’s case, this would involve a Czech writing in German, but with the additional linguistic pull of Yiddish, “a language that frightens . . . a language that is lacking a grammar, filled with vocables that are fleeting, mobilized, emigrating, and turned into nomads that interiorize ‘relations of force’ ” (25). The three qualities they discern for minor literature is that it has a “high coefficient of deterritorialization” (linguistic practices that sever language of its traditional meanings, subverting the control of the “masters” in favor of a nomadic play of signification), that it is inherently po­liti­cal due to the “cramped spaces [that] force each in­di­vidual intrigue to connect immediately to politics,” and that it has a collective value because “talent isn’t abundant in minor literature,” and hence authors do not acquire “master” status, but instead are representative of the collective from which they arise. A minor literature doesn’t so much designate a body of writing as “the revolutionary conditions for any literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (16–18). Kafka’s writing, after a process of evacuation, didn’t so much reterritorialize the language with “sense”—Kafka “abandon[ed] sense, render[ed] it no more than implicit . . . he retain[ed] only the skeleton of sense” (21)—

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but denied his language the privilege of cultural or mythic mastery like that of their central counter-­example, Goethe. “What interests Kafka is a pure and intense sonorous material that is always connected to its own abolition,” they write, “a deterritorialized musical sound, a cry that escapes signification, composition, song, words—a sonority that ruptures in order to break away from a chain that is still monotone and always nonsignifying” (6). Since articulated sound was a deterritorialized noise but one that will be reterritorialized in sense, it is now sound itself that will be deterritorialized irrevocably, absolutely. The sound or the word that traverses this new deterritorialization no longer belongs to a language of sense, even though it derives from it, nor is it an organized music or song, even though it might appear to be. We noted Gregor’s warbling and the ways it blurred words, the whistling of the mouse, the cough of the ape, the pianist who doesn’t play, the singer who doesn’t sing and gives birth to her song out of her nonsinging, the musical dogs who are musicians in the very depths of their bodies since they don’t emit any music. Everywhere, organized music is traversed by a line of abolition—just as a language of sense is traversed by a line of escape—in order to liberate a living expressive material that speaks for itself and has no need of being put into form. (21) A minor literature, as this final sentence suggests, is a creativity in reserve, a jostling field of pre-­individuation, in Simondon’s phrase, marked by mere presence over formal appearance. “Deterritorialization” is made possible by what they call elsewhere a preconceptual “plane of immanence,” here characterized by warbling, whistling, and coughing, which bears a relationship to the linguistic but also preserves an autonomy as “living expressive material.” Deleuze and Guatarri note that minor literatures such as Kafka’s are replete with something they call intensives or tensors, those elements that foreground the “internal tensions in language”—“a withered vocabulary, an incorrect syntax.”8 They are “all sorts of master-­words, verbs, or prepositions that assume all sorts of senses; pronominal or purely intensive verbs as in Hebrew; conjunctions, exclamations, adverbs; and terms that connote pain” (22). “Outsider” writing shares qualities with “minor literature,” as “outsider” writing is inherently deterritorialized, if irrevocably so: in addition to void­ ing the accouterments of higher education and the literary establishment, outsider writing lacks an organic relationship to a fixed community, partly because these communities—ethnic, regional, or even national—are less imperative in an era of total simultaneity (indeed, outsider writing makes this geographical void the locus of its emergence). Hence, the inherently po­liti­

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cal and collective nature of minor writing is not readily apparent, as any sort of representational element in outsider literature is eschewed for a gesturing toward a “plane of immanence” prior to an engagement with the symbolic order. “[T]he plane of immanence must be regarded as prephilosophical,” Deleuze and Guatarri write in What is Philosophy?, offering many intriguing metaphors for how the infinite but featureless plane of immanence relates to concepts. Concepts are the archipelago or skeletal frame, a spinal column rather than a skull, whereas the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts. Concepts are absolute surfaces or volumes, formless and fragmentary, whereas the plane is the formless, unlimited absolute, neither surface nor volume but always fractal. Concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane is the abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts. Concepts are events, but the plane is the horizon of events, the reservoir or reserve of purely conceptual events: not the relative horizon that functions as a limit, which changes with an observer and encloses observable states of affairs, but the absolute horizon, independent of any observer, which makes the event as concept independent of a visible state of affairs in which it is brought about. (36) This entire passage is like a litany to Simondon’s notion of the preindiv­idual, the “reservoir or reserve” from which individuals and collectives draw in their individuation. Concepts are “skeletal” while the plane is “breath,” or “fragmentary” while the plane is “continuous”; most interestingly, concepts are “concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine,” giving mass (in the way the Higgs field gives extension to particles) to the “abstract machine” of immanence. The phrase “infinite speed” recurs in What is Philosophy?—the plane of immanence is “a section of chaos . . . characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish”—which stands in contrast to the “ ‘slow beings’ that we are” (42). Finally (and again, like the “field” in physics), “Immanence is immanent only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs All-­One, and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent” (45). The immanent cannot be immanent to something—the mind, the God, the other—but reflects an entire sys­tem of forms and deforms, of movement and relative stasis, of the invisible and appearances. “Transcendence enters as soon as movement of the infinite is stopped,” (47) they note ominously, suggesting a sort of mission for the outsider writer, one directly appealing to ­Damon’s outcast subjects: to avert or avoid final form.

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The Commons of the Margins These works are “fictions” of immanence as no writing can be truly precon­ ceptual—the featureless, infinite qualities of the plane of immanence are unavailable to anything like cognition. The writing is like an engine of detour­ nements, destabilizing everything that comes into its ken in a whirl of free play. We can extrapolate and say that the algorithmic aspect of the Rabel­ aisean web, and by extension all outsider language, is this very proliferation of meanings that occurs outside the bounds of normative, bourgeois norms that strikes a certain fear of an other order, one that cannot be simply contained by proper schooling, detention, or other forms of socialization— work­ing in consort, as a sort of “swarm” in Kristin Ross’s phrase. These aspects merge into what might be identified as the singular affect of outsider writing: that it is grotesque, excessive, and largely irresponsible.9 Charles Bernstein, in arguing for seeing mainstream writing as a “minority literature” in a culture of minority literatures, valorizes an attention to “dissident forms of life, manners of speaking, ways of thinking” (225) while, of course, maintaining a firm distance from the poetics of personality that one associates with writers in the wake of the Beats. In “Poetics of the Americas,” Bernstein advocates an understanding of “dialect” poetry as a species of a larger category, “ideolectical” writing, characterized by its “nomadic,” de-­centralizing nature: [I] think we have moved away from the choice of subjective, objective, or even constructive and toward a synthesizing or juxtaposing of these approaches. Here the influence of the dialect poetries of the modernist period gives way to a dialectical poetry that refuses allegiance to standard English without necessarily basing its claim on an affiliation with a definable group’s speaking practice. The norm enforces a conduct of representation that precludes poetry as an active agent to further thought, unbound to the restrictions of rationalized ordering systems. Poetry can be a process of thinking rather than a report of things already settled, an investigation of figuration rather than a picture of something fig­ured out. Such ideologically informed nonstandard language practice I call ideolectical. (117) Bernstein fig­ures a group of poetries, or poetic practices, as a sort of entropic force on the “norm [that] enforces a conduct of representation that precludes poetry as an active agent to further thought,” which generally fall under the sign of “standard English.” “Non-­standard” writing is, however, not merely a negative field—it’s not the not-­standard, the set of exclusions— but exhibits in the positive productions of poets. “The invention of an ide-

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olectical English-­language poetry as a poetry of the Americas involves the replacement of the national and geographically centered category of English (or Spanish) poetry not with the equally essentialist category of Ameri­can poetry but with a field of potentialities, a virtual America that we approach but never possess. English languages, set adrift from the sight/sound sensorium of the concrete experiences of the English people, are at their hearts uprooted and translated: nomadic in origin, absolutely particular in practice. Invention in this context is not a matter of choice: it is as necessary as the ground we walk on” (117). Bernstein strikes a Deleuzian note with his advocacy of “nomadic” poetries, but the key notion is that of the “virtual” America that we “never possess.” As Steven Shaviro notes, Deleueze’s notion of the virtual was that of an “impersonal and pre-­in­di­vidual transcendental field” and stands in contrast to the merely possible: To say that something is possible is to say nothing more than that its concept cannot be excluded a priori, on logical grounds alone. This means that possibility is a purely negative category; it lacks any proper being of its own. Mere possibility is not generative or productive; it is not enough to make anything happen. It does not satisfy the principle of sufficient reason. This is why Deleuze says that “the possible is opposed to the real” . . . The virtual, on the other hand, is altogether real in its own right; it “possesses a full reality by itself.” It is just that this reality is not actual. The virtual is like a field of energies that have not yet been expended, or a reservoir of potentialities that have not yet been tapped. That is to say, the virtual is not composed of atoms; it doesn’t have body or extension. But the potential for change that it offers is real in its own way. In the Proustian formulation so frequently used by Deleuze, the virtual is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract” . . . The virtual is a principle of emergence, or of creation. As such, it does not prefig­ure or predetermine the actualities that emerge from it. Rather, it is the impelling force, or the principle, that allows each actual entity to appear (to manifest itself) as something new, something without precedence or resemblance, something that has never existed in the universe in quite that way before. (34) Enforcing a rapprochement of Deleuze and Badiou, one could state that it is from the “virtual” that the true event could erupt, as the event is never merely just the mechancial unfolding of activities from what is already in the world. “Poetics of the Americas” is replete with quotations from a wide range of poets who are “particular in practice” and seeks, in my mind, to

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merge the interests of postcolonial and multicultural theory with the “constructivist” concerns of the “avant-­garde,” between the seemingly formalistic writing of, for example, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, and the “nation language” of Edward Kamaou Brathwaite. Even if Bernstein doesn’t wish to divorce his language from something that could be epistemologically verifiable, his notion of a “virtual America” as a sort of horizon is suggestive to me of something hovering beyond the possible, not something that we “approach” in Bernstein’s spatial metaphor but which grounds our very field of activities. My sense is that recent poetry seems to be referencing this phantom limb of the marginal in the form of Flarf poetry, conceptual poetry, neo-­ Situationist poetry, neo-­Oulipian poetry, digital poetry, and even the new forms of engagement with pub­lic rheto­ric that one sees in the writing of ­Juliana Spahr, who of­ten fig­ures herself as a marginal fig­ure even if (as in The Transformation) she is painfully aware of another order of margin. The first Flarf poem, “Mm-­hmm,” was conceived as a “deliberately bad” poem by Gary Sullivan for submission to Poetry.com, and it exhibits all the qualities of outsider writing, particularly its granularity: Yeah, mm-­hmm, it’s true big birds make big doo! I got fire inside my “huppa”-­chimp(TM) gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god wanna DOOT! DOOT! Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey! oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee) uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get off the paddy field . . . (“The Flarf Files”) The poem ends, “Thank you God, for listening!” even as the sonic expression of this poem is impossible to (merely) imagine. CA Conrad, for whom YouTube and Facebook are as readily forums for the dissemination of his work as the books themselves, includes a prose poem in his first collection, Deviant Propulson, that laments “the fringe of the queer community [that is] forgotten, even censored,” and ends with an appeal to the sort of infinite speed of communication that the plane of immanence calls forth: “Can you resurrect queens as backbone of queer leadership? Do you make the high heeled, bitch hammer grade? Do you have

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Sissy Pride? Interested in victory? Contact CAConrad at (215)563-­3075, or ­[email protected]” (59). Though the majority of Deviant Propulsion can be called “lyrics,” a few poems contain some of the “outsider” qualities noted above, such as “P for Interest in Waking”: ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( Pertho West perforate the language bring no sleeping bag HEY does this mean we’re not staying? Means there’s no sleeping weigh your English Brother by date and hour of atrocity weigh ourselves complicit with every unanswered damnation my pop at cardboard box factory meditation not preservation’s sanity but sanity’s preservation Philly sounds of PhillySound not you take that P poets (!) sounding Philly young palomino vegetarian in land of the cheese steak. . . .10 (54) British poet Keston Sutherland’s poem “Hot White Andy” also appeals to the virtues of the virtual even as it remains closely tied, as John Wilkinson argues in his short review “Mandarin Ducks and Chee-­chee Chokes,” to a materialist, Marxist critique: Lavrov and the Stock Wizard levitate over to the blackened dogmatic catwalk and you eat them. Now swap buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck, phlegmophrenic, want to go to the windfarm, Your • kids menu lips swinging in the Cathex-­Wizz monoplex; Your • face lifting triple its age in Wuhan die-­cut peel lids; ng pick Your out the reregulated loner PAT to to screw white chocolate to the bone. The tension in an unsprung r trap co → The tension in an unsprung trap. ck QUANT unpruned wing: sdeigne of JOCK of how I together grateful anyway I was Its sacked glass, Punto → What is be done on the sly is manic gargling . . . (“Hot White Andy”) Wilkinson’s argument that “this poetic script bears no fraternal relationship to the textual blocking and dislocating performed by the most radical products of Ameri­can Language writing” because “it entertains designs which are quite lucid and elucidable” is on the one hand unnecessary (the product of some obsession with generic purity) and on the other hand belied by Wilkinson’s own recourse to the language of “indeterminacy” in his

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“elucidation,” as when he writes that the word “chichi” “sounds like a stuttered Chinese but is derived from chee-­chee, a racist term for the ‘hybrid minced English’ spoken by ‘half-­breeds’ in India (and derived, according to the OED, from a dismissive Hindi word corresponding to ‘Fie!’ (really?!), and origi­nally meaning filth). Again, Sutherland suppresses the hyphen in ‘chi-­chi’. (As a further shade of meaning, pace the OED I have usually heard ‘chi-­chi’ used mistakenly as a variant on ‘chic’)” (Wilkinson). This recourse to the OED seems to me a decidedly arbitrary form of linguistic grounding, and certainly an esoteric one—will later editions of the OED continue to confirm Wilkinson’s interpretation, or will scholars of the future have to refer to Wilkinson’s exact edition to discern such certainties from Sutherland’s poem? Clearly, if the word “chichi” sounds like a “stuttered Chinese” to Wilkinson then it must be—it has registered as such, it is in existence and can’t be forgotten—just as it must also be “chic” (one would have to explain how a colloquialism could be “mistaken,” just as “pissed” is not a mistaken variant on “incensed” or “drunk”). Wilkinson describes what, to me, is the definition of “indeterminacy” and a distance away from the “undecidability” that appears in the poem by Ben­ Lerner, in which recursion and renewed contexts limited the range of pos­sible solutions. It’s difficult to imagine Sutherland writing a poem as crammed with such linguistic garbage (even if replete with allusion), whose very speed of execution is encouraged by wayfinding symbols, and imagining that the contemporary readers will understand “chichi” as derived from “a dismissive Hindi word corresponding to ‘Fie!’ ”—there simply isn’t enough information in the poem to direct us there. Regardless of intentions, “Hot White Andy” seems, to my mind, to suggest that there is no necessary contradiction between an “outsider” poetics with its appeals to the virtual and nonstandard—one that suggests an epiphenomenal supersubject arising from the realm of actual events and occasions—and the type of analytic poetics grounded in philology that Wilkinson seems to favor.

5 Terrible Engines Toward a Literature of Sets

A Quasi-­Dominant In his influential study Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale argues for what he calls a shift in the “dominant”1 between the eras of the Modernist novel (typified by writers like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner) and the postmodernist novel (typified by writers like Robbe-­Grillet, Fuentes, and Pynchon) (3). In McHale’s view, the former, modernist era is characterized by an “epistemological” dominant that questions the availability to a human consciousness of “reality”: objects, spatial relations, concepts, other human psychologies, even the past. In the postmodernist era, however, the in­di­vidual subject herself seems to have disappeared; the postmodernist is guided by an “ontological” dominant in which certitudes such as the self, the singularity of this world (over that of infinite simulacra), the transparency of the text (as a window onto “reality”), and the ontological status of literature (within the culture, across cultures, as constituting a past) themselves are questioned. While “realism” of a sort remains a concern in either quarter, the first category targets a realism of subjectivity, characterized by novels that chart—in a journalistic, authorial fashion—how the mind works in gathering knowledge through time, while in the sec­ond, postmodernist category, a realism of signification emerges in works that explore text as a liminal space, as something like an excrescence of the mind, a modest proof of thought. If the Modernist text asks what an author can know, the postmodernist asks, with a degree of pathos: can we with any confidence say there is an author, if there is only text? Some authors bridge these two dominants, notably Samuel Beck-

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ett, whose Watt can be read as an extension of the epistemological method of stream of consciousness into the purely formal, mathematical reaches of the mind, such that the only surety of consciousness is the pure difference of words as they exist in a continuum of text. Rather than address the accuracy or robustness of McHale’s schema, I’d like to use it to outline some new trends in experimental writing in fiction, poetry, “conceptual writing”2 and works that even this last capacious category can’t cover. Writers from very different circles, and with very different genre identifications and varying degrees of pub­lic renown, seem to be moving toward similar formal concerns—working with closed sets of words, a preoccupation with number, and recursive structures among them—in an act of synchronicity characteristic of a dominant. They have, for one, jettisoned human subjectivity as the central concern of literature. Humans as characters have not been universally banned from these works, but they have been demoted, relegated to being objects among other objects, or even objects among systems and relations. The question of human knowledge is still important; but rather than wallowing in the impasse that there is no knowledge of the world untainted by cognition or conceptual categories, these recent works are comfortable with the ultimate impossibility of divining essences or absolutes through thought. In fact, these works bracket the subjectivity of their “characters” (when they have them) in favor of subjecting readers directly to the work and putting objects for study in their hands, both literally and figuratively. In some more extreme cases, these writers even imagine a future in which literature will not be made by or for humans at all—what Christian Bök has a dubbed a “robopoetics.” These texts can, I propose, be seen as formal arrangements, perhaps as prostheses, possessing qualities we associate with architecture and engineer­ ing: of­ten intricately constructed, they foreground formal symmetries, lay their structures bare, and generally aspire to the status of the monument, a his­tori­cal investiture distinguished from the “organic” or “natural” landscape (which is to say, other people’s writing) by an obvious ingenuity. Many of the works involved in this mode receive no small amount of criticism for reasons that seem directly related to their ready pub­lic dissemination, particularly through the Internet: they are of­ten easy to describe, and their descriptions of­ten seem carved out for tweeting and listing on aggregators of cultural oddities like Boing Boing and reddit. Here are a few of them: In 1997, Kenneth Goldsmith, a RISD-­trained sculptor who employed language in his art, publishes No. 111.2.7.93–10.20.96, a book composed entirely of phrases ending in the “r” (or related schwa) sound. The phrases are divided among themselves according to syllable count;

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each set is then organized alphabetically and placed in a section titled for that count. For example, section VIII opens, “A beer does not come with in-­laws, a Bohemian reformer, a bridge from nowhere to nowhere, a bunch of crap thrown together, a dog will not bite his brother, a few kernels short of an ear, a fly betty is really your, A frog in a liquidizer!, a giant Nintendo nightmare.” (97) In 2001, Canadian poet Christian Bök publishes Eunoia, a book-­length prose poem, each chapter of which only permits the use of words that use one of the vowels to the exclusion of all others (a constraint known as the “universal lipogram”). While deeply indebted to writers of the Oulipo, especially Georges Perec, whose novel La dispari­ tion excluded the letter “e,” Bök attempts to create “beautiful thinking” (the meaning of “eunoia”) while smothering conventional human creativity and expression. The “e” chapter, for example, tells the story of H ­ omer’s O ­ dyssey through the eyes of Helen: “Whenever Helen feels these stresses, she trembles. She frets. Her helplessness vexes her. She feels depressed (even when her cleverest beekeepers fetch her the freshest sweets). She feels neglected (even when her shrewdest gemseekers fetch her the greenest jewels). She regrets her wretchedness, her dejectedness; she keeps her deepest regrets secret. She never lets herself express her echt Weltschmerz.” (48) In 2002, Nick Montfort and William Gillespie publish, both online and in book form, a 2,002-­word-­long palindrome titled, unsurprisingly, “2002: A Palindrome Story.” The story begins with a fairly conventional invocation of the muse—“2002 demands lore—aside Roman-­era eye, non-­idyl. Guerilla muse, we call, rig. Yo! Brag us an ode-­tale.”— and ends in defeat—“Crass algebra. Eyes pale, Bob teems red, aero-­ elated on a sugar: ‘Boy . . . girl lace!’ We sum all: ire, ugly din. One year enamored is aero-­LSD named 2002.” (22) In 2006, Mark Z. Danielewski publishes Only Revolutions, the long-­ awaited follow-­up to his best-­selling debut novel, House of Leaves (2000). Graphically intricate, Only Revolutions explores the properties of algorithm in its construction, partly through the Web (he gathered text, such as the names of animals, plants, and cars, from readers on his fansite), and partly through its elaborately recursive structure. Exactly 360 pages long, one version of the narrative told by the female protagonist, Hailey, runs along the top part of the page, the other (the same story but from the perspective of Sam, the male protagonist) upside down along the bottom. One is instructed to read an eight-­page

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chapter and then to turn the book over to read the next eight pages, starting from the other end of the book, from the other perspective. Each page spread has exactly 360 words, four chunks of ninety in a sort of variable stanza form, two running along the top, two upside down on the bottom. In 2009, critic and poet Craig Dworkin publishes the first of his series of poems called “Fact,” the entire content of which is the detailed description of the chemical composition of the medium conveying it. The version that appears in Poetry, for instance, is composed entirely of the physical components of ink and paper: “Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-­pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%.” In 2010, popu­lar literary novelist Jonathan Safran Foer (best known for 2005’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, eventually turned into a film starring Tom Hanks) publishes Tree of Codes, a text entirely drawn from the text of Bruno Schulz’s 1934 short story collection Street of Crocodiles. Tree of Codes makes a new fiction (complete sentences, characters, narrative arcs, etc.) out of the origi­nal text by physically subtracting, as with a razor, those parts of Schulz’s pages Foer chose not to utilize in his new text. Described by the publisher as a “sculptural object,” Tree of Codes appears when opened as if a gang of opinionated, literary termites had made their way through the book, only eating those parts they didn’t particularly prefer. Despite the diversity of procedures, strategies, and products in the above works, I’d like to outline a few commonalities: 1. Immediately evident here is a concern with number in the form of counting (syllables in phrases, words on the page or in a stanza), scientific measurements (degrees in a circle, percentages of chemical components), and units of time (the year 2002, the twenty-­four hours in a day). In this way, most of these works point back to that most numerically affiliated work of the Oulipo, Raymond Queneau’s series of variable sonnets Cent mille milliards de poèmes, which would take some 200 million years to read even if reading twenty-­four hours a day. 2. In addition there is a fascination with sets, such as the set of letters in the first half of a palindrome (reproduced in reverse order in the ­sec­ond half), the set of words more or less common to the English language (in­clud­ing some French and German) that use a single vowel,

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and the set of words (along with their exact placement) in a published text such as Street of Crocodiles, from which a new text—a subset—is ­literally carved. While none of the works seem to be concerned with formal logic, the equation of words with sets seems to create a bridge that symbolic languages build between pure mathematics and semantic units, favoring neither one over the other. 3. One can notice a fascination with recursion, notably in the form of the chiasmus—a reverse parallelism in which the sec­ond half of a statement somehow mirrors the first—or even the more constrained antimetabole, the rhe­tori­cal fig­ure in which, in addition to the mirroring, the same words are used. This is notable in the works of “fiction,” each of which are engaged in elaborate symmetries reaching-­over-­voids of time and space, but also in the chiasmic structures of the sentences in Eunoia. 4. Finally, each of the works are preoccupied with scale, working along a gradient of excess and exhaustion. Some works seem to elevate very minor elements of the language (words with one syllable, words ending a particular sound, the names of cars or plants) or of things (the atomic composition of paper) and let them override common notions of literary economy (excess) while executing a basic writing algorithm—­ collect all the words that satisfy this or that constraint, use every letter in the first half in the sec­ond in reverse order, etc.—for as long as called for (exhaustion). The finitude of the book form is played off against the possible infinity of elements in the sets. These preoccupations—with numbers, sets, recursion, and scale—all point to a desire to foreground “non-­meaningful” aspects of language that do not themselves contribute to affect (in the way an em-­dash might, for example, in a poem by William Carlos Williams) but suggest instead a mathematical syntax. In performance, the algorithmic substratum of the texts—the crippling structures, and the hints of sys­tem in the welter of randomness—are brought to life, perhaps back to life, by an activated reader. Such a reader can be said to “execute” the algorithm behind the text, in Lev Manovich’s formulation concerning video games: “As the player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the rules which operate in the universe constructed by this game. She learns its hidden logic, in short its algorithm (“Data­base as a Symbolic Form” 5). Thus, the work continues to maintain its social function (even as expressive content is deleted) while straying into the aesthetics of pure sound, repetitive and yet replete with variations, that one associates with the minimalist music of Charlemagne Palestine, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich.

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Games This meeting of number and laughter points to perhaps the most obvious feature of the speculative works above, which is that they were written in the spirit of play, perhaps as games themselves. Initial theories of the ludic considered whether play can be considered an intuition or biological need (a sort of “nature” theory), or a cultural function, a way for humans and animals to train for adult behaviors such as hunting and self-­defense (a sort of “nurture” version). Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) rejected both versions, claiming that these explanations understand play as handmaiden to biology or society and not as a discrete vital phenomenon in itself. Huizinga saw play as foundational, at the root of nearly all forms of human institution. A court of law, for example, maintains many of the qualities of games: the “magic circle” in which the game is considered active, the willing submission to rules for the sake of continuing the game (the one who rejects those rules is called the “spoil sport” or “heretic”), the inherent seriousness of game play, and the maintenance by players of the understanding that they are in a separate form of reality, if not a state of “make-­believe,” then at least one in which we are aware that the normative social physics are no longer active (e.g., courtroom etiquette). Play “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly” and “only becomes possible when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos” (3). Works in this speculative quasi-­dominant hypostasize Huizinga’s notion of the “magic circle”—a spatial and temporal limit outside of which the rules of play do not adhere— to the point of solipsism, that is, what happens within the work occurs with a seriousness about the constraint or process that overrides concerns with conventional “realism” or expression. These works all, at the very least, make of the conventions of “literature”—the fact that it’s “published,” but especially the notion that it’s “creative”—appear wildly overdetermined. Roger Caillois introduces a different vocabulary in his book Man, Play and Games (1961), notably by foregrounding the role of chance, which he calls alea, as a central feature. He also makes explicit the continuum along which forms of play exist, from that of full-­formed “games” (in­clud­ing rules and variable outcomes), which he calls ludus, to unstructured “play,” which he calls paidia. One associates the former with football or tennis, the latter with, say, children dressing up dolls or whacking each other with lightsabers on a Saturday afternoon or with the varieties of “environmental storytelling” (e.g., theme parks and video games) described by Henry Jenkins in his influential essay “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”: “Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-­existing narrative

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associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-­en-­scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives” (121). Bernard Suits, responding to the formulations of Huizinga and Caillois, focuses more specifically on “games” rather than “play” and creates what, for me, is the most useful formulation for discussing games in relation to works of literature. His criteria for what constitutes a “game” are as follows: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]” (54–55). One can concretize this schema by using its language to describe the game of ice hockey: the prelusory goal, imagined as a snapshot of some final state of affairs, is to have the puck appear in the opponent’s goal (we are not concerned, just yet, with how it gets there); the lusory means, in the physical sense, would be the hockey stick and a combination of slapping, shuffling, and passing; the constitu­ tive rules could include anything from the number of players permitted on a team, the penalties associated with offsides or rough checking, or the illegality of simply picking the puck up and placing it in the goal; the lusory attitude is the investment all players have in the game, the agreement that there is a possible way to “win” or “lose,” and the desirability of the former over the latter. The humor of performances of strictly “conceptual” work can be described in the terms Henri Bergson uses in his 1900 work Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Invoking terrible engines of his own, Bergson postulates that laughter occurs in those moments when the machinic essence of human movement and thought is brought abruptly to attention, as when a man walking down the street slips on a banana peel, or when Don Quixote, transfixed by some corner of his consciousness, sees windmills as dragons. Bergson speculates on the grimace as a calcification of human fluidity: “One would say that the person’s whole moral life has crystallized into this particular cast of features. This is the reason why a face is all the more comic, the more nearly it suggests to us the idea of some simple mechani­cal action in which its personality would forever be absorbed” (25). In Bergson’s theory, laughter reveals a certain fiction about our relationship to matter. We are all, in some sense, vitalists: we like to think that we are whole, fluid, and organic, that we possess unassailable mental interiors that are almost sublime in their flexibility, and that our physical exteriors are merely extensions of that spiritual realm. But Bergson suggests to the contrary that the physical body is quite solid and rigid, if considered properly, and that there

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of­ten isn’t an easy transport between the mind and the physical form (if we adhere to the basic Cartesian dualism for the moment). The body is as subject to the laws of time and space as any clump of dirt, the wind in the trees, or store window mannequin. Each of the literary works I’ve listed above seems, to some degree, to have been created with some consciousness of how it will appear on a timeline of literary master works—that is, as a decidedly singular intervention in the literary canon—as well as in the physical landscape (or network) of books and readers—that is, as an inscrutable object apart from the normative, organic communion readers have with creative writers. To this degree, each of these works starts with a distinct prelusory goal—“my novel or poem will have such and such qualities”—as well as a set of constitutive rules, what are otherwise known as a “process” (in works like No. 111, which merely unfolded in the day-­to-­day existence of the author) or “constraint” (in a work like Eunoia, where, in addition to the word sets, there were constraints on paragraph length, sentence structure, and narrative vignettes). If there is a lusory attitude, it might be something along the lines that the habitus of literary production itself, once its apparent fluidities have hypostatized into convention, is a game: one doesn’t write expressively or creatively but in response to a feedback sys­tem of exertion and reward that we pretend doesn’t exist (a sys­tem Mark McGurl explores in his exhaustive history of Ameri­ can MFA programs, The Program Era, or which Pierre Bourdieu examines more abstractly in Distinction). One publishes not as a natural extension of having written something of value, but to insert something distinctive into a continuum of other books already in “play.” This attitude goes hand-­ in-­hand with the lusory means, which, depending on whether a project is dominated by a spirit of process or constraint, can either be liberating or crippling.

A Literature of Sets The author, or information architect, of the above works is engaged in some sort of game whose rules of­ten, if not always, rely on thinking of words as pieces or tokens—which is to say, as elements in a formal language, perhaps as numbers themselves. Thinking of letters as numbers ascribes to them an indexical relationship to something in what is commonly referred to as “reality” even if non-­sensual. That is, though we are now comfortable since Saus­sure’s Course in General Linguistics with the arbitrary nature of the word-­to-­thing relationship, the paragrammatic approach to textual construction hinges on the simple identificatory (or prelogical) equation of a letter to i­ tself—­“0” equals “0”—as the site of an irrefutable necessity, a taut­

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ology or formal absolute. The works above, much as some of them are characterized by virtuosic feats of graphic design, do not focus on the “materiality” of language as commonly understood in terms of color, font, or physical features of the book, but rather highlight the self-­organizing potential of language over and above its semantic value, the effect it might have on the “reader.” The play of the referent—the polysemeity of the sign as valorized in Language poetry, for example, or in the ontological stage of literature in McHale’s schema—is not the goal of these writers, so much as the formation of a radical form of indexicality through which the reflexive property of objects—that they always already equal themselves—will come to supersede or compensate for that ineluctable property of words, which is that they never equal what they are pointing to. Letters and words treated as numbers in turn create equations out of their textual structure; letters and words both buttress them and comprise them. The work of literature itself forms, then, a sort of proof. Such a proof might not necessarily unfold with the hermetic complexity of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (which Quentin Meillassoux convincingly argues is largely organized around numerical motifs): on the contrary, it would be accessible to any reader of literature who passed high school algebra. Fiction and poetry are now able to make statements about reality, albeit speculative ones, which are based not on journalistic observation but rather on the integrity of mathematical thinking, however etiolated it might be. What these works offer to the reader is access to what we might term the “unthinkable.” Meillassoux’s careful dissection of the problems of the Kantian tradition in After Finitude is apposite, particularly the central issue of how to find a place within philosophy for what is beyond thought. For Meil­ las­soux, once something has been thought—even something of a perfectly abstract, absurd, or contradictory nature—it has entered the realm of “correlationism,” in which we must consider objects as indissolubly bound in a mind→object relationship. There is no way in Meillassoux’s framework (based on his idiosyncratic reading of Kant) to consider what we’ll call the universe, without also considering the mind thinking it. Likewise, there is no way to conceive of the mind apart from the operations of experience: the mind’s engagement with the outside, the not-­I, or reality. The “great outdoors” to Meillassoux is that part of the universe to which the mind doesn’t have access through empirical or theoretical methods. The aim of speculative realists—and this is where they intersect with the apparently non-­realist, highly structured mode of the writers under consideration—is to create a description of this great outdoors (a metaphysics, even if this term is of­ten disavowed) without the language of description, which would reduce this outdoors to mere thought.

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Meillassoux theorizes a “hyper-­chaos” characterized by a contingency that can be called the governing law of the universe, though any notion of an absolute law characterized by necessity is anathema to the speculative realists, who do not wish to a return to a pre-­Kantian metaphysics (e.g., that of a Descartes, Leibniz, or Berke­ley) that places God, a realm of ideal forms, or some total Being as a transcendent super-­object or grand design from which the plurality of objects are derived. “For we know two things that the sceptic did not,” he writes. “First, that contingency is necessary, and hence eternal; sec­ond, that contingency alone is necessary” (65). Necessity cannot be acknowledged, because we would then be forced into a teleological account of the events of the universe, pointing to a day of revelation that would imply a transcendent author who is perfect yet who permits suffering and injustice. Suffice it to say, works in the speculative quasi-­dominant counter the apocalyptic tendency, in the compelling argument of Frank Kermode in Sense of an Ending, of all plotted narrative; resolution doesn’t lie at the end of the road, the author-­as-­justice never makes an appearance. Meillassoux makes a clear distinction between what he calls “chance” and that central feature of the hyper-­chaos, which is “contingency.” The great outdoors is not characterized by “chance” since, were that to be the case, the physical laws of the universe would change entirely with every throw of the dice. Triangles, for example, could have three sides in one unit of time; with another throw, triangles could be characterized by having three angles but four sides, or no angles but six sides, or several curves while still conforming to the laws of the Pythagorean theorem. This doesn’t seem to be happening or, if so, humans have proven remarkably resilient in adapting to incessantly changing physical universes (and at retroactively con­ struct­ing histories that maintain the illusion of constancy, like in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven). Contingency is still characterized by a form of ­randomness—­it is certainly not governed by necessity—but because it is exponentially more random than “chance,” the die actually comes up again and again with the same face showing. Though Meillassoux is not as adamant as his teacher Badiou to place mathematics at the center of ontology, his concept of contingency is largely based on his understanding of Cantor’s set theory, which he describes in accessible fashion: “Cantor’s theorem,” as it is known, can be intuitively glossed as follows: take any set, count its elements, then compare this number to the number of possible groupings of these elements (by two, by three— but there are also groupings “by one,” or “by all,” which is identical with the whole set). You will always obtain the same result: the set B of possible groupings (or parts) of a set A is always bigger than A—

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even if A is infinite. It is possible to construct an unlimited succession of infinite sets, each of which is of a quantity superior to that of the set whose parts it collects together. This succession is known as the series of alephs, or the series of transfinite cardinals. But this series itself cannot be totalized, in other words, it cannot be collected together into some “ultimate” quantity . . . Consequently, this “quantity of all quantities” is not construed as being “too big” to be grasped by thought—it is simply construed as not existing. Within the standard set-­theoretical axiomatic, that which is quantifiable, and even more generally, that which is thinkable—which is to say, sets in general, or whatever can be constructed or demonstrated in accordance with the requirement of consistency—does not constitute a totality. For this totality of the thinkable is itself logically inconceivable, since it gives rise to a contradiction. We will retain the following translation of Cantor’s transfinite: the (quantifiable) totality of the thinkable is unthinkable. (104) In a sense, the numerical sublime of the transfinite exists even beyond the exponential increase of the infinite set because exponents rely on a finite, if complex, series of operations; instead, the path to the transfinite relies on a set of layered recursions that is, itself, infinite in number given that recursive operations can operate forever if lacking the constraint of a break, the condition that if such-­and-­such a point is reached the recursion ceases. Elegant as Meillassoux’s description of Cantor’s theorem is, Cantor’s “diagonal argument,” here recounted by Dana Mackenzie as an architectural metaphor, renders these recursions concrete: Suppose that I try to come up with a room assignment for all the real numbers between 0 and 1. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the list starts as follows: Room 1: 0.1415926 ... (the decimal part of pi) Room 2: 0.7182818 ... (the decimal part of Euler’s number e) Room 3: 0.4142135 ... (the decimal part of “12) Room 4: 0.5000000 ... Room 5: 0.1011001 ... (I’m running out of interesting numbers, so this is just a random string of l’s and O’s). Notice that the first digit of the first number is highlighted, as is the sec­ond digit of the sec­ond number, and so forth. Now Georg Cantor comes along and asks me, “Which room is this number in?” and he writes down the number 0.22511 . . . It’s no secret how Cantor got this number: he simply took each of the bold numerals and added 1 to it. (If he had encountered the nu-

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meral 9, he would have changed it to a 0.) Cantor’s number cannot be in room 1 because its first digit disagrees with the number there. It cannot be in room 2 because its sec­ond digit disagrees with the number there. In fact, for the same reason it cannot be in any of the rooms in the hotel. The room assignment is incomplete! More importantly, Georg could repeat this procedure for any room assignment I came up with. Thus there is no way to accommodate the real numbers between 0 and 1 in the hotel (and so, of course, there is no way to accommodate all the real numbers). (185) The “transfinite” exists, in this fable, in those rooms that exist beyond this hotel, the “great outdoors,” which, we’ve noted, consists of the “infinite” num­ ber of real numbers between 0 and 1 (misleading as these spatial metaphors are). The concept of the “transfinite” permits Meillassoux to articulate a sphere that governs chance and yet is in place of necessity, one that, nonetheless, formally underlies the consistency that we appear to witness in our physi­cal and mental universes. In a work yet to be completed but known presently as the Divine Inexis­ tence, Meillassoux calls those very rare moments when contingency changes what is possible within the world an “advent”: “God did not create thought, and nothing in the world was thinking before the advent of thought; God did not create the suffering or pleasure found in vital activity, and nothing suffered or enjoyed in the world before the advent of life. This indicates in the most striking fashion that if we think advent in its truth, it is an advent ex nihilo and thus without any reason at all, and for that very reason it is without limit. In revealing the contingency of laws, reason itself teaches that becoming is ultimately without reason. . . . [A]dvent ex nihilo does not conceal an essentially religious notion, but forms instead the sole immanent concept of becoming. It expresses the fact that what arises suddenly in the world does so thanks not to a Supreme Being, but to the absence of any governing principle of becoming” (Philosophy in the Making 176–77). These new forms of literature under discussion—characterized as they are by the total erasure of subjectivity, by their equation-­like nature, by their game structures, by their concern with sets and scale, and even by their strange humor that is, nonetheless, not absurd or pessimistic—provides a way to access the hyper-­chaos, or the unthinkable, without corruption by thought itself. They don’t only point to the uncertain nature of the world as we know it, but offer a way to see past the next “advent”—a time after contingency has changed the total set of possibilities. Unlike the chance-­based operations of writers like John Cage and Jackson MacLow, which sought to bring us closer to the random nature of the present world, these works can be said—I really want

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to be modest in my claims—to point beyond possible experience, to a time and place beyond our present era of the possible. In a sense, they gesture, like Queneau’s sonnets, to the impossible, what our present universe can’t allow. For our purposes, the time beyond the next “advent,” rather than mere chance, is made available by the foregrounded and formalized rule-­based play of these speculative works of literature. Such works, that is, bracket the indeterminacies of semiotic “play” in favor of the ephemeral necessities of the rule-­based game. To Meillassoux, the only absolute that we acknowledge in metaphysics is the necessity of contingency; these works seem to agree, if only in the transition within them between the arbitrary nature of game-­ like rules and the absolute nature of literary artifice. We can thus read the set of poetic works I briefly described above as philosophical objects, even as “transitional objects” in child psychologist D. W. Winnicott’s sense. Like a security blanket easing our turn to a new form of realism beyond thought, such speculative texts propose a realism based no longer either on journalistic descriptions of the “world” as it reaches the “mind,” or on dramatizations of the failure of the subject (or writing itself) to obtain knowledge of essences. Rather, such writing is premised on staging the “unthinkable,” the absolutely contingent nature of a world. We gain access to this unthinkable through our witnessing the boundedness of “chance” in rule-­based literature, the speculative function of a novel or poem which until now has always been characterized by the absolute control of a “creative” author.

Exhibits We can now turn, armed, if incompletely, with a set of terms from our consideration of games, numbers, sets, and recent metaphysics, to the texts mentioned earlier to describe some of their properties.

a. Kenneth Goldsmith, No. 111 One can recognize several laws interweaving in this massive tome of syllables, words, phrases, sentences, and, finally, short story (D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-­Horse Winner,” which comprises the entire final section). The most notable compositional law would be that of number: the phrases are organized according to syllable count and alphabetized. (Alphabetization, for our purposes, is numerical, especially as computer sorting algorithms rely on the numerical index behind the Unicode letterset). The sec­ond would be the law of genre, here calcified into a Bergsonian grimace: the work seems to beg to be called a “poem,” though it features qualities one normally associates with the novel, such as the length, the heteroglossia of voices, and

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the Rabelaisian collapse, in Bakhtin’s sense, of high/low distinctions. The final law would be that of the concept itself; while not a work of “constraint-­ based” literature, the concept, arbitrary at core, rests on the im­preg­na­bility of every phrase having to end with an “r” (or related) sound. The author, though he does indeed have to make choices, is reduced to the role of Maxwell’s demon, permitting some phrases to enter and banishing others. In each given sequence of phrases, all three laws can be discerned. Following is an excerpt from section 10, fourteen phrases of ten syllables that could form something of a sonnet when linebreaks are inserted after each comma. I’ve underlined those letters in which the law of number is o ­ perative: Go Cry On Somebody Else’s Shoulder, go out and get yourself some grass-­killer, go out through the motion sensitive doors, go Upstate and get your head together, God is a concept by which we measure, God is honest. He don’t take payola, God! This is a tasty little sucker!, gotta run the cat’s caught in the printer, grant me a respite of two or three years, great green globs of greasy grimy gopher, Guess I have some growing up to do huh?, gunpowder for trees and lemon leather, hairball blocking the drain of the shower, Has anyone ever Spamized a car? (137) The law of number is expressed entirely in the first letter when the transition is from a phrase starting with one letter to a phrase starting with another (the “g” to “h” progression above) but can extend deeper into the phrase when a word like “God” begins a series (“God is a concept” to “God is honest”). This is pure algorithm: the author has submitted a major formal quality, the ordering of the sentences, to the alphabetic sequence. At the end of the phrase, however, number in this fashion has disappeared and the work of the author is most apparent. Formal decisions concerning what is in fact a complete phrase—can it be a list of nouns? a complex noun? a gerundive action? a complete sentence?—combine with authorial decisions about what constitutes the “schwa” sound (if a word like “payola,” for example, could be included in a list of clearly articulated “r” endings, then the potential number of phrases in this text explodes). Notable here is the flurry of subjectivities that become available beyond the jurisdiction of these two laws. Affect appears in this work only sponta-

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neously, confirming the creativity inherent in a radically immanent, even vitalist, concept of the language, while demonstrating that true novelty only appears beyond the strictures of logic or narrative. That is, “God! This is a tasty little sucker!” is a true non sequitur: there is nothing in the progression of phrases that would allow us to anticipate this micro-­subject’s sudden appreciation for a lollipop. Other observations we can make about these fourteen lines—the emergence of iambic rhythms, the apparent articulation of themes, the breakdown of the stress count in the final line—suggest a strong intersection with the genre of poetry, but other sections of No. 111 are notable in offering no possibility of being construed as traditional poetry and hence are, from the standpoint of the critics of poetry, unthinkable even as they are made available as a possibility.

b. Christian Bök, Eunoia Notable in Eunoia’s relationship to the Oulipo is the poem’s hypostatization of the group’s basic mandate: that is, to release creativity from the caprices of inspiration. Bök’s poem smothers creativity through an exponential increase in the number of constraints under which the work was written. Bök starts with a set of words that share the unique quality of utilizing only one particular vowel, “banana” and “Toronto,” for example, which can be likened to Simondon’s understanding of there being a limited number of technical individuals. He thus extracts a kind of hyper-­chaos from that arbitrarily structured chaos, the dictionary. Unlike Goldsmith, who organizes his text according to the law of number, Bök creates a text that submits itself to the laws of literature: it has to be, according to his own requirements, well written, even “creative.” All of the chapters of Eunoia tell stories, for example, and each chapter must describe “a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage” (103). They are also of­ten quite funny, not merely because several of the lists of foods, say, become outlandish due to the arbitrary nature of what’s contained in them, but also for their zany pacing, cracked logic, and curious plot twists. Bök hypostatizes several of the rules of compelling rhetoric: for example, he makes chiasmic structure—a lynchpin in his approach to ‘pataphysics— a requirement of nearly all of the sentences. He also hypostatizes rules of graphic design by requiring that each paragraph be the same length. The play of the law of number (which words constitute a set) against the laws of chance (what the words might, in fact, mean or sound like) is foregrounded by the recursive paragraph and sentence structures: “Hiking in British districts, I picnic in virgin firths, grinning in mirth with misfit whims, smiling if I find birch twigs, smirking if I find mint sprigs. Midspring brings with it singing birds, six kinds (finch, siskin, ibis, tit, pipit, swift), whistling shrill

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chirps, trilling chirr chirr in high pitch. Kingbirds flit in gliding flight, skimming limpid springs, dipping wingtips in rills which brim with living things: krill, shrimp, brill—fish with gilt fins, which swim in flitting zigs. Might Virgil find bliss implicit in this primitivism? Might I mimic him in print if I find his writings inspiring?” (Bök 52). This paragraph, a parody of romanticism with its chirring birds and inspired writing, exhibits the vari­ous range of sounds the English letter “i” can possess—the “ai” of “hiking,” the “ih” of “British,” the “er” of “virgin,” and so forth—even while submitting itself entirely to the numerical constraint of the unit “i.” Subjectivity is rendered entirely material on account of its easy availability through a single letter, the lyrical “I,” as well as its enforced absence in the other chapters of the poem, where the letter “i” is not permitted. A radical contingency in Meillassoux’s sense is acknowledged if we imag­ ine that each chapter possesses its own range of the possible; between each chapter would be an “advent” that marks the transformation from one range of possibility to another. The movement from chapter to chapter seems to suggest the addition and subtraction of arbitrary features—the “I” bursting out of the subjectless landscape of the “e” chapter; the erasure of “Helen,” who simply can’t survive in the “i” chapter—with only the absolute quality of an equally arbitrary law to explain it. Narrative suturing is important for Eunoia as the ground against which these plays of chance becomes recognizable, something other lipogrammatic works like Ian Monk’s Writings for the Oulipo (2005) can’t achieve due to their adherence to the cult of the fragment. Narrative also suggests a movement through time, not to mention a telos, and relies on the sense of object permanence; it links this undeniably experimental work with literature, expressed through exaggerated convention.3 Ironically, Bök’s poem, which was intended to suggest the output of a selfless algorithm, actually resembles a program itself; the strictness of its guidelines approach the strictness of a low-­level, “forgiving” scripting language (like Java­script), and its recycling of themes is not unlike the recycled functions of object-­oriented languages like Java and C++, in which the same code can be used for different ends. It is also the most passionate (if coldly so), inventive, and counter-­intuitive response to the cultural vectors that digital technology has set in motion. Whereas many artists are moving toward randomization, variability, collaboration, and possibility, Bök spent seven years pursuing the most elegant solution to a simple linguistic problem.

c. William Gillespie and Nick Montfort, 2002: A Palindrome Story The book 2002 presents the unique case of a work of literature that had to be written forward and backward at the same time. That is, phrases in the early part of the book (imagining Gillespie and Montfort started with the be-

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ginning) would be accepted or rejected according to their legibility in some form in reverse. As opposed to No. 111 and Eunoia, whose set of words could be arranged and divided as lists of objects based on their qualities (a parody of “essence”), the letters of 2002 had to be arranged according to their relations with adjacent letters (a parody of “accident”). These relations, however, are verifiable to the degree that they can, in their aggregate, also form words, which is to say, objects as well: Job? Mocha dude? Non! No. Works at node, wades on. Idée fixe snows Bob’s ass all under. Pure . . . Eligible Babs: flesh self ’s eros revolts, rubs. Babs, looted

under Bob, se



Xes Bob. Red,

nude tools. Babs: “Burst, lover! Sores. Flesh self ’s Babel big. I leer up.” Red, null ass, as Bob’s won sex: “I feed; I nosed awe!” (Don’t ask.) Row on, none dud. Ah! Combo joy. (12)

The law of number is, naturally, present in the largely arbitrary number of words, 2,002, but also in the letter count: given that the palindromic axis occurs on a single letter, “x,” we can conclude that there is an odd number of letters in all. The preoccupation with sets is further emphasized by the reuse of letter sequences in reverse, which are made legible in turn by a range of typographical elements—commas, em dashes, exclamation points, etc.— which grant them some position within syntax (even if what qualifies as a sentence becomes severely strained). Notably, the number of spaces in the work—those all important 27th letters that differentiate a word from a mere text string—are not tallied by the authors (though they could have been if the Unicode number for a space were computed). As opposed to the open economies of experimental poetry and fiction in the postmodern era, which resisted closure on principle, 2002 struggles to delimit a closed economy. Not only are the variations of text limited based on the law of the paradigm, but the mirror structure of the work points toward an empty center that is absolute as much as it is arbitrary. (In this case, the word “sexes,” used as a verb, stands at the center of this universe, a cross-­ linguistic rhyme with the word for “six” in German, sechs, the number of

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the sides of a die.) As in No. 111 and chapter “u” of Eunoia, a Rabelaisian element is present in the cacophony of voices and the of­ten vulgar language and situations, but once again we are faced, in this battle between number (with its transcendental quality) and culture (with its sensual, extensional elements), with an image of the relationship between immanent, even non-­ human creativity and an absolute law that is only, in fact, grounded in arbitrary constraints. This is also, more than any of the works we are considering, the most purely mathematical structure, as those places where letters don’t exist—the spaces, punctuation, and so forth—seem to take precedence over the content. It is, in this way, a nearly perfectly abstract structure, significantly buttressed by the 27th letter, that could serve as an extension beyond thinking into what we have been calling the “great outdoors.”

d. Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions Like 2002, Only Revolutions (see fig. 5.1) is structured according to an inscrutable symmetry, but one whose dominant number is taken from math— the 360 degrees of a circle—rather than arbitrarily from history (2,002 years since the birth of Christ). However, its structure is much more forgiving; that is, though each of its pages contains exactly 360 words in four chunks of ninety, and though the top parts of the spreads (across eight pages) have to mirror the events of the bottom pages, this mirroring does not extend systematically to the level of the letter. An additional mirroring occurs across the first pages of the novel when read from the beginning one way—from the perspective of the female protagonist, Hailey, for example—and when read from the beginning (after flipping over the book) from the other way—from the perspective of the male, Sam. Sam’s story begins, for example, with the words “Haloes! Haleskarth! Contraband! I can walk away from anything,” while Hailey’s begins “Samsarra! Samarra! Grand! I can walk away from anything.” The only proper way to read the story is to work eight pages in one direction, then to flip the book and read the mirrored sections from the other protagonist; however, it is possible (if a bit mystifying) to flip the book and read the bottom texts of the eight pages one has just read, but only for the structural repetition of themes, since the narrative of this bottom text would in fact be moving in reverse. Only Revolutions, which I choose to regard as a narrative poem rather than a novel, most clearly fits as a successor to the two dominants McHale presents as characterizing the modernist and postmodernist moment in literature. This is because, in fact, Danielewski’s book absorbs them. The novel is clearly indebted to the epistemological paradigm, for example, insofar as it offers two distinct subjectivities, Hailey and Sam, witnessing the same series of events, if of­ten with humorously different takes on things (Sam’s cow-

Figure 5.1. Mark Z. Danielewski, pages from Only Revolutions.

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ardice and Hailey’s promiscuity, for example, are rendered with different valences depending on who is telling the story). The textual surface, permeated with puns and allusions, has an almost Joycean quality; the sentence structures can become distended almost indefinitely, and narrative causality is bracketed as the exception rather than the rule. We are not always sure what or who is present at a scene, or where the scene is taking place, given the incessant flux of perspective between a first-­person speaker (in a stream-­of-­ consciousness vein), an implied third person (in the totalizing structure), and pure information supplied by Danielewski’s readers. The novel branches into what we might call the postmodern or “ontological” dominant to the degree that language itself appears to be the governing principle, rather than the work’s distinct characters or subjectivities. Indeed, common features of fiction, such as plot and setting, not to mention elements of gender representation, are bracketed, utilized as conventions (one thinks of Robbe-­Grillet’s pillaging of genres like detective and romance novels for his most fractured Nouveau Romans) to keep the story moving. The work’s speculative quality arises, to my mind, from its abundance of hard facts housed in a totalizing mirror structure: while we have no access to the Kantian noumenon due to the inviolable mind→object limitation, we are nonetheless offered a space for thinking between the two mirror narratives of Hailey and Sam. That is, the story not only points to an empty center (like 2002) at which events are merely repeated in reverse, it also points to the space between Hailey and Sam’s rendition where the story could be without telling us what, exactly, it is. If the Kantian impasse suggests that objects of the world are unavailable due to the motion outward from a subjectivity, Only Revolutions suggests an “other” that is an exact mirror of oneself, equally incapable of moving outward toward essence but nonetheless moving closer to an “us.” Hailey and Sam push ever outward into the frontier of the United States, side by side (i.e., at base, a sort of road novel), but in fact they are simply moving closer to each other with a faultless synchronicity. The characters might find love in this center, but, for readers, between these two subjectivities lies a huge emptiness, for as total as the novel’s structure appears to be, drawing a magic circle around a vibrant but closed universe, it merely serves to delimit what it can never claim to present—what “really” happened. Unlike Browning’s The Ring and the Book or Kurosawa’s Rashomon, the point is not that humans see a singular truth through imperfect lenses; the point is that subjectivity can exist as part of a grand, if contingent, design, but has no access to its lineaments except as an intuition of necessity. These characters might have some sense of their own fates, but have no idea they live in a 360-­page reversible book in stanzas of ninety words. Only Revolutions is a multivalent work that can be appreciated through

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many criti­cal frames: as eco-­poetics, as cybernetic literature, or as a modern allegory. As mentioned, Danielewski collected through his website lists of the names of birds and plants, many of which pepper the landscape of the novel, mere data being a stand-­in for more conventional mise-­en-­scène, suggesting not only a relationship to “the ecological thinking” in Morton’s conceptualization that disavows a nature/culture binary, but an uncanny new symbiosis between author, machine, and readership.

e. Craig Dworkin, “Fact” “Fact” might be the most vividly narrative of the works under consideration, as it illustrates the scientifically observable “real” interactions of a host of chemicals in a stable, limited field, the plane of the page. While the law of number is not apparent in the formal properties of the text—it can be as long or short as needed so long as it is exhaustive of the ingredients of its medium—the persistence of percentages through­out does suggest the primacy of the number 1 in that ingredients are described not in measurable units but as a parts of a whole. On the macro level, this is expressed as some percentage of the paper and ink; on the micro level, as some percentage of the component chemicals making up that ingredient. For example, 19.4 percent of the ink is made up of 100S Type Alkyd “used as a binder,” which itself is made up of linseed oil, isophthalic acid, and trimethylolpropane, among other ingredients. More apposite to the proportional logic of Dworkin’s “Fact” than Meillassoux’s brand of speculative philosophy, with its language of necessity and contingency, would be Graham Harman’s “object-­oriented ontology,” which posits as an inherent quality of objects their incessant withdrawal (in the Heideggerian sense) from relations. To Harman, any object’s “experience” of another object is only ever a form of caricature, some set of sensual qualities that can only synecdochically stand in for the retreating essence of the object: “[T]he shifting features and contours and possibilities of objects do not turn them into different objects. If we consider that they are merely cari­ catures, exaggerated versions of real pears and apples, then we allude to a dark subterranean underworld of beings that no perception and no relation can ever touch. This underworld, too, is made of objects, but objects that exceed any attempt to grasp them” (“The Road to Objects” 5). Dworkin remains a realist to the degree that his poem submerges the reader into a world of which we normally have no experience—this is an unguided tour of the flatland of the page. In some ways, it is a hyper-­realist fiction: the subject/ reader is purportedly given access to the molten heart of an object—in this case paper—in a way understood as impossible in object-­oriented ontology. And it is impossible, since Dworkin’s poem is, if nothing else, a caricature of the object under examination, forsaking its deceitfully humanistic quali-

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ties—papers with poems on them do something to allow human subjects fluid contact with one another across space and time—in favor of its purely mechanistic and technological ones, the production-­based enterprise that lies behind the devising and construction of paper. Meillassoux’s discussion in After Finitude of the “arche-­fossil”—matter that predated the existence of human life that we can only discern through scientific tools and hypothesis—is also relevant here as Dworkin, more than any of our writers, describes a world in which the human plays no part. That is, for Meillassoux there is no controversy in the legitimacy of describing material that is contemporary with the human—paper and reader both occupy the same world, the latter one after the advent of human thought— but were “paper” a material that, like the moon or a fossil, preceded the advent of humans, Meillassoux would lodge a complaint, since we are then forced back into the Kantian impasse of attempting to describe something from before the era of human mind that we presently occupy. Dworkin’s poem, like his formulation of “tectonic grammar” described earlier, presents a desolate landscape absent anything like “life,” and thus brings us some aesthetic appreciation of Meillassoux’s imaginings of the world before the advent of thought, advents themselves being proof of the ultimate contingency of universal laws.

f. Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes Like several of the works above, Tree of Codes seems to fit comfortably within a tradition of both fiction and poetry, though its author (wisely) chose to market his work as fiction. Foer not only draws his fiction from the set of words from a source text, he permits the words to exist in the same space in which they appeared in the edition from which they were drawn. While those of us who work with digital typesetting can visualize words spilling into preformed text boxes like water poured into a vase, Foer imagines a previous printing of the text as a complete block of stone from which he is permitted merely to carve, by cutting out words, sentences, and paragraphs, his new story. Something that is largely arbitrary—where words appear on particular pages of one edition of one translation of a book—is being treated like an absolute. Consequently, because Foer, like all of our authors, doesn’t allow himself the use of word fragments (as the artist Tom Phillips does in a similar venture, A Humument, so that his protagonist “Bill Toge” derives his last name from the word “together”),4 the words of Schulz’s collection form themselves a sort of law: they are the set of words that outline a physical space that Foer merely manipulates. Because the words have to be cut out of the pages, Tree of Codes only has printing on one side of the page; what this dramatizes, in ways normal books don’t, is the inaccessibility of the past by the present. Once you turn a page,

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you are left with a blank reverse-­silhouette of the page you’ve just read, the form of the reading without the letters. (This is in contrast with, say, a glass storefront, where letters of the signage can be read in reverse from inside.) On the right-­hand side, however, you are provided not just with the words of the page you are on but, through the blank spaces, fragments or sometimes entire words from the pages you are about to read. The book is truly like a “tree” in that one can find it difficult, if not impossible, to isolate certain elements—a specific branch, a specific word—from the noise of the back­ground provided by the very same object, tree or book. While Tree of Codes is not difficult, there are no instructions for how best to read it as there are for “ergodic”5 works like Only Revolutions, Marc Saporta’s proto-­hypertext Composition No. 1, and countless works of digital literature. The only way to block out the words of future pages, which of­ ten confuse the reading of the present page, is to insert something between the pages, such as a blank sheet of paper. However, this renders the forthcoming pages completely invisible and therefore obliterates a very poignant quality of the book’s central theme, the painful hemorrhaging between past, present, and future. My solution is to put my own hand behind the page I’m reading, which does nothing so much as insert my own flesh into the structure of the book. The words that I want to read are now no longer framed by the uniform white of a flat piece of paper but by the variable skin tones of the textured palm of my hand. I can also, of course, feel the page I am holding—­Foer’s die-­cut pages have the fragility of doilies—and because my hand doesn’t completely obscure the following pages, I continue to have some access to the future of the text (see fig. 5.2). This suggests, to my mind, a parody or corruption of the Kantian impasse; I am not just engaged in “reading” from an object to whose essence I have no direct access, but, my hand being part of the object itself, I am engaged in a sort of “0” equals “0” equation in which the book-­and-­reader interface is the 0—a sort of super-­object, in Harman’s language. Foer suggests that, while it is impossible to resurrect the dead, especially unjust considering Schulz’s murder during World War II, we can nonetheless revive the sensual cornucopia of the origi­nal work by experiencing, even while reading, the sensual world of today, one’s own living hand, in the form of a painterly backdrop to a die-­cut page.

Text and Numbers “Digital humanities” is a field generally characterized as “born of the en­ counter between traditional humanities and computational methods” (Bur­ dick et al. 3), the logics of which also inform “conceptual writing” and novels

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Figure 5.2. Jonathan Safran Foer, page from Tree of Codes.

such as Danielewski’s premised on baroque, if non-­normative, data visualization. Regardless of physical computers, digital humanities is a field that enacts the convergence of mathematics—at least as far as it concerns quanti­ ties—and what is usually called “culture”—products and activities associated with the human that we mostly value for their qualities. In the field of literature, culture usually means textual objects—poems, plays, novels, etc.—that are deemed, for whatever reason (extraordinary aesthetic quality, his­tori­cal relevance, social and po­liti­cal representation, value as suggestive anomaly, as revealing psychological insights, etc.), as relevant objects of study. What the digital humanities means for literature is the suturing of mathematics to text; letters and number merge in some imaginary realm that is entirely ignorant of any of the laws we associate with human language and the distribution and consumption of culture and is largely without regard for the proliferating avenues of mathematics beyond statistics (set theory, imaginary numbers, Gödel’s theorem, etc., don’t seem to play a huge role in the operations of digital humanities computing, at least for now). Prior to any operations of a computer analy­sis on a work of literature (especially or exclusively those from a time before computers) is that the text has to be digitized—that is, turned into numbers, an initial form of pure differentiation that is akin to a paralysis. We all know the basic procedure of scanning: you place the physical book on a platen (or flatbed) of a machine and “scan” it, which is basically taking a high resolution photograph of it; you then have an OCR (optical character recognition) program convert the vari­ous glyphs that it recognizes as letters into numbers that cor-

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respond to that particular letter in the Unicode set (most of us these days just do this in Adobe Acrobat). This last step doesn’t destroy or contaminate the photographic image of the text—which is one of the charms of creating PDFs from scans, we still get to see what the typesetting and graphic design looks like, not to mention the stray image of a hand or finger—so much as seed the image with a set of numbers determined by the correlation of number to letter in the ASCII protocol (the basic kernel of the Unicode set). ASCII stands for Ameri­can Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it was generally created, based on telegraphic codes like the Morse code, by committees of computer scientists in the 1960s. Following are a few basic examples of the ASCII code associated with letters and other elements of print: Binary Oct Dec Hex Glyph 100 0001 101 65 41 A 100 0010 102 66 42 B 100 0011 103 67 43 C 100 0100 104 68 44 D 110 0001 141 97 61 a 110 0010 142 98 62 b 110 0011 143 99 63 c 110 0100 144 100 64 d 011 0001 061 49 31 1 011 0010 062 50 32 2 011 0011 063 51 33 3 011 0100 064 52 34 4 010 0000 040 32 20 (space) 010 0001 041 33 21 ! 010 0010 042 34 22 “ 010 0011 043 35 23 # As you can see, unlike with the QWERTY keyboard, which was created by Christopher Latham Sholes in the early 1870s based on how the most commonly used letter combinations intersect with the physical construction of typewriters (so that letters that usually occur after each other, like “q” and “u” don’t jam), the correspondence of ASCII numbers to letters is purely ordinal and in no way related to mnemonics—how easy or hard it might be to remember which number goes with each letter—nor related to the probability of letters to be used or appear in sequence. That is, they are arbitrary.

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ASCII was only meant to be seen by computer programmers—it’s the rare bird that can translate a bunch of numbers back into letters on the fly—some of whom, like I did back in the eighties programming a Vic-­20, eventually learned that “32” (in decimal ASCII) represented a space, and that lower-­ case and upper-­case numbers differed by 32. If you wanted to write a basic program that converted a text into upper-­case letters, you would subtract 32 from its ASCII, but only if the ASCII number was between 97 (lower-­case “a”) and 122 (lower-­case “z”). You would write a conditional loop (involving an “if ” statement) that would examine each letter of a text (which at this point is just a sequence of numbers) to see if it fell within a particular range. Only after you determined that the letter fell within this range (i.e., that the character was indeed a lower-­case glyph) would you subtract from its ASCII number (or the content associated with its variable). If you applied this numerical change to any character outside of the range of 97 to 122, you would have unusable, or unreadable, results—turning, for example, an upper-­case “Z” (90) into a colon (58). This procedure is generally known as a transfor­ mation. A visual analogy would be when one applies what used to be called a “filter” to an image in Adobe Photoshop or in your cell phone, one that, for example, converted a color image into black and white (grayscale), or which turned it into a pencil sketch or mirror image. These procedures—the character-­recognition program that turns letters-­ as-­visual-­images into numbers, the transformation programs that change certain letters into other letters for whatever reason (a kind of cryptography but intended to enhance human comprehension) and other common procedures such as search-­and-­replace and spell-­check—are at the basis of digital humanities when it concerns literature. The mathematization of text (its transformation into numbers, the operations of algorithms on those num­bers, the re-­presentation of these numbers after transformation as a re-­versioning of the origi­nal text) occurs with no regard for the syntactical, rhe­tori­cal or aesthetic integrity of those source texts—their construction, of course, but also the foundation of how they relate to the milieu, their situation within the literary economy of the pharmakon—which, in the biological analogy alluded to above, could be thought of as an override the text’s self-­ regulation, that is, a paralysis. In his essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” Franco Moretti defends his proposed methodology of “distant reading,” which entails analyzing thousands of digitized texts through computational processes, with the following arguments: [I]f you want to look beyond the canon (and of course, world literature will do so: it would be absurd if it didn’t!), close reading will not do it.

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It’s not designed to do it, it’s designed to do the opposite. At bottom, it’s a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger that the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the sys­tem in its entirety, we must accept losing something. (57) Moretti’s notion of “world literature” is based on two premises: that comparative literature has failed to live up to the promise of Goethe’s and Marx’s notion of de-­nationalized literatures, but more problematically, that this literature forms what he calls a “planetary system”—that it has discrete parts with observable relations which, in his mind, invariably reflect the expansions and contractions of commerce through imperialism. But Moretti commits something like a tautology in this last line, since he’s already defined his brand of “world literature” as a concern with systems, but then states that if you are interested in systems (which we have to be if we’re interested in “world literature”—it’s why we can join the club) we must be interested in distant reading. But I think it’s quite possible to be interested in “world literature” of the brand outlined by Goethe—who came upon the concept after enjoying Chinese novels and Persian and Serbian poetry—and others while having no interest in systems. Moretti’s writing is, however, suggestive in the context of speculative realism. What Meillassoux’s philosophy suggests is that there are limits to human thought, but also that it is quite possible—in the manner I have suggested above—that there is a thinking that extends beyond human capabilities (and a thinking that exists in universes that lie in our future, which is an entire other matter). We could then imagine that there is a being that could read and synthesize 7,000 novels, since there is nothing necessarily opposed to this possibility. We can then imagine an examination of such a large corpus as not relying on digital technology—and thus not requiring the precondition of a paralysis—but rather as a compensation for a physical and cognitive lack in human beings, much as night goggles or the Hubble telescope are a compensation for a human’s inability to see in the dark or over the distances of light years. Digital technology thus becomes another human prosthesis used for navigating and exploiting the world (a vast expansion of the Umwelt much like a telescope or the Hadron Collider), but in this

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case, the world of a future or, speculatively, “divinely inexistent” being. This type of thinking unlinks the analy­sis of “big data” from the Marxist frame, or makes such a link unnecessary, since—at this scale, in which we imagine a natural being that could read 7,000 titles or who thinks a century is just a blink of an eye—the creative operations of humans who produce “novels” would appear to be about as sophisticated as earthworms overturning dirt do to the human. We would then be using digital technology to explore a single, stable, and lived space, much like Edgar Allen Poe’s protagonist in the “Pit and the Pendulum” used the sense of touch and hearing—absent all light—to imagine the architecture of his cell. In a sense, “distant reading,” which has been persistently dogged with charges that it fails to generate new concepts, provides us not with a way of seeing so much as a metaphor for thinking in an age increasingly characterized by the subjection of conventional notions of “reality” to mathematization, therefore to conceptualizations within the scales of the infinite. My sense is that “distant reading” provides us, via a digital prosthesis premised on the mathematization of text, a vision of something that might possess a certain aesthetic coherence or philosophical integrity for alien visitors or for “humans” of the future (and not just merely academics of today), but given the unavailability of a phenomenological view of this corpus, could it ever really be said to have “humanistic” value?

A Touch of the Infinite The creator of works in this “speculative” dominant does not write in a conventional, expressive way; the crafting of propositions, the evocations of powerful memories, the animation of a plot or character is set aside for an intense session (sometimes lasting years) of play. But given that the elements of this game are not things or images but words acting as numbers, the description of this form of play departs somewhat from those encountered in theorists such as Huizinga and Caillois. Sherry Turkle in “Video Games and Computer Holding Power” and Lev Manovich in “Database as Symbolic Form” have described the effects of al­ gorithmically-­determined play as, in the former, some sort of engagement with the infinite, and in the latter, a sort of cybernetic relationship of the organic “human” with the rote, rigorous, and inorganic functions of algorithm enacted in time—the player in concert with the machine as substantiaters of algorithm. Turkle observes how the very presence of video game characters and objects—those hinges for our attention, what we engage in all seriousness in order to “win,” ultimately the weighers of justice—are in fact chimeras: “The new ‘logic technology’ has made possible an explosion

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in the free­dom of game designers to search for ways to capture the attention, the imagination, and the coins of players. If a designer wants to change the game, for example, to put a new monster on the screen, he or she doesn’t have to ‘make’ a monster, but simply has to write a program that will trace out the monster’s shape. To have the new monster engage in a chase requires another program. Pinball games were constrained by mechanical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ball. The video world knows no such bounds” (502). New presence in the video game—which is viewed by the player, in an act of suspended disbelief, as material—is a matter of a few lines of code (or what Turkle calls a “program” but which is more accurately a function or object). The video game offers, to the misfit adolescent, a world away from “chance and accident,” but nonetheless is one in which a player, ironically considered lazy according to common social codes, is relentlessly tested by an algorithm, one which is always fair, more fair than the physical world itself, which seems impregnated (to our imagined misfit teen) with a god of ill-­fortune. Johan Huizinga bases central features of his theory of play and games on the inherent “seriousness” of play and the presence of play in grave operations such as the court: “The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. The inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath. Tricky questions such as these will come up for discussion when we start examining the relationship between play and ritual” (8). Play is, in fact, inherent in our very relations with the milieu (here fig­ured as a “cosmos”), something like a cognitive imperative: “From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos” (3). Video games, even with their attendant glitches and design failures, banish the “absolute determinism” of a disordered cosmos since, after all, even these glitches and failures—these marks of blind forces—are stable, predictable properties of the game and can be learned. For Turkle, the world of the video game is exact, though trying, and “give[s] people the feeling of being close to the edge because, as in a dangerous situation, there is no time for rest and the consequences of wandering attention feel dire” (509). Returning from this edge is the moral reward for good play. Turkle describes playing a pinball game as “like a dance,” ultimately one that breaks down after the failure of each partner to master the laws of physics long enough to keep the ball in play. A video game, however, suggests a libidinal exchange accompanied, finally, by a post-­coital letdown. As one of

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Turkle’s interviewees states: “When I play the game, I start getting into it, and you start taking the role of the person . . . and then the game ends. And you have just put all of your energy into it. It doesn’t make me angry, more like depressed. You walk out of the arcade and it’s a different world. Nothing that you can control” (503). The sort of mindlessness—the total seizure by sensation—that one associates with sexual rapture can also be linked (as it has by Sontag in her essay concerning De Sade, “The Pornographic Imagination”) with a sort of religious ecstasy, one that can only be experienced by an initiate. Turkle writes: “As a computational object, the video game holds out two promises. The first is a touch of infinity—the promise of a game that never stops. Most video games give you three chances: three ‘men,’ three ‘ships,’ three ‘missiles.’ [W]hen the game skill becomes sec­ond nature, when the scores reach the hundreds of thousands, then it becomes clear that in a video game there is nothing except gaining more time, and, for some players, the idea that but for their growing fatigue, their ‘human limitations,’ the game could go on forever. When you face a game of pinball, there is a clearly demarcated point when the game is over. You may have achieved a high score, you may win a free game. A video game presents no such moment” (511). This experience of endless time is something that the novice player—concerned with pedestrian accomplishments in an alien, dangerous world—cannot experience. The master player, in contrast, has unlocked an entire new universe in the game, one fraught with terrors but which is of­ ten “imbued with religious feeling” (511)—an experience of the sublime. This “touch of the infinite” in video games is prefig­ured, if merely in a thought-­experiment, by John Locke’s phenomenological formulation of a body’s relationship to number in “How we come by the idea of infinity” from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689): Every one that has any idea of any stated lengths of space, as a foot, finds that he can repeat that idea; and joining it to the former, make the idea of two feet; and by the addition of a third, three feet; and so on, without ever coming to an end of his additions, whether of the same idea of a foot, or, if he pleases, of doubling it, or any other idea he has of any length, as a mile, or diameter of the earth, or of the orbis magnus: for whichever of these he takes, and how of­ten soever he doubles, or any otherwise multiplies it, he finds, that, after he has continued his doubling in his thoughts, and enlarged his idea as much as he pleases, he has no more reason to stop, nor is one jot nearer the end of such addition, than he was at first setting out: the power of enlarging his idea of space by further additions remaining still the same, he hence takes the idea of infinite space. (chapter XVII)

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I call this a phenomenological experience with number (or maybe Wittgensteinian, given his view of mathematics as a physical activity) due to its presumed experiential bridge between that which much recent philosophy, namely that of Meillassoux, views as the one way out of the impasse of the indissoluble interdependence (what he calls “correlationism”) of mind and matter in metaphysics—namely mathematics—and fairly normative human cognition. That is, mathematics is the only thing we can be sure exists apart from human consciousness, the one thing we can point to that is inarguably noumenological, but which Locke presents as readily available to the senses. Indeed, as Neal Stephenson suggests in his novel Anathem, mathematics might indeed be universal across parallel universes—the side of the ship Daban Urnud is inscribed with the “Adrakhonic Theorem,” a sort of visual, non-­linguistic proof of the Pythagorean theorem—something with which Meillassoux, with his concept of advents, might disagree.6 When playing a video game, one is engaged with the seemingly “infinite” play of algorithm while being engaged in what is phenomelogically perceived as (if consequently a replacement of) the physical world. The player of a video game engages with the belief that what is unfolding before him on the screen is syntagmatic, like a unique utterance, when in fact it is paradigmatic, empty structures filled and refilled due to algorithmic processes. It is a parody of the sorts of libidinous excess that are described by Steve McCaffery in his extrapolations upon Bataille’s theory of the general economy, though it remains to be considered whether algorithmic “creativity” is in fact—in the vitalist sense—creative, and to that extent, whether or not it partakes in the process of radical immanence that a philosopher like Bataille discerns in the complex of vegetable/animal/human life on the planet. In video games, the player’s engagement is complete, as complete as that of a physical game (with a seriousness that is aptly described by Huizinga), enough such that the physical bearing of the human respondent can be transformed and lead to sensations of the “infinite” and consequently post-­coital letdown.

Terrible Engines [Cool] is the shadow ethos of knowledge work. It is the “unknowing,” or unproductive, knowledge work by which those in the pipeline from the academy to the corporation “gesture” toward an identity recompensing them for work in the age of identity management. Whether watching cool graphics on the Web or cool dinosaurs in that Spielberg film allegorizing the fate of knowledge workers in the age of global competition (where the real action occurs in the out-­of-­control computer control room

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behind the leisure theme park), knowledge workers are never far from the cubicle, where only the style of their work lets them dream they are more than they “know.” —Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool (78)

My sense is that these works are, by and large, truly cybernetic in that they of­ten simply chart a series of feedback loops between “author” and materials, treating each on a level plain as an object among objects. An author is active, not in the pouring forth of words from an inaccessible “genius,” but rather in inaugurating a series of engagements with assembled sets of words—they “dream” of more than they “know” through number, manipulation, recombination, and not solely through something like “expression” which might be premised on experience, in short supply in a world characterized by the ubiquity of portable bits of “knowledge.” The author is not a creator of new descriptions but the assembler of extant ones, someone to “witness and adjust” (in Williams’s phrase from the end of “To Elsie”)—in other words, to “play.” And what is playing a game but forcing the breakdown of the boundaries between human and object, law and chance, agency and the absolute? Such absences (of affect, of entire words and phrases, of transitional phrases, of syllogistic organization) that suffuse poetic works that are, in other ways, completely exhaustive (in their sets of words, permutations, recursive principles, and technical descriptions) point to the very space of the unthinkable, of contingency resting on the throne of the absolute. We are asked to look as much at what is missing, at what is possible and perhaps not possible, as at the architectural ingenuity of their construction. This isn’t to say that the works thematize the absolute or contingency, but rather that they have followed a certain strand running through modernism and postmodernism, which seeks to acclimatize a human readership with ontological uncertainty, namely the retreat of scientific wisdom from everyday life. In the speculative realist sense, even with a comprehensive increase in the information available to science, a throw of the dice never gives us access to what lies beyond possible knowledge—the transfinite looming as an outer shell of the infinite. When the culturally arbitrary (an edition of Street of Crocodiles, the year, or the spelling of words) takes on the property of law, as they do in all of these works, we see the relationship of chance to causality is, actually, rather mundane. This is the lesson of Marcel Duchamp, that master of the metaphysical guffaw if there ever was one: that the distance between the abject and transcendence—events of mere chance and intimations of divine order—can be bridged with hilarious ease given the surgical collapsing of frames. Furthermore, these works seem to ask to be rearranged themselves, for new sets to be created out of the existing sets,

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if not by authors wanting to create new works—in which case, they would be akin to the “undigests” described in my last chapter—then by the reader perpetually in the throes of witnessing absolute agency jousting with the absolute determinism of arbitrary rules. If these works test the bounds of “literature,” it can also be that they create a frayed edge along what one feels is accessible to experience and what will always remain, if always somehow locatable in indeterminate outline, inaccessible. We are able, in our experience of these works, to gain access to the speculative realist contention that the universe is not characterized by necessity but that, in fact, what seems absolute is really only absolute in this era—in the next era, such relationships will change. These works, some written by small-­press poets and some by established novelists, also pre­ sent an image of a meeting for what used to be called the “avant-­garde” and the “mainstream,” the speculative and the foundational, and what we commonly know as “poetry” and “fiction.” In this way, we can suggest instead they be considered “terrible engines”—philosophical toys that, in their very dethroning of subjectivity from the center of substantial works of literature, suggest a “great outdoors” that might fill us with awe if not fear.

6 Miscegenated Scripts The Gramme and Transpacific Hybridity

The Chinese Room In 1980, the philosopher John Searle published “Minds, Brains, and Problems,” a critique of Strong AI (the belief that, were one to create a computer that can mimic brain processes, one would have indeed created a “thinking” computer) in which he describes what has become one of the most famous thought experiments in the discourse on computer intelligence, the “Chinese Room Argument.” A modification of the Turing test, Searle’s thought experiment attempts to isolate what it is that we mean when we say that a computer is “thinking”—is the mere shuffling of symbols with no underlying “consciousness” thought? He asks that we imagine that he was placed in a room and had at his disposal the complete set of rules that allow him to translate any sentence between the two languages: “Suppose furthermore (as is indeed the case) that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken, and that I’m not even confident that I could recognize Chinese writing as Chinese writing distinct from, say, Japanese writing or meaningless squiggles. To me, Chinese writing is just so many meaningless squiggles” (3). Outside the room is a human proficient in Chinese who is able to communicate with him by sending and receiving messages and even stories underneath a door (i.e., there is no human voice or face involved). After days of such exchanges, the Chinese human becomes convinced that Searle is indeed completely conversant in Chinese based entirely on these messages. Can we say, then, that Searle actually “understands” Chinese (even as we are sure that he “understands” the stories)? Likewise, if we are able to program a computer

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to perfectly manipulate symbols in a natural human language—i.e., evaluate incoming textual messages, run internal processes that suggest a probable result, and create perfectly formed and viable responses—would that computer be said to be thinking? Searle’s answer is a resounding no: “The aim of the Chinese room example was to try to show this by showing that as soon as we put something into the sys­tem that really does have intentionality (a man), and we program him with the formal program, you can see that the formal program carries no additional intentionality. It adds nothing, for example, to a man’s ability to understand Chinese” (12). Any sense of “intentionality as computers appear to have is solely in the minds of those who program them and those who use them” (11). Searle might have been influenced by another thought experiment circulating in the cognitive sciences in which the Chinese fig­ured, not because of their writing sys­tem but because there were so many of them and, perhaps, because of the racist assumption that Asians lack initiative and spontaneous creativity. In “Troubles with Functionalism” (1978), Ned Block envisioned the entire population of China implementing the functions of neurons in the brain. This scenario has subsequently been called “The Chinese Nation” or “The Chinese Gym” and treated each in­di­vidual Chinese as a single neuron in a larger brain called “China”: We can suppose that every Chinese citizen would be given a call-­list of phone numbers, and at a preset time on implementation day, designated “input” citizens would initiate the process by calling those on their call-­list. When any citizen’s phone rang, he or she would then phone those on his or her list, who would in turn contact yet others. No phone message need be exchanged; all that is required is the pattern of calling. The call-­lists would be constructed in such a way that the patterns of calls implemented the same patterns of activation that occur between neurons in someone’s brain when that person is in a mental state—pain, for example. The phone calls play the same functional role as neurons causing one another to fire. Block was primarily interested in qualia, and in particular, whether it is plausible to hold that the population of China might collectively be in pain, while no in­di­vidual member of the population experienced any pain, but the thought experiment applies to any mental states and operations, in­ clud­ing understanding language. (Cole) This experiment is interesting as it envisions the possibility of phone calls being made with no “message” being exchanged, and yet with a “collective” sensation of “pain” emerging from the vectoral pattern—speed, direction,

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crossings, and recombinations—of the transactions. This mirrors to some degree the arguments I have been making about the emergence of lyri­cal technicity out of “fictions of immanence,” the epiphenomenon of the “subject” from what can otherwise be mistaken for a random assemblage of linguistic atoms. Searle’s experiment suggests two distinct ways in which we can discuss Asian Ameri­can culture in relation to digital technology. One concerns language and the curious fact that not only Searle, in reaching for a linguistic “other” for English, chose to avoid the Roman alphabet altogether and settle on Chinese, but that Asian and Asian Ameri­can digital artists such as Xu Bing, Paul Chan, and Peter Cho have chosen to examine this linguistic divide by creating entirely new, hybrid language systems. The other concerns affect, particularly the motif in West­ern culture that the Asian (especially the Japanese) face is inscrutable to West­ern eyes, a motif that exhibits nefariously in popu­lar culture in the fig­ures of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, or somewhat more neutrally in works such as Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs, in which the Asian face is a stand-­in for the empty signifier, or the film Blade Runner, in which the blank expressions of pill-­taking geishas fig­ ure prominently in blimp-­born advertisements. This coincidence of themes in Searle’s essay, itself completely unconcerned with social issues (but which was published just a year after the normalization of U.S.-­Chinese relations in 1979), is suggestive of a possible new theory of a strand of algorithmic culture that is decidedly transpacific, and in this way unique to Asians and not just all non-­West­ern ethnicities.

Henri Michaux The trajectory of West­ern typographical experimentation that led to the Futurists’ celebrated “liberated word” (parole in liberta) is not of­ten directly linked to that of the influence of Asian art, particularly Ukiyo-­e (“pictures of the floating world”) on the Parisian artists of the fin-­de-­siècle. The machinic elements of Futurist text art, coupled with the histrionic anarchic affect, obscures what are apparent Asian elements in the spatialization of the text, in­clud­ing the implicit fig­ure/ground dynamics that naturally occur when typefaces of different sizes appear on the same page. For example, Philip B. Meggs embeds his discussion of Mallarmé’s Un coup de des—which he states spreads “silence” of the “white, empty margins . . . through the work as part of its meaning” (253)—in his section of Futurism due to their similarities of technique, without mentioning that the poem was created in the period of Japonisme and art nouveau. Futurist typography can be said to have unboxed the word, in direct opposition to the artists of the once bur-

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geoning Arts and Crafts movement who rejected industrial aesthetics and whose page designs enclosed text boxes in frames of leaves, ivy, and Celtic patterns intended to evoke the decorations of Medieval scribes. The basic dichotomy is that a “boxed” word could somehow attain balance and civility, a relationship to the past; the response by the Futurists and, later, the Lettrists, was the explosion of the text-­space with an implicit courting of imbalance, motion, and discontinuity. Belgian poet Henri Michaux explored a calligraphic approach to the Roman alphabet in early drawings such as “Alphabet” (1927) (see fig. 6.1). This work is notable not only because the in­di­vidual elements, the glyphs, are indecipherable—not reducible to the normative economies of language or even of a regular alphabet—but that, despite regular left and right m ­ argins, typesetting elements such as size, line spacing, descenders and ascenders, are all rendered fluid—the letters appear to breathe more as one moves down the page, at least until they suddenly return to the miniscule type and leading of the first lines of the page. His much more celebrated mescaline-­inspired India ink drawings suggest, in the regularity of the lineation and the consistency of the hand, a coherent symbolic language (a sort of Symbolist cryptography), but one in which the recognizable glyphs of Roman letters are entirely sacrificed. Michaux, inspired by his ignorance of Chinese, chose to chart his aesthetic appreciation of the script itself by entering the script— not imitating it, but becoming part of the universe of this script by getting behind the hand that made it, and putting the “reader” directly in the position that he was to Chinese (and to his own script), which is that of not “understanding.” This might seem some more palatable form of Orientalism in which a West­erner’s ignorance of an Asian language does not result in the judgment that the language itself is just gibberish (in the way that much of the “Korean” in M*A*S*H was just gibberish, or whatever Asian language the actor happened to speak). It’s not Orientalism at all, or if it is, it’s a confirmation of the belief of Edward Said’s that Orientalism itself is anti-­ empirical, sharing “with magic and with mythology the self-­containing, self-­ reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter” (70). Suggesting a sort of ontological absence, a deletion from the real, Said writes: “From the beginning of West­ern speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work” (283). Michaux’s alphabets, in their surrender of any claims of fitness in stating truths, of having a recombinatory semantic system, seem like a parody of the pseudo-­episteme of Orientalism. Mich-

Figure 6.1. Henri Michaux, “Alphabet” (1927). Courtesy of Éditions Claire Paulhan.

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aux forfeits signification, not to mention any control—the “West­ern style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” in Said’s phrase—in favor of a pure signification that is contained within its material presence. “From E ­ picurus to Spinoza and from Spinoza to Michaux the problem of thought is infinite speed,” Deleuze and Guatarri state, “But this speed requires a milieu that moves infinitely in itself—the plane, the void, the horizon. Both elasticity of the concept and fluidity of the milieu are needed. Both are needed to make up ‘the slow beings’ that we are” (36). Michaux’s images, understood as writing, are cinematic renderings of the pre-­individual, the metastable, that the philosophers adopted from Simondon’s thinking; they can be seen as the most rudimentary renderings, or stoppages in Duchamp’s sense, of what is otherwise unassimilable to concepts. “Reading” Michaux’s works reinfuses thought with this “infinite speed”: “We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. . . . To think is always to follow the witch’s flight” (41). Deleuze and Guattari argue that this continual infinitization is the very precondition for societal, in­clud­ing aesthetic, anomaly: “Take Michaux’s plane of immanence . . . with its infinite, wild movements and speeds. Usually these measures do not appear in the result, which must be grasped solely in itself and calmly. But then ‘danger’ takes on another meaning: it becomes a case of obvious consequences when pure immanence provokes a strong, instinctive disapproval in pub­lic opinion, and the nature of the created concepts strengthens this disapproval” (41). Michaux’s art, read as “poetry,” is the very image of the pre-­individual: it is prior to the “slow body,” the concept, the appearance. Michaux’s “nomadic” networks are hostile to anything like “pub­lic opinion,” even as they aspire to be objects in the chain of discourse. The Russian constructivist A. N. Chicherin published Change of All in 1924, a suite of poems that combined ideographic, musical, and purely formal elements with words, while fig­ures such Charles de Brosses, creator of the “organic alphabet,” and Alexander Graham Bell with his sys­tem of “Visible Speech,” attempted to give glyphs a concreteness based on their relationship to sound.1 But Michaux is the first to have sensed the fertile void—to have suspended this absence—between what is seen of­ten by the West as a nearly pictographic sys­tem and a letter sys­tem possessing an ordinal (rather than merely cardinal) property. Michaux is the first major fig­ure in a line of artists who, I would like to argue, operate in a space of negotiation between an “East­ern” and “West­ern” script sys­tem in their work by the creation of new pseudo-­scripts, subjugation of standard script systems to non-­ normative spatial and temporal systems, or the subjection of standardized typo­graphi­cal systems themselves—the digital font, the calligraphic hand—

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to a new kind of “content” that is explicitly a hybrid or, as I state in my title, a “miscegenated” script.

Empires of Signs The writers assembled around the journal Tel Quel, notably Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes, grounded many of their investigations into semiotics, the voidance of West­ern metaphysical presumptions, and revisioning of Freudian theory in an examination of Asian writing systems. Derrida asks, “Is not China, in our dreams, the privileged home of space? Chinese culture [is] the most impervious to occurrences in time, the one most attached to the pure unfolding of distance,” rounding out this argument with a glance at Chinese writing: “Even Chinese writing does not reproduce in horizontal lines the fleeting passage of the voice, but arranges in columns the motionless and still recognizable image of things themselves” (40). Derrida’s argument here as elsewhere is that Chinese writing doesn’t represent events happening during reading—a “relentless sequence of Nows” in Haun Saussy’s phrase (148)—but rather is something like a display case of embalmed images, that “ ‘puts them up’ as we say of summer vegetables, in those durable and translucent jars furnished by a non-­phonemic writing system” (41). In contrast, Kristeva argues that Chinese as a tonal language provides insight into the pre-­Oedipal stages of language use, making some startling claims about the cognitive development of the Chinese child: This differentiating role, common to all tonal languages, reveals what certain psycho-­linguists have already surmised: tonal variations and intonations are the first distinctions in the flow of sound that children are able to apprehend and imitate. However quickly these intonations are lost in a milieu where tones are not a functional part of language, children surrounded by tonal speech begin to retain them quite early: for this reason, little Chinese enter into the linguistic code of social communication before other children do, as early as the fifth or sixth month, since they begin very early to distinguish tones as basic features of their language.  .  .  . [T]he psycho-­corporeal imprint of the mother will shape the tonal flow of sound; and this imprint will be transmitted, not obliterated, as a subjacent but active layer of communication after the child has acquired the grammatical system. . . . Can it be that the Chinese language preserves, thanks to its tones, a presyntactic, presymbolic register (for sign and syntax are concomitant), a pre-­Oedipal register (even if it is clear that the full realization of the

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tonal sys­tem must await syntax, just as with the phonological sys­tem of French)? (Saussy 154) Kristeva’s suggestion that the Chinese have a privileged relationship to the “pre-­symbolic” resembles some of the wishful thinking apparent in Ron Silliman’s argument that poetry of the early capitalist era (in which he includes sixteenth-­century England, where John Skelton was perfecting Skeltonics) flourished with poetries that skirted normative meanings, that encouraged semantic slippage as it was free of commodity fetish. The important thing to note in this brief consideration of Derrida and Kristeva (who also writes about the Chinese writing sys­tem as “retain[ing] its evocative visual character [and] its gestural character”) is to note that the Chinese serve a useful purpose for exploring their own ideas about West­ern culture, much as, much later, Vilém Flusser employed the vampire squid to explore a nonhuman Dasein. The most elaborate, and most beautiful, use of Asian cultures as an empty signifier with positive values (if perhaps only against the bourgeois order of the West) is Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs. While a short book comprised of very short chapters, most of its central motifs have become well-­known: that Japanese favor the frame as much as the content (for example, in packaging a gift); that Japanese drama evacuates the psychological interiority of its actors (and to this degree is Brechtian); that the West­ern fork, like West­ ern criti­cal practice, pierces its subject whereas the chopstick merely selects and separates (just as one can only repeat a haiku); that T ­ okyo, like Paris, has a city center but one not characterized by fullness (the social “truth”) but emptiness (both “forbidden and indifferent”). The real aim for Barthes, however, is not to offer a West­erner a travelogue or “first-­hand” account of Japanese culture but to take advantage of his position as a foreigner, a stranger, one happily ignorant of the language, to describe how Japanese cultural practices (and by that I think he also means the practices of any culture of which he is not part of the habitus) are all essentially a trail of traces—a form of writing. “[T]he Japanese bouquet has a volume . . . you can move your body into the interstice of its branches, into the space of its stature, not in order to read it (to read its symbolism) but to follow the trajectory of the hand which has written it: a true writing, since it produces a volume and since, forbidding our reading to be the simple decoding of a message (however loftily symbolic), it permits this reading to repeat the course of the writing’s labor” (45). The erotic component of Barthes’s undertaking, his attempt to retrieve gesture from care with materials, comes most to the fore in his meditations on the Asian transformation through make-­up of facial features such as the

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eyelid and mouth into elements of a pure semiotic sys­tem lacking (as he notes, thankfully) pretentions of a West­ern-­style “soul.” Nonetheless, this facelessness brings Barthes around to conjuring some of the predispositions that brought Block and Searle to use the Chinese and Chinese writing systems, respectively, in their Gedankenexperimenten concerning artificial intelligence: One might say Japan imposes the same dialectic on its bodies as on its objects: look at the handkerchief shelf in a department store: countless, all different, yet no intolerance in the series, no subversion of order. Or again, the haiku: how many haiku in the history of Japan? They all say the same thing: season, vegetation, sea, village, silhouette, yet each is in its way an irreducible event. Or again, ideographic signs: logically unclassifiable, since they escape an arbitrary but limited, hence memorable, phonetic order (the alphabet), yet classified in dictionaries, where it is—the admirable presence of the body in writing and in classification—the number and order of the gestures necessary to draw the ideogram which determine the typology of the sign. And the same for bodies: all Japanese (and not: Asiatics) form a general body (but not a total one, as we assume from our Occidental distance), and yet a vast tribe of different bodies, each of which refers to a class, which vanishes, without disorder, in the direction of an interminable order; in a word: open, to the last moment, like a logical system. (97) Barthes effectively collapses the Japanese body, at least as understood in masses (notably, not identified by the face in the West), into the sort of assemblages one associates with products (handkerchiefs), literary works (haiku), and ideographic signs, attributing to them a sort of intentionality ground zero on a par with Block and Searle’s understanding of the in­di­vidual Chinese as a neuron or Chinese script as “scribbles,” respectively. For our purposes, it’s worth noting that much of the allure of distance, not to mention that of gesture, has dissipated in our far less enchanted “digital” world, which is something of a permanent loss. Consequently, as Barthes also suggests in his writing that Japanese “individuality,” lacking “hysteria,” is “not closure, theater, outstripping, victory; it is simply difference, refracted, without privilege, from body to body,” he was prescient of (and perhaps appreciative of) the manner in which advances in the sciences would, of themselves, create a critique of the bourgeois subject, refiguring the in­di­vidual not as an immortal soul visiting a hunk of clay, but as a grain or gramme itself—pure difference—given meaning by “an interminable order; in a word: open, to the last moment, like a logical system.”

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Genealogies As expressed in culture, the algorithm serves to break-­up material singu­ larities—here I am in this place doing this activity at this time with this person for this reason—into discrete bits of information that get separated, shuffled, and reassembled elsewhere, either immediately, at a later time, or both. The problem for the traditional humanist is obvious: if theorists of Asian Ameri­can literature and art would want to maintain that there is a distinct field of activity tied to cultural differences, power interactions, social oppressions, and po­liti­cal representations, digital theorists would see culture as a series of anonymous, largely invisible micro-­processes that are themselves ignorant of the particular needs or demands of the individual, never mind the collective. Lev Manovich calls this changed worldview “the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself.” He writes in The Language of New Media: If in physics the world is made of atoms and in genetics it is made of genes, computer programming encapsulates the world according to its own logic. The world is reduced to two kinds of software objects which are complementary to each other: data structures and algorithms. Any process or task is reduced to an algorithm, a final sequence of simple operations which a computer can execute to accomplish a given task. And any object in the world—be it the population of a city, or the weather over the course of a century, a chair, a human brain—is modeled as a data structure, i.e. data organized in a particular way for efficient search and retrieval. Examples of data structures are arrays, linked lists and graphs. Algorithms and data structures have a symbiotic relationship. The more complex the data structure of a computer program, the simpler the algorithm needs to be, and vice versa. Together, data structures and algorithms are two halves of the ontology of the world according to a computer. (197–98) Manovich’s collation of genetics and data structures is no facile homology: as Alondra Nelson and Jeong Won Hwang describe in their essay “Roots and Revelation: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the YouTube Generation,” genetic ancestry testing is a large part of “affiliative self-­fashioning,” which they define as “the constitution of in­di­vidual identity, through and toward the goal of association with others, in­clud­ing ancestors and DNA ‘kin’ ” (273). Genetic information—the DNA strand that is the genotype that finds expression, in each new individual, as a phenotype—is dropped into a data-

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base and, through the processes of algorithm, associations are discovered between individuals that can of­ten seem surprising in contrast to assumptions based on race and culture. This is the opposite of eugenics, in which racial or genealogical purity has an indexical relationship to cultural expression, the genotype invariably expressing as a cultural phenotype. If anything, these invisible genetic alliances foreground the inherent hybridity of seemingly monolithic racial identities—think of Henry Louis Gates in the PBS documentary “Finding Your Roots” discovering he had an ancestor who fought in the Ameri­can Revolution—and unlinks genetic transfers through history from overdetermined cultural expression.2 Manovich highlights this ontological shift by describing a change in language production. Pre-­digital or analog culture privileges the syntagmatic sense of language—language as speech, existing in time and space, spontaneously contributing to “reality”—and digital culture the paradigmatic dimension, in which a sentence is characterized by the rules of syntax and the sets of possible words for each space—for instance, the set of nouns for where the subject would be, or the list of interrogative pronouns should the sentence be a question (in the manner of a Mad Lib). If the former model imagines language as a matter of presence—this was said or was written and exists in a here and now—the latter imagines language as an absence—this sentence is a possibility among many, given an algorithm and database. The Facebook page, for example, is composed “on the fly” every time you revisit the site—an algorithm pulls together your list of friends, your recent posts, your friends’ posts, your pictures, etc., and formats a page according to the site’s stylesheet for your screen—and yet we read it as a singular (if ephemeral) creation by the page’s owner. If ethnic and cultural lineage can be displaced by genetic testing, computer mediation renders any simple idea of “identity” politics, not to mention representation itself, problematic. This is also partly due to the syntagm/­ paradigm swap outlined by Manovich, for in the logic of algorithms, the binary of marginal/mainstream seems to fold into an all-­inclusive, interconnected non-­space—let’s call it the internet—while leaving corporate-­ based media (premised on the logic of centers from which information is transmitted) more or less intact.3 Lisa Nakamura, one of the prime theorists of new media and race, proposes in Digitizing Race a theory of “digital racial formation,” one which understands digital culture as having shifted the emphasis of identity studies from the subject to the object: “If we are starting to understand what the subject of interactivity might look like or be formed, what or who is the object?” (15). Citing John Berger’s seminal work Ways of Seeing, Nakamura notes that the “producer/artist and subject/ model [dichotomy] was clear in more traditional art,” whereas in our inter-

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net saturated world, the “interface becomes the star, and just like other sorts of stars, it works to compel racialized identifications; interfaces are prime loci for digital racial formation” (16). Nakamura is criti­cal of what she sees as the “neoliberal discourse of color blindness” of a “post-­racial” era, and argues that a reading of the subtle ways race is negotiated in the visual culture of our time can be found in seemingly minor phenomena such as the development of AIM buddy images. Her discussion of alllooksame.com, a site which polls users on whether a particular photograph is of a Chinese, Korean, or Japanese individual, makes useful claims for the site’s ability to produce “a community based on a shared act of interactive self-­reflexivity. By discovering that Asian identity is in the ‘eye of the beholder,’ as the site asserts, identity is detached from biological bodies and reassigned to the realm of the cultural, po­liti­cal and geographic” (83). Alllooksame.com seems to parody Barthes’s notion of the Asian face as semiotic system, in this case asking whether the elements of the face can operate as a formal language denoting, indexically, a fact or state of affairs—the documented genealogy of an individual. While it is arguable that the site “reassigns” identity elsewhere—after all, it merely attaches a single word, an ethnicity, to an otherwise silent face—it does have an effective, humorous, and, as Nakamura notes, “uncanny” way of dispelling any myth that vari­ous East Asians can be linked to an Asian identity simply through appearance. Alllooksame.com perches precariously between the cultural logics of representational humanism (how many Asians are there in Congress, in the movies, in a poetry anthology, etc.) and genetic identity. But it can also be understood as challenging the very graphemic quality of the face: can one recognize a face as one does a word? Do the principle of arrangement of the face—the shape of the eyes, the elevation of the nose, the curve of the chin— have the determinacies of a writing system? What is most interesting is that the site was created by a Japanese programmer, Dyske Suematsu, who, according to Nakamura, “asserts that he is not a member of any such thing [as Asian Ameri­can culture] because he was born in Japan, and goes on to question the importance or relevance of Asian Ameri­can studies as a discipline and Asian Ameri­canness as a meaningful identity based on anything other than shared racial oppression, the existence of which he professes to doubt” (82–83). It’s as if Suematsu, a representative member of the Mano­ vich generation, expresses the cultural logic of the algorithm himself in his dismissal of ethnic studies. Suematsu writes in his “Speech at the Harvard Law School for Asian Pacific Ameri­can Conference”: “Personally, I am not interested in building an Asian community on the Internet. The more you think about what the word

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‘Asian’ means, the more it appears arbitrary. It does not seem to me that there are enough binding issues in the word ‘Asian’ that call for building of a community. . . . On the Internet where the color of our skin is irrelevant, that is what we are: a hybrid of the East­ern and the West­ern wisdom” (3–8). Suematsu optimistically believes that network culture creates new hybrids, not just of knowledge and cultural practices but of truth itself. But this attempted hybridity of cultures of wisdom—or more specifically, the transference of Zen belief systems to Judeo-­Christian Ameri­can culture—is itself a product of a much older, and controversial, intermingling of cross-­cultural imaginings and high technology: techno-­Orientalism. ­Kumiko Sato explains: “ ‘Techno-­orientalism,’ a term coined by [David] Morley and [Kevin] Robins, [signifies] the recent, especially the 1980s, phenomenon in the US that Oriental images of Japan manifest in two contrary stereotypes, which are the premodern traditionalism (geisha, samurai, etc.) and the supremacy of high-­technology” (355). Robins and Morley write that cyberpunk, as typified by William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, embody techno-­Orientalism: “[W]ithin the po­liti­cal and cultural unconscious of the West, Japan has come to exist as the fig­ure of empty and dehumanized technological power. It represents the alienated and dystopian image of capitalist progress. This provokes both resentment and envy. The Japanese are unfeeling aliens; they are cyborgs and replicants” (170). Techno-­ orientalism shares aspects with Orientalism, notably that there is an essential if not verifiable difference between West­ern and East­ern cultures, but techno-­orientalism focuses on a single country, Japan, rather than the entire continent, and it never had to do with the Middle East. With the elevation to the level of “wisdom” of such ideas as the Samurai code, as can be seen in movies as vari­ous as The Matrix (1999) and the Jim Jarmuch film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), it would be hard to claim that techno-­orientalism regards Japanese culture as inferior to the West. Techno-­orientalism might express a sense of the mythic Japanese “soul” being in some agonic sense “empty”—failures in terms of the Chinese Room experiment, certainly, as the mask of the face hides only lack of organic consciousness—but it also argues for the positive values of this “emptiness,” which is to say: techno-­orientalism understands the impassive nature of the Japanese face as somehow in tune with a higher (late-­capitalist or not) “wisdom.” One can observe the huge animated billboards in Blade Run­ ner as representative of an inhuman, facile capitalism that doesn’t even try to disguise the indifference of its machinations, but one can equally say that the mask-­like faces of the Japanese actors demonstrate a positive coming-­ to-­terms with the world of proliferating simulacra.

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A Catalogue of Effects These vari­ous problematics—the use of the “Chinese” in allegories of artificial intelligence, the merging of Asian poetics in European Modernism, the understanding of Asian facial features as sign systems, and the displacement of seemingly “natural” racial and cultural continuities by digital technology—have found renewed expression since the late nineties in artworks and projects by Asian and Asian Ameri­can artists along with a number of non-Asian artists with interests in the East. These works in some way confirm Manovich’s notion of the projection of the “ontology of the computer” on everyday reality, but more tellingly, transform the ground of our beliefs in impregnability of the subject and the sensual world into a series infinitely recombinable signs and objects, many by suspending or circumscribing a void between the operations of West­ern and East­ern linguistic systems.

a. Rhizomes If techno-­orientalism at its worst represented a continuation of the trend in Ameri­can culture, starting with Fu Manchu, of foregrounding some Asian “essence” before evidence, it also introduced an image of human/machine hybridity that set the stage for early network art that dealt with cultural representation. “Bindigirl” (2001) by Prema Murthy, artist and former co-­editor of the premiere website for digital art, Rhizome, is “a web project that questions our growing relationship with distance and tele-­erotics—tourism and intimacy. [ . . . ] Bindi is a construct of fe/male desire, created out of what is deemed ‘exotic’ and ‘erotic.’ Bindigirl draws parallels between technology and religion and questions these as a means for transcendence and the creation of a utopian space” (Rhizome). The piece cleverly, if not entirely convincingly, mimics what might have been a pornographic website for audiences interested in exotic, Orientalized women. The artist herself appears in photographs with bright colored circles—simulacral bindis—concealing both her nipples and pubic area. The images flicker past at speeds that would resist any use for erotic fulfillment; meanwhile, the texts point to themes of internet voyeurism and virtual sex tourism. “Bindigirl” shares some aspects with the far creepier site “Mouchette,” which purported to be the creation of a twelve-­year-­old girl in Belgium but which, on further examination, contains writings suggestive of sexual deviance that pushed the atmosphere beyond the uncanny into criminality. Murthy’s site, more prone to slogans, poetry, and quotes from the Kama Sutra than to evoking pedophilia, is yet uncomfortable enough to make one not want to view it in a coffee shop. Murthy’s piece depicts the human body as somehow entrapped, manipulated, marketed, and tele-­transported over the Internet, while other

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works on Rhizome see identity as entirely a matter of chance, which is to say, randomly or algorithmically constructed. C. Spencer Yeh’s “myData = ­myMondrian” (2004) confronts the user with a typical (and typically annoying) questionnaire familiar to the user from early dating sites, and constructs from the data a unique image rendered in the style of Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian. The joke is that website “personalization” is nothing more than a comical reduction of what lies at the base of the singularity of a person (or, perhaps, that at the base of identity is just a bunch of red, yellow, and blue boxes). Parker Ito’s “The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet” (2010) takes a more violent, if pop-­inflected, approach to the defacement of identity. Ito employed the services of orderartwork.com, a Chinese company which makes oil paintings based on digital images, to create a series of paintings based on a stock photo depicting, as Don ­Terclo writes, “a smiling, blonde female wearing a backpack which (amongst its other usages) a ‘parked domain’ company called Demand Media employs to catch the eye of Web surfers who accidentally click to the sites it owns” (1). Ito then used the paintings to create several derivative artworks, either by simply splashing dabs of color over the picture like a blind Abstract Expressionist, by creating anime and CGI versions, or by giving the canvases to friends to paint over themselves. In a sort of reverse Orientalism, this generic blonde face becomes subject to the pure play of signifiers, if not to legions of chaotic desires. Ito is interested in the issue of identity as it relates to fame and the media —he cites Warhol as an obvious reference point—but the larger logic of his work, which links it to Murphy’s and Yeh’s, is that algorithmic culture is one that, by definition, does not develop intimately, enmeshed in an Umwelt and in contact with warm human bodies in organic cultural spaces. Rather, it is mediated through and created by algorithms, hence subject to the noise of any complex communications system. Ito’s work also suggests that the politics of racial representation simply cannot operate as it did in transmission-­ based media spheres where, if anything, copyright and libel laws served to keep the images from dissolving into subversive remixes or, if not, consigned such remixes to a cultural underground.

b. Matrices Walter K. Lew describes, in his introduction to a selection of poems for the Asian Ameri­can cultural magazine Bridge in 1983, “A New Decade of Singular Poetry,” a taxonomy of Asian Ameri­can poetic modes that includes relatively conventional genres such as the documentary, lyric, satire, and ode, and something that he calls “matrices” that “employ a wide range of rapidly juxtaposed languages, media, his­tori­cal frameworks, motifs, and rhe­tori­

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cal moods. It is almost demanded by the normally multi-­cultural situation of Asian Ameri­cans and the accelerated information flow and collisions of contemporary society in general” (11–12). Lew’s key exhibit is one of the two known poems by Ho Hon Leung, “A Symphony Poem ‘Unfinished’ for Rose Li Kin Hong” (see fig. 6.2), which is something of a combination of Kurt Schwitters’s libidinous, anti-­logical tract “An Anna Blume” and the synaesthetic, ideogrammic style of Pound’s Cantos. As the sec­ond page of the poem demonstrates, “A Symphony” is triangulated between three notation systems: the West­ern alphabetic, the Chinese ideogram, and West­ern musical notation. The alphabetic sys­tem is utilized primarily for its ability to formulate statements—“I believe x is you,” “But x is coming”—though Leung tweaks the possibility of truth statements with the more conventional practice of the pun: the bad “armour” of the self transmutes into the “a-­mour” from which the pair wish to escape. The Chinese is used for its ability to convey essences, as he writes: “I see / a real ‘I’ [],” anticipating Yunte Huang’s translation practices, to be discussed later, premised on the concrete meaning of radicals. The final sys­tem lies somewhere in between: Leung uses bits of musical measures to, in a Mallarméan fashion, sound out silences, but also, in a nod to Cage, permit the poem to escape into indeterminacy, as these are bits of music one could play at will and that trouble any semantic certainties. Musical notation is, in this case, both alphabetic, as it is composed of discrete units of notes, staves, and measures, and ideogrammatic to the degree that one can “understand” a descending line of notes, a series of eighth notes, phrasal structures, and so forth. Lew’s interest in “matrices” continued into Premonitions, the anthology of Asian North Ameri­can Poetry that appeared in 1996. Premonitions opens with pages from Theresa Cha’s graphic essay “Commentaire.” By beginning the anthology with Cha, an avant-­garde filmmaker and video artist and the author of the now-­canonical Dictee, Lew provided a grounding for a radical new identity for Asian Ameri­can poets that was rooted in the non-­ alphabetical. Some pages of “Commentaire” contain no more than a handful of words, of­ten written in script, or in white on a black background (like the placards in a silent film); others include a photograph of a brick wall, total whiteness framed by a black border (an empty movie screen), or a still from Carl Dryer’s Vampyr. Cha’s piece, origi­nally published in her anthology of film writings, Apparatus (1982), seems to be about the way a film draws one into its enclosed emptiness, “hushing” (a word from the piece) the viewer while at the same time providing—this is a silent film, like a silent page—a separate “commentary” to fill the space. In the anthology’s afterword, Lew compares his idea of the anthology to Poe’s concept of the long poem as a

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Figure 6.2. Ho Hon Leung, “A Symphony Poem ‘Unfinished’ for Rose Li Kin Hong.”

series of linked shorter ones, to “East Asian forms of multi-­authored verse, or (in the oldest example) the Avatamsaka sutra’s metaphors of mutual interpenetration and inclusion” (576). He maintains the tensions that result in such a heterogeneous grouping (akin, as well, to Pound’s vari­ous experiments in “luminous detail”) by in­clud­ing the best of the vari­ous types of writing; in this way, he takes advantage of the peculiar situation of an anthology centered around ethnic difference to cross the vari­ous boundaries that exist in the United States and Canada between stylistic—of­ten, but not always, as politicized—difference. Lew’s collection of poetry, Treadwinds, follows through on his interest in “intermedia” poetry, in­clud­ing as it does several pages from his out-­of-­print “criti­cal collage” on Cha’s work, Excerpts from Dikte, weird phonetic translations of poems in Japanese script, and the title poem, which is accompanied by several collages by filmmaker/animator Lewis Klahr. This collection, with its unique mixture of traditional, even ancient, poetic styles extending across cultures—one poem is called “Two Handfuls of Waka for Thelonius

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Sphere Monk”—and writing in a near Language poetry vein (the title poem’s “mudlight / moontruck / bloodhope / bonegun”) fills in an important corner not only of Lew’s multifaceted career but the larger portrait of Korean and Asian Ameri­can literature of the past two decades. Clearly indebted to the example of Cha, a Korean-­born artist silenced by her murder in 1982, whose work didn’t “miscegenate” scripts so much as deterritorialized English and French, Lew’s anthologies, collages and “intermedia” poetries attempt a formalization of the principles of Cha, turning her anomalous probes into the “void” into a set of exploitable cultural practices.

c. Ideograms Leung, Cha, and Lew seem to be targeting some of the perceived, incorrigible distances between sign systems of the East and West—the ideogrammatic writing systems that seem, to some degree, to retain a primitive relationship to their origins as representational drawings and the alphabetic sys­tem with its abstract, and possibly even entirely arbitrary (if poststructuralism means anything), sys­tem of letters and words. This fertile rift is explored by Yunte Huang in SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (1997) and by Jonathan Stalling in Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poet­ ics (2011), both of which, significantly, present themselves as both poetry and scholarship. These two books seem to offer a sequel to Pound’s notion of the ideogrammic method in his treatise based on the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, first published in 1908 and republished in a criti­cal edition in 2010. Pound continued his long-­ standing, somewhat Ramist argument against logic and syllogism, arguing that the downfall of West­ern culture is in its tendency toward the abstract over the concrete. In “The Spirit of Romance,” Pound argued for a criti­cal practice premised on the presentation of “luminous detail,” a method that he attempted to exploit in the anthology The ABC of Reading. As for poetry, the decadence of fin-­de-­siècle literature is criticized for its retreat from the sensual in favor of argumentation, which he famously addressed in his imagist manifestos. In the Chinese Written Character, the argument is stated in terms distantly related to Hume’s “bundle of properties” argument: “Let us consider rows of cherry trees. From each of these in turn we proceed to take an ‘abstract,’ as the phrase is, a certain common lump of qualities which we may express together by the name cherry or cherry-­ness. Next we place in a sec­ond table several such characteristic concepts: cherry, rose, sunset, iron-­rust, flamingo. From these we abstract some further common quality, dilutation or mediocrity, and label it ‘red’ or ‘redness.’ It is evident that this process of abstraction may be carried on indefinitely and with all sorts of material. We may go on for ever building pyramids of attenuated concept

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until we reach the apex ‘being’ ” (98–99). Notably for Pound, each ideogram formed a constellation that could depict, concretely or even cinematically, the meaning of the word. [C]hinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic fig­ure and in the spoken word there is no natural connection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space: a bold fig­ ure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs, but unforgettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs. The thought-­picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words, but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all three characters: they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a moving picture. (45) Pound’s understanding of the Chinese ideogram was premised on its having axiomatic fig­ures, such as “man,” and composite fig­ures, such as a “man lying under a tree.” What Pound failed to notice, and which Yunte Huang addresses in his hybrid SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry, is that there is a more axiomatic, and largely arbitrary, level to the ideogram. Huang effectively replaces Pound’s cinematic characterization of the Chinese ideogram with a granular analy­sis, looking at the roots, or radicals, of their construction and translating those: “[T]he words in bold face refer to the so-­called literal meaning of the characters, while the italicized words connected by hyphens indicate the radicals in these characters. For instance, in ‘bamboo-­ xiao ear-­sound mouth-­sob,’ xiao, sound, and sob are literal translation of the Chinese characters, while bamboo, ear, and mouth are radicals in those three characters respectively” (9). Though Huang addresses Pound in his introduction, he cites an instance where Walter Benjamin seems to echo Pound’s desire to free language from abstraction: “The section entitled ‘Radical Translation’ is again my effort to disrupt the smooth transaction of ‘meaning’ by foregrounding the radicals (roots) of Chinese characters. However, the nature of this practice is very different from what Walter Benjamin has characterized as the ‘literalness’ of Hölderlin’s translation of Pindar that risks the danger that ‘the gates of a language thus expanded and modified may slam shut and enclose the translator in silence.’ The literalness, to Benjamin, is ultimately a property of the ‘pure language’ or the Adamic Language that names things without any mediation. But radicals, as vital components of Chinese characters, are

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not a representative language that eliminates material mediation” (13). Naturally, Huang’s “translations” are not as immediately pleasing as Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” as Huang’s goal (echoing those of S­ pivak in “The Politics of Translation”) is to corrupt the false transparency of a closed translation while, consequently, operating as a primer of the Chinese language itself.

d. Morphs Ameri­can poet John Stallings takes a somewhat more complex tack, permitting not only the different scriptural but also spoken systems to corrupt (and, consequently, render into grains) the way words are depicted in English. Using an English phrasebook published in China, Stalling writes that he had “totally rewritten the book by changing all of the origi­nal simple Chinese characters (chosen to mimic the pronunciation of common English phrases without initiating Chinese meanings) into complex Chinese poetic phrases and ‘poems’ ” (4). Each “poem” contains two elements that might be called normative language—a line in English, a line in Chinese (written by Stalling)—and two that are non-­normative—a phonetical rendition of the English into phonemes (created by Stalling) and a line in Chinese attempting to mimic the sounds of the English words (created by the publisher of the phrasebook). But in fact, the only language that remains well within standard usage is the line in English, as Stallings’s Chinese renderings are of­ten (from what I understand) obscure, and lack tonal markings to denote which competing meanings should be privleged. One example runs like this:

forgive me fó gěi fú mí Buddha offers floating enigmas (87) While Stallings isn’t the first poet to have utilized phonetic translations— Louis Zukofsky’s translations of Catullus, published in 1969 but written much earlier, are the touchstone for this practice—his project is unique in merging both the scriptural and spoken linguistic systems, attempting a sort of ‘pataphysical grounding of his poems in a sys­tem that is coherent if cripplingly impractical. Digital poet (and Sinologist) John Cayley has been most persistent in

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transforming what one might call the montage logic of Lew’s matrices into the streaming logic of digital culture. Cayley writes with a sense of imperative about digital cultural practices, the underlying logics of programming systems themselves, notably concerning the asymmetrical relationship of common coding languages, all of which use Roman characters, and East­ern language systems. He developed two techniques early in his career to address the possibility of linguistic miscegenation: transliteral morphing, which is, as Maria Engberg writes, “created by an algorithm which organizes the English alphabet according to a set grid sys­tem and assigns specific loops to replace letters (spaces, or signs) according to similarities in sound,” and interliteral graphic morphing, which “reflects a process of visual translation, or migration from Chinese signs to West­ern letters and back” (4). Not surprisingly, Cayley has made deeper explorations into the first variant, as it largely relies on alphabetic letters and, in many ways, bears a closer relationship to what have now become standard understandings of poetic economy among the “avant-­garde,” which is that the “nonsensical” has a role to play in disturbing conventional meanings. “Interliteral graphic morphing” also possesses moments that are a form of visual nonsense. Transitioning from the word “empty” to the Chinese character “kong,” the image becomes not a word, ideogram, drawing, or even Abstract Expressionist scrawl, but in fact can of­ten resemble what was once a common Flash “morph.” Cayley’s own experiments in “interliteral graphic morphing” demonstrate that the finest unit in which a programming language operates is not the alphabetic letters that a programmer types (“print,” “for . . . then . . . “) but the numbers that inform the shape (whether raster or vector based). Getting to those numbers through something like English, Chinese, or assembly code does not make all that much difference; the parameters of what is possible in that language would, but these parameters are defined by functions and not language (one doesn’t program a computer as one trains a dog). But Cayley’s focus on this specific problem does offer us insight into what I think is a much more general project by artists in­clud­ing Xu Bing to move from the montage style of intercultural textual practice characterized by Pound (and away from the pre-­symbolic improvisations of a Michaux) into the examination of entire new systems of scriptural practice that might do nothing more than point a finger—a programmatic deixis—at the void between scriptural systems.

e. Networks The group Young-­Hae Chang Heavy Industries can be considered, perhaps, the last of the artists whose works were based entirely on, and in response to, the internet prior to the 2.0 era. As their name suggests, the Seoul-­based

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Figure 6.3. Young-­Hae Chang Heavy Industries, excerpts from “Cunnilingus in North Korea” in four languages. Courtesy of the artists.

duo wants to associate themselves with some sort of chaebol or with the huge industrial success of giants like Hyundai (whose shipping branch is called “Hyundai Heavy Industries”). The genius of YHCHI is their resistance to the absorptive possibilities of their chosen technology, Adobe (now Macro­media) Flash, the primary conveyor of interactive multimedia content on the web at the time they started their practice. YHCHI’s pieces only use the most rudimentary features of the Flash programming environment, each one involving no more than a soundtrack—quite of­ten a well-­known jazz track, played in its entirety—and words flashing, rising, scrolling, or otherwise being animated (usually in a slow and simple fashion) across the screen. Literary scholar Jessica Pressman calls this technique “textual montage” (2008), which she compares to the theories of montage described by Sergei Eisenstein in his seminal essays collected in Film Form. YHCHI, based out of Seoul, Korea, is a duo made up of one native Korean, Young Hae Chang, and an Ameri­can of Asian descent, Marc Voge. Claiming them as an extension of Asian Ameri­can art and literature is tricky, and yet it is the borders of the nation-­state itself that are questioned most distinctly in YHCHI’s work. Most pieces, for example, appear in several languages, in­clud­ing French, German, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, English, and “Tango,” and no language in any multi-­language pieces is given priority (see fig. 6.3). This translation of one’s own text into other languages can find an analogy in Samuel Beckett’s translations of his own works between English and French, but YHCHI’s new versions simply supplant the

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version in the earlier language (no translator is credited), making each new version an origi­nal, thereby calling for a whole new variety of comparative studies. One could certainly apply conventional hermeneutics to any in­di­ vidual text, but the actual “content” of the work seems to lie in the fact of the network itself. In the time of 56k modems, YHCHI pieces were notable for just zipping over the internet to one’s computer, unlike much early net-­art that could take hours to download before viewing. This samizdat quality—the basic production and speed of reproduction and access—almost insured their work reached developing countries today that lie on the other side of the digital divide. One of their most notorious pieces, “Cunnilingus in North Korea,” is a fake speech given by a North Korean woman in high sloganeering style on the superiority of North Korean men in satisfying their female comrades. The ideological satire of this text is nearly unreadable to those unfamiliar with Korean history, but it was poignant enough for YHCHI to garner criticism from both the left and the right in South Korea for their subject matter (2008). Most importantly, YHCHI once again defeated geographical distance, this time between the South and the North, even if there is no internet access for anyone but the highest ranking, no doubt humorless bureaucrats in that country. Peter Cho’s web-­based projects “Letterscapes” and “Wordscapes” explore interactive fonts; each set comprises twenty-­six digital pieces in which either a letter or entire word can be dragged, bent, or otherwise manipulated by the user. Each one exists at the nexus of typography, animation, and interactivity, making modest claims for each, but in combination completely sui generis. Each piece also operates at the nexus of reference (text), representation (image), and abstraction (number) and plays with the common trope of “negative” space in Asian calligraphy, transforming yin/yang interaction between inky darks and untouched whites into a much more elaborate series of gestalt switches between solids and voids, foreground and background, and a seemingly endless number of color gradients. An earlier project of Cho’s titled “Takeluma” involved an entirely new alphabetical sys­tem in the spirit of Brosses’s “organic alphabet” and Bell’s “visible speech,” not to mention King Sejong’s Hangul, in which each letter resembled the shape of the sound made when depicted as a single line (something like the depiction of a sound wave). Inspired by Wolfgang Köhler’s 1929 discovery, known as the “bouba/kiki effect,” that humans naturally associated sharp consonants (like k, t, ch) with jagged lines and soft consonants (like m, r, or sh) with rounded lines, Cho crafted his own alphabet with the intention of “returning” written language to an indexical, and not arbitrary, relationship to sound.

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f. Fonts Paul Chan (born in Hong Kong in 1973) launched a series of fonts in the late nineties that he dubbed Alternumerics, each of which replaces the letters of the alphabet with either words or an image. Chan wrote, describing “Self-­ Portrait as a Font”: “What is it like to write like me? You don’t even know me. Lowercase letters are phrases I think I say in conversations. Uppercase letters are parenthetical comments based on what I think I say in conversation and common mistakes I make when writing. Numbers are names of friends, family, and former lovers. Punctuations are incidental words I use to feign interest, confusion, or indifference” (“Alternumerics”). The font titled “The Future Must Be Sweet (after Charles Fourier)” includes words and phrases from the French utopian thinker Fourier connected by lines or vectors, such that a word like “poverty” typed out in “The Future Must Be Sweet” creates a nonlinear network of philosophical reflections. The “Black Panther” (see fig. 6.4) font transforms the letterforms into portraits of major Black revolutionaries, slogans and demands, guns, babies, animals, and cops, turning even the most indifferent typing into a vibrant, even passionate, documentary montage. For gallery exhibitions, Chan would create fine prints of these words, tweaked by playing with common features of typesetting such as kerning and tracking, such that the word resembled something like a calligraphic sculpture itself. However, it’s not just ideographic or phoneme-­based written systems that stand at a distance from the alphabetic systems traditional to program­ming languages. Rana Abou Rjeily explores in Cultural Connectives a typeface she created called Mirsaal that stands somewhere between the Roman alphabetic sys­tem and written Arabic, a sys­tem which possesses a number of transformational or morphological features that make it difficult for the West­ern-­educated person to learn: a. Arabic letters change their shape depending on where in the word they are placed. The letter hā, for example, has an initial form (at the start of a word), a medial form (the middle) and final form (end) as well as an isolated form. Arabic doesn’t have upper-­and lower-­case letters. b. Arabic is always written in cursive, a specialized category in the Roman alphabet, and thus when justifying Arabic script, the lines between the central glyphs must be elongated or compressed, making Arabic also a more horizontal script than Roman characters which have an “upright nature.” (60) c. Arabic letters are of­ten combined (much as the letters “e” and “t” are

Figure 6.4. Paul Chan, “Black Panther” font from Alternumerics.

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combined to form the ampersand) adding more characters to learn, such as when the “lam” and “alif ” are “knotted” together to form “la.” (36) d. Arabic employs a complex sys­tem of diacriti­cal marks to denote vowel sounds, mostly in the form of one, two or three dots (occasionally below the central glyph) but also vari­ous diagonal lines (singly or in pairs), a line with a loop, a curly letter “w”, and so forth. Arabic did adopt many conventions of West­ern typography, such as italics and punctuation marks, and though the text is read right-­to-­left, numbers are read left-­to-­right as in West­ern systems. Mirsaal addresses these issues as it removes many of the transformational features of standard Arabic, such as the change of shapes depending on placement in a word, while trying to preserve the cursive and horizontal aspects. Rjeily writes that Mirsaal was “inspired by the ‘naskh’ style . . . the most legible and simplified curstive Arabic writing,” arguing that, for her, it was “crucial to develop a typeface that would help convey the cultural essence and conventions of Arabic script” (87). While Rjeily’s efforts can’t but be controversial—some parallel with a variety of attempts to creative “synthetic” versions of non-­standard ideolects such as Scots and Af­ri­can Ameri­can speech come to mind—the focus on the site of the typeface marks Mirsaal as operating on the granular level as well, even attributing to the gramme a singular essence and set of properties. Mirsaal also hints at the Utopian element that underpins even the most Dadaist of these “miscegenated scripts.”

g. Instructions An artist not associated with new media—in fact, his medium is one of the most traditional, the ink brush and scroll—is Xu Bing, a Chinese artist who has for years at a time lived in the United States. Xu Bing is probably best known for his fascinating, if entirely inutile, sys­tem for drawing English words using strokes from Chinese ideography. Called “Square Word Calligraphy,” Xu’s sys­tem seems to run against what one might call the strength of the Roman alphabet in digital culture, with its assignation of a single ­grapheme to a single sound, efficiently usurped for the purposes of computer code. Xu’s sys­tem takes English words and translates each letter into calligraphic strokes, combining these units—enlarging, shrinking, interweaving, distending them—into larger units that resemble ideographs (not unlike another invented script, Hangul). Of course, this betrays the basic Orientalist tenet in Ernest Fenollosa (and later, Ezra Pound) that the ideogram will reveal its meaning if stared at long enough, the mimetic image at its ancestral root somehow reemerging with enough concentration. But it also

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takes away from the Roman character a quality that made it amenable to programming—­its occupation in a “line” of a distinct, inviolable space. “Square Word Calligraphy” also betrays the singular virtue of Chinese ideographs, which is that, once learned, they can be read quite quickly (see fig. 6.5). This flip from what one could call the binary units of the Roman alphabet (to the degree that each letter in a finite alphabet can be assigned to a single number) to the indexical units of the Chinese ideogram (in which each word, of which there are an infinite amount, requires a distinct number) suggests the pressures a Chinese speaker and writer must succumb to when absorbed into the globe’s new lingua franca. Whereas the pre-­digital age would be either absorbed in the game of literary translation and cultural anthropology—look at Pound’s Cathay poems, on the one hand, and Said’s analy­sis of Orientalism on the other—the present hangs on the algorithmic quality of languages: its ability or inability to support processes in a digital realm. Roger T. Ames, in his discussion of another of Xu Bing’s projects, the “Book from the Sky,” which is, like “Square Word Calligraphy,” premised on a set of instructions—this time in the creation of “meaningless” Chinese characters that nonetheless conform to the general rules of ideogrammatic writing—crafts an intricate contrast in West­ern and specifically Chinese notions of creativity. Striking a somewhat Lovecraftian note, he writes that “Book from the Sky” “evokes an antique primordiality in that its intelligi­ bility suggests that the novelty attending an always continuing process has outrun its linguistic reference. What once was a determinate, rational language has become residual, and we are left with an obsolete vocabulary that would speak if it could of a lost world before the birthing of our present linguistic epoch—of a profoundly literate civilization that we no longer have the cultural competence to know” (38). Xu Bing’s work is “within its own Chinese worldview,” one to which the “West­ern” observer has only limited access, a “heuristic for the further production of meaning” (40). What Ames appears to describe is a sort of folk, or spiritual, understanding of the immanent creativity inherent in algorithmic (if bodily activated) production: One distinctive feature of Chinese process qui cosmology is the continuing “emergence” of determinate order—a hermeneutical assumption about how meaning is made that will not allow for any severe distinction between “text” and the productiveness of interpretation. [T]he production of meaning is radically situated, emerging from the changing relations within our world of experience in our continuing present. “Emergence” is a creatio in situ assumption about creative

Figure 6.5. «when you are old» (Square Word Calligraphy) 2007, ink on paper, 69 x 140 cm. Author: W. B. Yeats. Calligraphy by: Xu Bing

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ad­vance, and is captured early in the Chinese tradition in the expression tiyong—­“the mutuality of reforming and functioning” . . . Simply put, in Chinese cosmology, all creativity is construed as situated and radically embedded—a collaborative co-­creativity. Creating oneself and creating one’s world is a coterminous and mutually entailing process. (40) Ames later draws a distinction between creation ex nihilo, which is the foundation of “Aristotelian cosmological assumptions—the hen reproduces its own essence, or in the human case, the child has its own soul as an essential identity independent of the parent,” and creation in situ, in which “the putative discreteness and independence [of objects] is qualified by . . . processual and contextual assumptions . . . [and] processual continuity . . . is punctuated as unique ‘events’ by the consummatory nature of [derivation]” (42). He suggests, among other things, a sort of link between Whitehead’s thought and Chinese cosmology, but also why “Chinese thought” was embraced by the Tel Quel writers in their expansion of semiology to all cultural spheres. “Procreation” is, in this contrast, closer to what one might call co-­creation, or which Stiegler calls consisting—a series of negotiations of the interior with the exterior milieu, yet one in which the soul or spirit doesn’t have an essence so much as a quest for (in Piaget’s terms) a sort of equilibrium. Ames suggests that the sort of meaning production in “Book from the Sky” is not akin to the sorts of expulsions valorized by McCaffery, nor merely an opaque Dada joke. Ames’s account instead envisions “Book from the Sky” as a sort of grounding in activity, noting that (in an account by Wang Bi), “the sages were not seeking to ‘discover’ or to ‘explain’ the ‘ontological’ ground of the human experience. Rather they sought to provide a contingent, explanatory vocabulary for the cultivation of an open-­ended and continuing cultural adventure. They began from the basic assumption that culture is an ongoing evolving process that entails both novelty and persistence, both crises and continuities, both transformation and resistance” (53). To this degree, the instructions of Xu Bing, not the products, are provided as the only reliable source of ground in both literature and philosophy, and that is in the in situ creativity of forms through time.

h. Scores John Cage’s later mesostics, particularly “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham” (see fig. 6.6) which appeared in M: Writings, ’67–’72, use chance and procedural operations to determine not only which phrases were taken from the source texts (Cunningham’s own book, Changes: Notes on Choreography, and “thirty-­two other books most used by Cunningham in relation to his

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Figure 6.6. John Cage, selection from “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham.”

work”) and how long they would run, but also the typeface and size of the font. In contrast to the standard mesostic, in which the name of the dedi­ catee forms a spine—the capital letters J, A, S, P, E, R, for example, stacked vertically—with phrases leading into it from the left and out from the right, the Merce Cunningham mesostics appear like free floating blobs of letters, not vertically but radially, tentacular and suspended in a thick viscosity. The “62 Mesostics” offer an interesting contrast to Xu Bing’s efforts with square writing. Xu’s sys­tem requires classical discipline—he’s produced instruction books for their production—and favor the shape of the square, horizontal and vertical regularity, and ultimately a form of legibility for the native English reader with time to stare. Cage’s method spurns traditional discipline, subjecting the composition to an automated “chance,” letting it sprawl to the left, right, up, and down, though like Xu, Cage offers a fair chance at comprehension with enough time staring. Xu’s work relies on the consistency of the hand and the limited toolbox of Chinese radicals; Cage’s, on the other hand, erases the bodily creator and can potentially expand to a limitless num­ber of typefaces, sizes and even colors (which he doesn’t do). Nonetheless, both fig­ure well within that territory of rendering the Roman alphabet

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“calligraphic,” or perhaps merely moving it closer to the expression of the elements—wind, rain, earth—and away from a largely anonymous “coding.” We can extend this concern with image and instruction to vari­ous experiments with musical scoring. For example, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s elaborate score for Zyklus required the musician not only to learn an entirely new set of specific icons devoted to percussion instruments and the way they should be played, but also, in performance, to negotiate a two-­dimensional, non-­ linear score that intermingles determinate and indeterminate instructions. The beauty of the scores themselves are readily apparent, and seem heightened by the novice’s knowledge that, indeed, they signified a sort of fidelity to instruction and were the enforcers of something like discipline—a law but in the form of something like an ideogram. These scores are unique in their proposing, in the manner of Schoenberg, an entire new methodology of music, but with the addition of a new written language with which, presumably, an infinite number of works could be conceived.

i. Esolangs The conflict between alphabetic and ideogrammatic language systems plays out in a quirky way in the world of programming. John Cayley once wrote of Xu Bing’s own efforts to digitize his work: “[X]u Bing produced a work using a letter-­based rather than a character-­based sys­tem of inscription. In the light of this, we might ask ourselves . . . to what extent this great artist of inscription was obliged, structurally, to modulate his practice . . . in order that it should enter the dominant systems of digital inscription? Should Chinese artists, working with the applied grammatology of Chinese culture and yet tantalized by the potentials of networked and programmable media, be obliged to make similar compromises?” (Hockx and Smits 287) Esoteric programming languages, otherwise known as Esolangs, address, in a non-­ utilitarian, off-­handed way, Cayley’s concerns. Esolangs are languages that directly oppose the normative value systems behind the construction of popu­lar languages such as C++ or Java. Created either as experiments or proofs of concept, as software art, or merely as a joke, esolangs are made under the sign of vari­ous imperatives: to not be compilable (i.e., to never run, even if coded properly), to inject randomness into any program (i.e., to make it difficult to make the program do something predictable), or to use a sys­tem of commands that make it difficult for the human programmer to read his or her own code. Invented by Urban Müller in 1993 in an attempt to make a language for which he could write the smallest compiler possible, brainfuck is the most famous esoteric language, employing only eight commands in the form of single, non-­alphabetic glyphs:

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> < + -­ . , [ ]

Move the pointer to the right Move the pointer to the left Increment the memory cell under the pointer Decrement the memory cell under the pointer Output the character signified by the cell at the pointer Input a character and store it in the cell at the pointer Jump past the matching ] if the cell under the pointer is 0 Jump back to the matching [ if the cell under the pointer is nonzero

From these basic commands, one has to create more complex, yet necessary, structures like variable definitions, control loops, arrays, and so forth. The program for “Hello World!”—the canonical first program for any new coder, one that merely places this phrase on the screen—in brainfuck looks like this: ++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+>+[.> –.+++++++..+++.>>.+.>++ A variant of brainfuck, Ook!, intended to be a language that only used the vocabulary of the Orangutan (thereby increasing the number of great ape programmers) was invented by David Morgan-­Mar. Each command contains the word “Ook” twice; it is only the variations in punctuation marks that distinguish the commands, such that “Ook. Ook?” means “move the pointer to the right” and “Ook? Ook.” means “move the pointer to the left.” Ook! is probably one of the few programming languages that was meant to be read aloud, at least to the same degree that Paul Chan’s “Sade for Fonts Sake” was intended to generate great pornography. The “Hello World!” program looks like this: Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook!

Gramme and Transpacific Hybridity / 223 Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook.

Other esolangs experiment with spatialization, such that the program doesn’t run from top to bottom or from function to function but, rather, is directed over a two-­dimensional “playfield.” A particularly suggestive esolang, White­space, was invented by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris and launched on April Fool’s Day, 2003. Seeming to step out of the pages of Craig Dwork­ in’s homage to the art of voids, No Medium, Whitespace is programmed entirely in spaces, tabs, and line feeds—any other character in a White­space program is ignored. The first line of the “Hello World!” program in White­ space, rendered “readable” by translating its vocabulary into markup language, looks like this: “ ”—though the code can be experienced in its fully glory by looking at any blank sheet of paper. Even before the advent of esolangs, attempts were made to create programming languages in Chinese and other Asian languages. Notable is Chinese BASIC, invented in the early eighties, which permitted within the same program Chinese ideograms, English letters, and abbreviated commands (such as “?” for “PRINT”). Inputting Chinese into a keyboard is something of a science in itself, as elements of ideograms, such as the radical or a geo­metric element (the shape of a box, for example) of characters related by a complex set of “decomposition rules” have to be mapped out over a QWERTY keyboard. Cangjie is based on the graphological aspect of the characters: each graphical unit is represented by a character component, twenty-­ four in all, each mapped to a particular letter key on a standard QWERTY keyboard. An additional “difficult character” function is mapped to the X key. Within the keystroke-­to-­character representations, there are four subsections of characters: the Philosophical Set (corresponding to the letters ‘A’ to ‘G’ and representing the sun, the moon, and the five elements), the Strokes Set (corresponding to the letters ‘H’ to ‘N’ and representing the brief and subtle strokes), the Body-­Related Set (corresponding to the letters ‘O’

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to ‘R’ and representing vari­ous parts of human anatomy), and the Shapes Set (corresponding to the letters ‘S’ to ‘Y’ and representing complex and encompassing character forms). Korea’s written language, Hangul, merges East­ern and West­ern writing systems to the degree that it employs in­di­vidual symbols, called jamo, for consonants and vowels, like the Roman alphabet, but assembles them in what, to untrained eyes, appear to be ideograms. On a computer, these in­ di­vidual strokes are entered one at a time, the computer then assembling the character when it’s complete. Aheui is an esolang for coding in Hangul; it’s “Hello World!” program looks like this:

Hanbe is another Hangul-­based programming language that was packaged with a Korean operating sys­tem called K-­DOS, while Himawari is a Japanese programming language intended for hobbyists. Asian-­language ­esolangs share elements of Xu Bing’s “Square Word Calligraphy” in that they trouble the border between alphabetic and ideogrammatic writing systems, bringing the attention of the user or programmer to the most granular level of a script.

Granularity and the Gramme The concept of granular synthesis was proposed with a theory of hearing by physicist Dennis Gabor in 1946. The Canadian composer Curtis Roads is of­ ten credited with having first utilized the technique in digital music, while credit is given to Greek-­French composer Iannis Xenakis, famously interested in “stochastic” methods of composition, for having proposed its use in musical composition, describing a nearly atomistic theory of the sound wave: “All sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time. In the attack, body, and decline of a complex sound, thousands of pure sounds appear in a more or less short interval of time” (Roads 169). In the digital realm, granular synthesis is the method of transforming sound files

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by breaking them into tiny snippets called grains, usually within the in­au­ dible range of 1–50 millisec­onds, running a procedure on them (to alter pitch, tone, volume, and so forth), and then reassembling these sounds to form a new, if related, seamless and audible sound file.4 After the advent of affordable digital technologies in the mid-­nineties, musicians and sound designers began to engage in granular synthesis outside the bounds of the avant-­garde, manipulating sound nearly at the level of the bit, which is to say the level of 1s and 0s. While visual artists also explored how images and videos could be transformed on the level of the pixel (the smallest unit of visual representation), given the relatively light amount of computing power needed to transform sound in real time (in programs such as Max/MSP, for example), sound artists were the first, in my view, to turn operations at the granular level into something like a “cognitive style” (to borrow Edward Tufte’s term). Because expectations of semantic content—meaning narratives, concepts, emotional perspectives— are reduced in sound art, manipulations of sound on the micro level could be more randomized and yet still appreciable as a form of aesthetic experience than could obtain (at least outside of the avant-­garde) in images and texts. Glitch works, for example, which are premised on the failure of technology (a skipping CD, a corrupted MP3 file), despite the chaos and speed with which the sound assaulted the ears, could be appreciated in the traditions of, for example, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, No Wave music or the barrages of noise of the most radical free jazz.5 Nonetheless, digital text artists did eventually find a way to explore a poetics of granularity, not only by using the phoneme or even the consonant or vowel (Neil Hennessy’s “Jabber: The Jabberwocky Engine,” working off of Markov chains, is an example of this) but by working at the level of the mark or, to borrow Derrida’s terminology, the gramme or trace. Steve McCaf­fery writes in his afterword to the largely wordless, typewritten “score,” ­Marquee, by poet Ray DiPalma: “Marquee then, exposes the very contours of the sig­ ni­fier (when meaning is differance what else can ‘be’?). Shard. Trace-­structure. A live (a life) in materiality deliberately devoid of function yet in that lack-­ of-­usage instituting a presence of its own: a graphic substance. On the plane of semiosis DiPalma gives us a language-­centered text, a text lacking all referential thrusts to any outside ‘reality.’ And here we enter the logical illogic and inhabit a centre which is margin: the centre of the sign-­shape, in/side the outline. A/long, a/mong, a/bove and not a/bove a spacing that is solid: the ink of the gramme” (8). The gramme is the level of the written word that is one of pure difference—no symbolic or syntactic orders accrue—and are tautological, non-­referential, and subtracted from the conventional semiotic triad of sign-­signifier-­referent. The gramme can be defined as that granu-

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lar element (the Chinese radicals, the horizontal lines of Arabic script) that, when subject to a sys­tem (the ideogram, the line of text) acquire the body of meaning, a form of extension into culture. The artists in the present essay explore a version of this a-­ or presemic writing in large part to explore a void that networks and the programming languages based on alphabets have exposed, one between competing East­ern and West­ern scriptural systems. Written language is not only rendered in its atomic, pre-­semantic units—as grammes or grains—but is then sublated into new, coherent, and, to a degree, functional systems. These new systems of meanings relate more to fields of iconography and cryptography than to, say, useful systems like Hangul, or systems of pure expenditure such as McCaffery’s “general economy.” The ontological status of these systems is unclear: Do they stand between the world of pure immanence and that of appearances, like a Maxwell’s demon distinguishing between hot and cold atoms? Or do they constitute a world itself—a set of ideal forms of which instances are mere shadows, like the “ghost” poem that hides behind the lyrical sequences of Harryette Mullen and Ben Lerner? In any case, like the “virtual America” Charles Bernstein describes, the horizon toward which a “poetics of the Americas” can only move but never attain, the miscegenated script makes claims to reforming geography, populating the fertile void—this essay only got longer as the examples piled up—between West­ern and East­ern writing systems.

Postscript: Living Poststructuralism Pamela Lu describes in her popu­lar underground novel Pamela: A Novel (1998), a sort of roman-­à-­clef roughly describing the culture of young San Francisco during the time of the first internet boom, the uncanny feeling of disembodiment in the face of naturalized high theory: The very fact of our existence, amidst the flux of circular debates about the state of our very existence, felt like a parody of these debates themselves; hence we could only be real, really real, when we mimicked the representations as they appeared in theory, commercials, and general conversation, which in turn seemed to suggest that we had just missed being real by fifty years or so. We were being influenced by all the books we read, but these same books had all been written at least ten years before we discovered them, so that we were always playing catchup as all the new ideas expired before us. In fact, we were always expiring before ourselves, or before we could convince ourselves that we existed, and had impact on the world outside us, if it was accurate at all to speak of the world as being “outside” anything. Or as A jokingly put

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it, R and I were “living” post-­structuralism, with an all-­encompassing personal irony that crossed the line between theory and praxis, or praxis and “praxis,” the latter being a more self-­aware, more satirical cartoon of the former. This made us feel both immensely important, for having the ironic self-­consciousness that we were fictional, and immensely unimportant, for being fictional in the first place. ­(19–20) Lu’s string of cultural determinants—“theory, commercials, and general conversation”—is tellingly symptomatic of what many hyper-­intelligent, overly-­ read youths (especially, one might suggest, of racial and sexual minorities) felt coming up in the nineties when used copies of Barthes and Foucault, Kristeva and Cixous, could be bought at an average urban used bookstore, and when the pressure to plumb the depths of identity, in an effort perhaps to reacquire the physical intimacy of sixties-­style counterculture, were lingering. Instead, one is left with the cerebral coldness of finding a way to translate “theory into praxis,” of being “living poststructuralism.” Lu’s novel is recognizably autobiography but reduces its actors to variables or scriptural elements—­characters are named P, L, R, and, of course, “I,” etc.—operating in what seems to be a network, or at least a world in which the protagonist is not particularly comfortable, either because she feels at times too robotic for love, at times too human for thought. Recalling the AI thought experiments by Searle and Block that started this chapter, Pamela suggests a collapse between human and non-­human actors, namely, the algorithms that run our computers, our net­works, our Facebook pages, and that humans are having to come to grips with machines that have acquired some agency, and hence falls in line with thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, Katherine Hayles, and Timothy Morton, who argue that nature/technology divide is largely non-­existent: the inanimate lives with and in us, and always has.

7 Discompositions Troubling Ground in Graphic Design

The Poem as Formal Language Wittgenstein, in his only publication, the Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus, seemed to believe in the possibility of a logically ordered construction of language premised on foundational “atomic facts,” though in his later, posthumous volume, the Philosophical Investigations, he dispelled any illusions about linguistic “simples,” arguing instead that language was a “game” that exchanged meaning and value according to a sys­tem that was both arbitrary and contingent. Though the large part of the Tractatus is concerned with the development of a mathematical language for formal logic (not to mention a development and critique of Frege and Russell’s earlier attempts), concentrating on a sys­tem of signs—such as ~, η, ξ, etc.—that plays little to no role outside of mathematics and logic, Wittgenstein glances upon what would become a central aspect in his later language theory, which is the role a single word can play as a “simple.” 4.032 The proposition is a picture of its state of affairs, only in so far as it is logically articulated. (Even the proposition “ambulo” is composite, for its stem gives a different sense with another termination, or its termination with another stem.) (22) Wittgenstein effectively takes a single word from an inflected language— “ambulo” is the first person active of the verb “ambulare” (to walk) in Latin—

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and treats it as a phrase of two or more words with a subject, predicate, tense, relationship to a real state of affairs (this isn’t a wish or hypothesis), and semantic content (in the sense that it is walking and not, say, drinking or sleeping). A declension of the word “ambulare” in the active indicative runs as follows: Ambulo Ambulas Ambulat Ambulamus Ambulatis Ambulant

(I walk) (you, singular, walk) (he/she walks) (we walk) (you, plural, walk) (they walk)

As any student of Latin or a modern Romance language would know, the suffix performs all sorts of grammatical work beyond what it could ever do in English. Following is the declension of “ambulare” in the pluperfect subjunctive voice and a rough English equivalent: Ambulavissem Ambulavisses Ambulavisset Ambulavissemus Ambulavissetis Ambulavissent

(I would have walked) (you, singular, would have walked) (he/she would have walked) (we would have walked) (you, plural, would have walked) (they would have walked)

Wittgenstein essentially converts a single inflected word into three distinct elements: the stem “ambul” informs us of the nature of the activity; the suffix both the chronological time of the activity as well as its relationship to the plane of reality (the subjunctive case being largely used for hypothetical or wished-­for situations); and the final string denoting the perspective and number of the subject. In a sense, a single word becomes a graph of relations between two elements, much as aRb in logical notation denotes “a has a relationship to b.” (In this case, a and b have an additional burden of representing specific objects, unlike x, y, and u, which are variables as in computer science, and p, q, r, and s, which denote elementary propositions.) To this degree, a single word is a “picture” not because it bears mimetic properties and acts on the cognition—the word doesn’t launch into the imagination a “mental” image of the speaker in the act of walking—but because it offers a graph of a state of affairs between objects of the world which, in relation, constitute facts (“2 What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts; 2.01 An atomic

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fact is a combination of objects (entities, things)” [5]). The word “ambulo” suggests that the -­o—itself a composite, as it denotes the active tense as applied to a speaker, the “I”—merely bears a relation to ambul—to walking itself. This is no mere general relation though, but one that asks of a synthesis of the object and predicate into the relatively unambiguous truth statement that the pounds of flesh uttering this word is also engaged in the activity of lifting a leg, moving the foot forward, and engaging in the “controlled fall” that is walking. Notable is the amount of meaning that can be compacted into a mere suffix—statements of fact, of logic, of argument, are rendered perfectly subjunctive in the sec­ond declension above—a situation that, as we’ve seen in Peter Manson’s Adjunct and will see in Clark Coolidge’s Ing, has been exploited by experimental poets. Wittgenstein returns to this problem of the word in the first sec­tions of the Philosophical Investigations, reflecting on the many possible intentions behind the uttering of the single word from an uninflected language—“Platte” (slab)—a formative element to his theory of the language-­game. In this case, he views the single word (in an anticipatory act of transformational grammar) as somehow signifying as many as four words, even as nothing in the grammar (but much in the context of the utterance) tells us to do so: But what about this: is the call “Slab!” in example (2) a sentence or a word? If a word, surely it has not the same meaning as the like sounding word of our ordinary language, for in §2 it is a call. But if a sentence, it is surely not the elliptical sentence: “Slab!” of our language.— As far as the first question goes you can call “Slab!” a word and also a sentence; perhaps it could be appropriately called a “degenerate sentence” (as one speaks of a degenerate hyperbola); in fact it is our “elliptical” sentence.—But that is surely only a shortened form of the sentence “Bring me a slab,” and there is no such sentence in example (2).—But why should I not on the contrary have called the sentence “Bring me a slab” a lengthening of the sentence “Slab!”?—Because if you shout “Slab!” you really mean: “Bring me a slab.”—But how do you do this: how do you mean that while you say “Slab!”? Do you say the unshortened sentence to yourself? And why should I translate the call “Slab!” into a different expression in order to say what someone means by it? (8–9) His final query, regarding translations, alludes to some set of rules of substitution natural to a formal language. In both examples, that of “ambulo” and “slab,” Wittgenstein has effectively treated a single word as a picture, in the former highlighting its possible relationship to a formal language in the

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manner of Frege, suggesting that it is a suitable formulation of some state of affairs consisting of a subject, predicate, and something like qualia—the feeling of meaning—for its content, in the latter transforming a noun along with an exclamation point into a series of speculative noun-­verb formations. In the former example, when Wittgenstein still humors the possibility of rendering logical realities using mathematical formulas, he believes in the notion of a composite made up of simples, and that propositions are founded on axioms that, themselves, don’t have to be proved beyond sufficient reason. In the latter example, Wittgenstein determines that, even if possible in logical schemas, axioms or simples are not possible in language itself—at the base of any formulation of a logical proof are words that slip between being single nouns, “slab,” to entire sentences, “bring me a slab.” This general motion from axiomatic (if tautological) to propositional (if base­less) can be termed a primary act of discomposition, which we can describe simply as the auto-­critique of acts of grounding within a syntactic/ semantic structure that strives, nonetheless, to provide ground.

Poetic Artifice This understanding of the single word as a possible graph, as a picture, is at the core, I believe, of Veronica Forrest-­Thomson theory of the image complex in Poetic Artifice, a book that outlined a theory of poetry from a criti­cal perspective—i.e., a tool to determine the success or failure of a poem rather than merely a vocabulary for describing the phenomenon of a “poem”—but one which, rather than confirming or resisting a “tradition,” concentrated on those elements of the poem that resist quick interpretation or, in her terms, “Naturalization” by the reader or critic. Forrest-­Thomson, extrapolating from the structuralist poetics of her mentor Jonathan Culler, creates a sort of parity between those non-­semantic elements that have been traditionally associated with interpretation—rhythm, rhyme or sound patterning, diction, semantics, tone, and so forth—and those elements that serve to resist “bad Naturalization,” the absorption of the poem into a world of determinate, prosaic meanings, the kind of thing that happens when we rush to “interpret” poems. These non-­meaningful elements can overlap with those of traditional methods—sound patterning, for example—but are of­ten elements like em-­dashes, line breaks (when not used for dramatic effect), unusual typography or spatialization of text, or even the descent at times into pure nonsense. Forrest-­Thomson cites the famous final lines of the Tractatus (5.6), “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” as helping to “set the stage for discussion.” “The basis of continuity between poetry and the rest of

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one’s experience is the essentially verbal nature of that experience: the fact that it takes shape in language,” she writes, “The continuity which makes it possible to read the world into words provides that the world may be enlarged or enriched by the enlargement of one’s awareness of language and/ or awareness of others’ enlargement of their awareness of language” (20­– 21). But she qualifies her statement—“awareness” and “knowledge” are not merely gauges of information but also “an ability to see how a use of language filters external contexts into the poem and subjects them to new distancing and articulation” (21). While Poetic Artifice contains several case studies (readings of Larkin, Hughes, Pound, Eliot, and so forth), her subjection of a short leader from the Times (Friday, De­cem­ber 15th, 1972) to quasi-­ Modernist poetic conventions—namely, irregular line breaks, spatialization, a somewhat programmatic use of scare quotes, and occasional capitalization and italics—illustrates best for me the range of “non-­meaningful” elements that would most likely be ignored in a case of “bad Naturalization.” At the ‘head’ of the BBC The Government have taken their ‘time’ in appointing the ‘new chairman’ of the BBC which is a measure both of the ‘importance’ now ‘attached’ to the ‘office’ and of the difficulty of persuading somebody of the ‘necessary quality’ to take it on a ‘part-­time basis’ at £6,000 a year BUT in choosing Sir Michael Swann they have made a ‘good selection’ and a very much better one than might have been expected after such a delay. (23) The standard description of such an exercise is that it is “prose broken into lines,” but I see Forrest-­Thomson’s activity differently: she added at fairly regular intervals the 27th letter, the blank space, that Claude Shannon de-

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scribes as a positive feature of textual communication (as I describe in an earlier chapter). In these moments of free-­fall, when the internal statistician, the “mathematical” reader, sizes up the possible futures of the poem or sentence, a sort of evaluative process occurs—concrescences of sounds and syntax are reheard, in a sense, contributing to the “poetic” quality of the poem. Notably, in Forrest-­Thomson’s revision, nothing unusual occurs in word order or statistical probability—she didn’t change anything from the origi­nal leader—and so any element of surprise emerges from the irrational but not inassimilable use of scare quotes. For example, in the phrase “take their ‘time’ ” one can hear something like “their so-­called time,” even if one does not know what the intention behind it is. However, unlike a phrase such as “necessary quality,” which could be, in quotes, a snarky euphemism for lack of quality—­“Who could be so unprincipled as to take this job?”— “time” in quotes doesn’t contribute to a satirical tone (at least in my hearing). The arbitrary italicization of the final line of this excerpt (Forrest-­Thomson’s “poem” continues for seven more lines) was possibly inspired by the elusive italics in the fourth line of John Ashbery’s “They Dream Only of America”: They dream only of America To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass: “This honey is delicious Though it burns the throat.” To my mind, the only reason this line is memorable is the absurdity, but also the fitness, of embellishing it with this Jamesian ornament—what set of meanings is liberated by offering us this qualification of tone? Who is this person? Forrest-­Thomson’s exercise isolates, even more than her case studies, a range of common devices that can be said, after Gerard Genette, to be para­ texts: capitalization, quotes, line breaks, capitalization, not to mention the typeface and -­size and perhaps the letters themselves, work as thresholds to the real text, which otherwise (stripped of all properties) might be nothing more than a word-­for-­word memory. In his essay “Artifice of Absorption,” which is indebted to Forrest-­Thomson not just for its central conceit but also, perhaps, its precedent of turning prose into “poetry” for didactic ends, Charles Bernstein isolates a key passage in Poetic Artifice that offers a clue to the very weirdness of privileging artifice. Proffering his own suggestive italics, Bernstein quotes Forrest-­Thomson: “Anti-­realism need not imply, as certain French theorists might claim, a rejection of meaning. All that Artifice requires is that nonmeaningful levels be taken into account, and that meaning be used as a technical device which makes it impossible as well as

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wrong for critics to strand poems in the external world” (132). Suggesting that meaning is a “technical device” is also to suggest that “meaning” could itself merely be the paratext to the poem (confirming my contention earlier that one might consider the “I” of a lyric a very troubling instance of paratext). Consequently, the “nonmeaningful” elements of poems are depicted as suspended by the “meaningful” even as meaning is being used as a technical device merely to suspend an interesting array of punctuation, italics, and line breaks. Such a dynamic would make all poems something like “undigests” as I describe earlier, or akin to the syntactical pyrotechnics of 2002: A Palindrome Story. Bernstein writes of this passage: Content never equals meaning. If the artifice is foregrounded, there’s a tendency to say that there is no content or meaning, as if the poem were a formal or decorative exercise concerned only with representing its own mechanisms. But even when a poem is read as a formal exercise, the dynamics & contours of its formal proceedings may suggest, for example, a metonymic model for imagining experience. For this reason, consideration of the formal dynamics of a poem does not necessarily disregard its content; indeed it is an obvious starting point insofar as it can initiate a multilevel reading. (10–11) Bernstein’s “metonymic model” is a little unclear to me—unlike the classic example of metonymy, “Hollywood” for the entire movie industry, it’s difficult to imagine how the high artifice of, say, many of Bernstein’s own poems (such as “Shade”) relate to anything like “experience,” at least of a non-­linguistic nature. “Metonymic model” might, in fact, mean the understanding of the poem as a formal language, one that employs many of the features of vulgar, everyday language while extending “language” into the non-­semantic—~, η, ξ, the 27th letter, etc.—not to mention subjecting it to a systemization whose structures themselves do not have “meaning,” at least of the type that submits to Naturalization. Forrest-­Thomson writes that some sort of interpretive activity must occur on a conventional level, yet she writes that “bad Naturalization” occurs when critics or readers rush in to paste very specific narrative or emotional tags on every word-­event (or “image-­complex” in her terms) of a poem, as in her example of a critic who wrote that a line by Max Jacob—“Dahlia! dahlia! que Dahlia lia”—leaves the reader “with an incongruous picture of Dalila tying

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up drooping dahlias” (132). This understanding of the poem as a function, a complex of non-­meaningful elements with conventional symbols—never quite knowing if a sign is one or the other—offers a way of thinking about Wittgenstein’s “pictures” as poems themselves, as they partake in that very tension that eventually drove Wittgenstein to concentrate entirely on language, that is, the tension between representation and reference, and that it is never quite possible to establish a relationship between the poem and the world. In fact, it might be easier to establish a relationship between signs like the em-­dash, the exclamation point, and the quotation mark with the “world,” given the concretization of its function and ultimately tautological character, than it would to establish a link between a word like “love” or “anthropocene,” which seem subject to endless debate, much as Wittgenstein did to “Platte” (slab) in the Philosophical Investigations.

The Concept of Ground Though a form of ground could be discerned in formal language, and perhaps in poetry, it is a bit harder to discern in graphic design, possibly the one textual practice in which meaning is always employed as a “technical device.” In poetry we are of­ten encouraged to ignore elements of the paratext— choice of typeface and other elements of the stylesheet, texture of the paper, and size and weight of the book—but in graphic design, these elements bear the primary burden of success or failure. By positing a continuum from poetry considered “experimental” because it relies on the page as a field or ground and graphic design, which naturally takes the plane of the page or screen as something like the content of the work, a different form of “cognitive poetics” becomes apparent, even if it largely works on a pre-­symbolic level—“prior to meaning” in McCaffery’s phrase. To clarify, I’d like to sketch in broad strokes three types of “grounding” that underlie a continuum between the poem as an instance of graphic design and graphic design as a sort of inchoate poem. These types of ground­ing overlap, yet for the most part they can be discerned as three types: formal, phenomenological, and symbolic. 1. Formal grounding is based on the idea that systems of arbitrary, non-­ lexical marks—whether lines, circles, dashes, non-­normative icons, or letterforms employed in equations—are intended to have an indexical relationship to something in the “world.” Examples of formal grounding range from the languages that Frege and Russell developed to integrate mathematics with logic, Venn diagrams, Feynman diagrams, and even nomograms that were employed by engineers from the late nine-

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Figure 7.1. Arakawa and Madeline Gins, selection from The Mechanism of Meaning.

teenth to mid-­twentieth century to make rapid calculations (a protractor is a primitive version of a nomogram). Though the language of ­axioms and corollaries has existed since the birth of logic, it’s not until Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) that the term “ground” was used as a principle in philosophy, though Bolzano himself never quite reached a formal solution to how such “ground” could be established. Notably, Wittgenstein refers to this set of “atomic facts” as tautologies, in themselves making no reference to a state of affairs. 2. In a more general, everyday sense, we can point to a sort of phenome­ nological ground that forgoes the language of axioms and corollaries for an entirely semantic (that is, related to qualia, units of consciousness)

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realm. “Ground” suggests embodiment, the point or volume in space and time that houses consciousness and that permits the deictic: terms such as “up” and “down” or “here” and “there” or “this” and “that.” In phenomenology, proper ground similarly suggests the field of shared reference for the objects of the world, what in Heidegger’s language is “present-­at-­hand” and makes possible the self-­recognition of ­Dasein if not its distinction from other objects of the world. The collaboration of Arakawa/Gins, The Mechanism of Meaning (see fig. 7.1), was a series of plaques that linked the Wittgensteinian conundrum of the “language game” presented in Philosophical Investigations with general phenomenological approaches.1 3. A third type of grounding can be termed legislative or symbolic in the Lacanian sense and concerns one’s relationship to any system, in­clud­ ing po­liti­cal and economical, relating to the social order. In some ways, this is the most inchoate order of grounding, as any sense of it relies on the acknowledgement of a parity between an individual’s internal sense of the symbolic order and what can be posited, from a perfectly fictitious, transcendental view, of what actually exists. Nonetheless, it is in this category of grounding that the formal imperative of the first category, the need for axioms, and the phenomenological imperative of the sec­ond, the need for meaning, meet. This is the level at which the internalization of legalistic codes along with the concretization of in­choate, social codes occurs. Symbolic grounding can also include the interiorization of what is considered “grammatical” in normative language use—it’s for this reason that “grammar Nazis” exist at all—as we intuitively sense a text as increasingly ungrounded as it strays from grammaticality. I believe that typography and graphic design offer a unique view of the interactions, perhaps even the synthesis, of these three forms of grounding, a possibility I’d like to argue by examining a compelling theory concerning the origins of writing systems.

When Writing Met Art Archeologist Denise Schmandt-­Besserat argues that the origins of writ­ing systems can be found in the imprinting of icons on the exterior of clay bullae—­kind of like baked clay wallets—to denote what clay tokens, a sort of primitive coin, were contained within them. In Schmandt-­Besserat’s view, this use of symbols to denote objects that were not visible to the viewer is at the origins of written language, even as the marks had an indexical, and not

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indeterminate, relationship to the quantities of grain, livestock, and other objects they referred to. Importantly for any theory of the pictorial nature of “primitive” sign systems, many of these symbols bore no mimetic relationship to what they represented; spheres, for instance, could stand, depending on their markings, for lamb, sheep, ewe, wool, or vari­ous types of garment (see fig. 7.2). Schmandt-­Besserat develops this insight to discuss mimetic art that depicted, say, famous personages or his­tori­cal events on the sides of vases and on walls. In pre-­Babylonian culture, it wasn’t until primitive writing systems entered the scene, with their well-­ordered columns and rows, that the visual arts began to adopt something that we might see as the precursor to “Renaissance” perspective—that is, the depiction of fig­ures in a unified, causal space. She writes: The function of lines in pottery paintings . . . changed significantly between the preliterate and literate periods. Whereas the Ubaid and Susa I lines were used as dividers, those on particular scarlet ware vessels acted to unite the features of a composition. In the chariot scene, for example, the tower, the wheels of the chariot, the attendant’s feet, and the animal hoofs are all aligned to form an imaginary ground line. And ground lines are important, because they signify that the connected fig­ures shared the same space at the same time, participating in one specific event. Accordingly, all the fig­ures in the composition are linked, and each is to be interpreted in relation to the others. Therefore, whereas the preliterate pottery compositions formed an all-­over pattern meant to be apprehended as a whole, or globally, those of the literate period were to be viewed analytically. (24) Schmandt-­Besserat seems to be describing the birth of difference in the linguistic senses of Saussure and, later, Derrida. She argues that pictorial representation, once it acquired a “ground” through depictions of economic activity, acquired a rudimentary causal structure that we now take largely for granted. The intrusion of causal relations into the realm of the picture, however, implies that causality of some nature can be depicted at all, and thus this introduction of “ground lines” into imagery can be seen as an ur-­ moment in the development of logical depictions such as the Feynman diagram, in which even the very same icon or glyph can have completely distinct meanings based on whether it is situated one way (left to right) or turned by ninety degrees (up and down). Phenomenological grounding is expressed through the very relationship of the viewer to the art or text, while symbolic grounding becomes most apparent in the eventual distribution of such objects as the Stele of

Figure 7.2. Illustration from Denise Schmandt-­Besserat, When Writing Met Art, depicting token system.

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­ ammurabi, tall blocks of stone in which were carved, in linear and coH lumnar fashion, the entirety of the empire’s 282 laws, among the first written laws in history, in commemoration of the sixth king of the Amorite Dynasty of Babylon. Though, as Schmandt-­Besserat notes, less than 1 percent of the Babylonian population was literate, the stele “combined text and images in new ways,” such that: “It would be wrong to assume that the casual ­passer-­by would be oblivious to the inscription. There can be no doubt that writing inspired awe to the literate and illiterate alike, and that the long calligraphic text had a special aura that evoked the learned scribes and their great knowledge” (98). Images of the stele, which were about seven feet tall, show well-­ordered columns and rows of text, which in itself must have been an uncommon, exotic site even if the text were indecipherable—perhaps its very resistance to Naturalization, like that of Michaux’s alphabets, was central to its power. Schmandt-­Besserat explains: .

The text brought to mind the power of the state bureaucracy, the palace, and the temple. Moreover, writing was seen as divine, since from the beginning of time gods were deemed to record in writing all human deeds on the Tablets of Destinies. Likewise, the arts of civilization and the functioning of institutions (me) taught to humans by the mythical Oannes were believed to be preserved on tablets. And, finally, writing was thought to have a power of its own. Curses could magically execute themselves long after they were inscribed, went the belief. The stele’s text brought together all the awesome aspects of writing: it was royal and divine. It was a scholarly text with a potent curse. (98) Schmandt-­Besserat’s research, which expands to account for law, the economy, and aesthetics, demonstrates how we are able to approach these levels of assurance through the transmission of text and, even if only in the linear ordering of elements, “graphic design.” The question of the meaning of graphic design thus descends quite deeply into a realm where “meanings” themselves—the particular content of what we will call qualia, a term from cognitive science to designate a unit of the sensation of meaning—reside. To this degree, certain forms of poetry that have thrown in their lot with the graphical representation of poetic texts (as opposed to the oral) will be observed as instances of graphic design itself.

The ABC of Reading A salient, if largely involuntary, example of discomposition can be found in the idiosyncratic anthology of poetry edited by Ezra Pound in 1934, titled

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The ABC Reading. Poetry anthologies—the poems themselves, the paratextual material such as poetics statements, introductions, footnotes, biographies, photographs—are a form of ludic criticism; contrast and absence (where did all those other poems go?), and not consistency and narrative, are significant measure for success. Pound’s anthology exponentially increases the aspect of play inherent in the anthology form as it is constructed on the principle of a rebus; an argument, however indeterminate, is extended over aporetic leaps, preserving the sovereignty of its elements, activating every element of the book to provide a singular dynamic image of the interplay of conflicting texts.2 At the head of his primer, Pound states that “[t]he present pages should be impersonal enough to serve as a textbook” (11), and yet the book itself performs a reckless destruction of nearly all of the elements that one would associate with a state-­or university-­sanctioned textbook, overriding bureaucratic authority with the authoritative whims of Pound himself. While much can be written about the tone of Pound’s introductions and glosses— he notes early on that he will banish the “gloom and solemnity” that characterize standard primers on writing, apologizing for “long dullish” stretches that he couldn’t help himself writing—the more interesting element is how Pound’s decisions affected the standards of graphic design, namely the impregnability of the stylesheet that guides the hierarchical structure of the page, that are usually put into place to grant a poetry anthology objective authority. The early parts of the book consist of a series of short chapters written in the style one associates with other mid-­period books of Pound’s, such as Guide to Kulchur. These chapters range from several pages to, in chapter 7, a mere two paragraphs, one of which runs in its entirety: “It doesn’t matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it” (62). As of­ten is the case with Pound, there is an unintended element of self-­parody here, as the sorts of symmetries one would assume present in a well-­constructed table— four legs of the same length, thickness, and weight distributed to the four corners of a presumably rectangular plane—are not observed in his book. The anthology, however, truly becomes distinctive in the “Exhibits” section, nearly ninety pages into the text. Pound notes that “[t]he ideal way to present the next section of this booklet would be to give the quotations WITHOUT any comment whatever. I am afraid that would be too revolutionary” (95). Pound’s remarks on his method harken to vari­ous versions of his imagist theory of poetics, from his very early formulation of the method of “luminous detail” in “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” to the later writings about the use of the Chinese ideogram as a method of composition (rehashed, in a more concise fashion, in The ABC of Reading). Pound’s gambit is

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that the student of poetry, the one truly sensitive to the felicities of language and the one truly desirous of rivaling or improving upon his or her predecessors, will simply experience the qualities of language in a poem while re­ jecting all of the necessary claptrap of authoritative scholar or master artist, in­clud­ing himself: “The most intelligent students, those who most want to LEARN, will however encompass that end, and endear themselves to the struggling author if they will read the EXHIBITS, and not look at my footnotes until they have at least tried to find out WHAT THE EXHIBIT IS, and to guess why I have printed it” (95). Pound, interestingly, takes over control of the presentation but, unlike Wyndham Lewis with Blast, he took no physical role in the design of his pages. He instructs the viewer concerning how to move the eye along the page, obliquely assuring him or her that the page itself—the hierarchical ordering of its elements, with the central text in the middle parts, the footnotes at the bottom, and so forth—will remain a constant through­out. But Pound had no intention of ceding authority to the norms of paratext. The first page of the “Exhibits” starts, not unexpectedly for readers of Pound, with five excerpts in five languages: Italian, Provencal, Medieval French, English, and Old English. The footnote states: “Example of ideogrammic method used by E. P. in The Serious Artist in 1913” the poet referring to himself in the third person. The note is tucked under a horizontal bar, a norm one presumes would be maintained through­out the chapter; in fact, the note continues for another few paragraphs on the following page. The ten-­line excerpt from Chaucer’s tale of the “Man of Lawe” on page 98 is also given a short gloss below a horizontal bar, but this is then followed by seven pages of commentary that considers the relative cultures and behaviors of Chaucer, Dante, and Shakespeare. The following sequences of pages ­follow more-­or-­less in this line, with a slight alteration on page 107, in which Pound chooses to use superscripts next to in­di­vidual words, which he then glosses just above the horizontal bar (but below the text); the word “chere,” for example, is defined just below, in smaller type, as “face.” Page 111 splits the page horizontally in two, and includes two horizontal lines to separate the main text from the gloss, with an additional horizontal line running halfway across the page (starting at the left margin) to denote the splitscreen format. Page 114 provides yet another variation on the stylesheet; in this case, words are glossed much as they are on page 107, but Pound’s footnote extends the glossing further: “Go slow, manissis = menaces, the key to most of the unfamiliar-­looking words in the sound. Don’t be afraid to guess. Rare = roar, rout = bellow, E = eye” (117). Pound gives a shout-­out to the reader in the form of an imperative verb, but also extends upon his more objec-

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tive practice of providing definitions with instructions in an element of the ideogrammatic method—how to suss out the meaning of words simply by staring at them. The horizontal bar separating text from footnotes completely disappears in the long excerpt Pound provides from Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid. On the third page of the excerpt, he barges in by stating: “I apologize for the cuts in the story, but I cannot give a whole book of the Metamorphoses here . . .” After a further page of glosses, he continues with the Golding excerpt, intruding once again on page 131 (no bar) with another interjection: “The student will note that up to now the writers exhibited are all intent on what they are saying . . . and their main effort is spent in TELLING him.” This ensemble of elements—primary text, in­di­vidual word glosses, Pound’s footnotes, pages-­long divagations from initial incitement—continues for several pages until page 142, when the entire apparatus of typographical au­ thority, of graphical grounding, is discarded, and the reader simply has no choice but to read Pound’s glosses. Robert Herrick’s short poem “Violets” (see fig. 7.3) is rendered with a sidebar commentary that begins: “By comparison with troubadours the rhyming is infantile,” suggesting that Pound simply couldn’t countenance a reader possibly enjoying this poem; adding abuse to insult, Pound’s foonote (no bar again) begins: “Verses of probably no literary value, but illustrating a kind of rhythm, a melodic innovation that you will not find in Chaucer, though there is ample precedence in Provence.” The hilarity of Pound’s complete travesty of his initial contract to be objective is reached on page 150, where he cuts off a rather longish excerpt from an anonymous seventeenth-­century author by inserting into the poem itself—no horizontal bar, no change of typeface—the line “and so on to fifteen pages.” There then follows a longish essay on a “Social and Economic Problem,” another series of exhibitions, an idiosyncratic timeline of authors “through whom the metamorphosis of English verse writing may be traced,” several more exhibits, the chapter finally ending with a short essay on Whitman. On a purely graphical level, not accounting for the changes of voices in his footnotes, glosses, and essays, Pound stages an assault on the ground­ ing elements of graphic design: the formal, phenomenological, and social. Formally, the contract inherent in a design stylesheet, with its hierarchical ordering of elements tied to font, position of text, and non-­linguistic elements such as horizontal bars and ellipses, is subverted or rendered malleable based on Pound’s own whims. This seems to suggest that Pound wants to take what would be a paradigmatic element of his book’s design, the protocols that describe where the as-­yet unwritten text should be placed, with

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Figure 7.3. Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading.

a syntagmatic element that argues for the this-­ness or haecceity of the text regardless of conventions. Any sort of social authority that is embedded in the formal elements of the layout is shown to be vulnerable to the needs and whims of the author. The staging ground of the text, which Pound promised would be uncluttered with his own notes, is of­ten displaced or even (in the case of Herrick’s poem) assaulted by the editor’s glosses. The ABC of Read­ ing is unique in this way, as it relies on a range of conventions from the history of poetry anthologies, the very mathematics of paratext that denote what sorts of cultural or ontological values accrue in basic graphic design,

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while manhandling them to animate that very quality that both attracts and repulses readers of Pound’s poetry and criticism, his complete inability to think dialectically and his overbearing confidence in the drama of his own insights, his personal “fiction of immanence,” a sort of confidence he hoped to impart with this book.

Poetic Kinema The ABC of Reading is not considered a classic of graphic design, perhaps not even an instance of it; if anything, its typography and layout are thought of as eccentric merely due to the needs of its author and the limitations and lax standards of the typesetters at New Directions. However, it can be seen as an early example of a form of poetic kinema, or even of “sequential art” (in Scott McCloud’s definition of comics) that creates some bridge between early experiments in typography such as Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, Marinetti’s parole in liberta, and Lewis’s Vorticist Blast and the later “electronic age book” (so named by Jeffrey Schnapp) The Medium is the Massage. For my purposes, “poetic kinema” can be described as the attempt to introduce into poetry and graphic design elements that are carried over from the art of moving pictures, such as the persistence of objects through time, the movement of elements through space, and the control exerted by the medium or apparatus upon one’s experience of these elements.3 Poetic kinema does not attempt to reproduce the illusions of film but, rather, to encourage a reading of “flows” in poetry to counteract the poem’s (illusory, in Whitehead’s view) static nature. Un coup de dés is, as noted above, a masterful example of this and emblematic of the poetics of discomposition to the degree that it challenges temporal and grammatical intuitions on the part of the reader. Slightly more mundane examples can be found in the poetry of E. E. Cummings, such as the poem “r-­p-­o-­p-­h-­e-­s-­s-­a-­g-­r” in which the letters of the title (in fact the first “word” of the poem) find themselves rearranged by the end to produce both the word and the icon: “grasshopper.” The real fun happens in the central section, of course, in which grammaticality—our need to produce parsable syntax out of letters, words, punctuation, and spacing—form the cognitive grounding of the poem: who

r-­p-­o-­p-­h-­e-­s-­s-­a-­g-­r

a)s w(e loo)k upnowgath PPEGORHRASS

eringint(o-­

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aThe):l

eA !p: S a (r rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs) to rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly ,grasshopper This poem works as a neat allegory of anagrammatic or recombinant poetics, as both “becoming” and “rearrange” cross paths to become “become” and “rearrangingly,” envisioning all of creativity to be merely the rearrangement of parts. Of course, Cummings is nothing if not novel in his poetics; this fall into pure recombinatory poetics sets the poem off from the large majority of poems that don’t choose to engage in the forces of chance and contingency Cummings courts. It also requests, like the diagram known as “Wittgenstein’s Rod” that I’ll introduce later, that one imagine the movement of pictorial elements according to laws, perhaps with the goal of forming something like a proof—I tend to count, for example, whether indeed all of the letters of “grasshopper” are contained in the string “PPEGORHRASS.” Like any graphic designer, Cummings sought to control the motion of the eye—one can’t help but review the letters, clusters, even punctuation marks, in an effort to resolve the poem into a sentence—and the poem reaches something like closure, if solely on Imagist terms. In contrast, Clark Coolidge’s experiments with poetic kinema in his sequence “Ing” do not provide you with all of the tools for resolution. Section 3 runs in its entirety: tradict theless it gether tastic for gin tion and sarily and sests

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Whereas Cummings’s poem is representational, pointing to an object or event outside of itself, Coolidge’s seems to just want you to see the letters and words, and whereas Cummings’s poem forces the eye to return to visual elements within the poem itself in a teleological move toward syntactic clarity, Coolidge’s can be read sequentially without such returns, as it declares quite early on—“tradict / theless”—that a final syntax, a closure, is not forthcom­ ing. However, the poem does in fact engage with recursion in its returns to what actually happens outside of the bounds of the text, a play of sight-­ lines—the hero gazes to something just out of the frame—as common in films. A graphic revision of this poem can help explain what I mean: ←tra/dict | ←the/less | it →gether | ←tas/tic | for ?gin →tion | and →→sari/ly | and ←←sests The key for the above diagram is as follows: ← denotes a lost origin for the word, a ghost stem to the suffix or suffixes → similarly denotes a lost root, but as the stem or prefix is not ­approached from the margin (or occurs after an ­enjambment) but rather from another word, the lost root is discerned more as an ellipsis rather than, as above, the ­approach of the root ex nihilo / represents a further breakage within the root into suffix/prefix and a core semantic unit | denotes a complete interruption of sense as the previous fragment is clearly a suffix ←← and →→ point to a missing morpheme that has to have, to my knowledge, at least two syllables (whereas the others have possible single syllable solutions)

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? suggests that the word could either stand alone (such as “and”) or have a missin prefix/stem, suffix, or both As the graphical representation of the poem demonstrates, Coolidge’s poem does not merely engage in a game of indeterminacy, on the one hand, or in “concrete” poetics, on the other; it is not merely a score for the eye through which one can gather vague meanings out of the air, nor is it merely a visual image foregrounding the materiality of text. The poem can also be seen as attempting to describe a “state of affairs” in Wittgenstein’s sense, pointing to actualities in linguistic possibility by leaving blanks, Mad Lib style, for the insertion of other letters. This also confirms Shannon’s notion of the “mathematical” reader who has naturalized a language’s statistical possibilities. Some possibilities are severely closed off; words such as “contradict,” “nonetheless” (or “nevertheless”), “together” (reminding us of the hero of Tom Philips’s A Humument, “Bill Toge”), “fantastic,” and “necessarily” seem inevitable insertions. On the other hand, “tion” seems to invite a countless number of roots—“motion” and “fiction,” for example, seem apposite— while “tastic” has been co-­opted from the word “fantastic” to join other words to the general family of “fantastic” things (“bandtastic” and “foodtastic” are two that come up on Urban Dictionary). “Gin” could stand as the word “begin,” but its proximity to the word “tion” suggests to me the word “imagination,” while “sests” took me some time to fill in—my only solution was the word “palimpsests” but I’m sure there are others. A first, and I think necessary, step toward a “bad Naturalization” of this poem would look something like this: contradict nonetheless it together fantastic for imagination and necessarily and palimpsests A bad Naturalization of the meaning of the poem, which is to say an exegesis, would run something like this: “With ‘nonetheless,’ the poem starts in me­ dias res (‘And then went down to the ship . . .’) offering some sort of response

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to a previously articulated problem, perhaps that of the void of linguistic certainty that Hugh Kenner writes of with regards to Beckett, the ‘Comedian of the Impasse,’ in Stoic Comedians. ‘It together’: Let us prefer the multiple to the singular (pace Deleueze and Badiou, for example)—to split, or to say two ways, something formally known as ‘it.’ The two (or the multiple) maintains an element of the ‘fantastic’ as it is at once a product of the imagination (a fancy), of necessity (a truth), and of a catastrophe of multiple causali­ties or prior elements (i.e., a poem is not a product of a chain of causes but results from a series ontologically equivalent, if incomplete, causes—hence the two ‘ands’).” Of course, I am doubtful that this is what Coolidge “intended” in the writing of this poem—it’s really just a small piece of a larger exploration of poems composed of fragments. Nonetheless, I think this extreme example of poetic kinema, a sort of poor man’s version of Un coup de dés, demonstrates how even poems that don’t engage with elaborate spatial typography or a bouquet of fonts can be seen both as an instance of graphic design and a relative, however distant, of formal languages.

Caroline Bergvall’s Éclat Poet-­critic Sophie Robinson writes in a short essay about Éclat, drawing from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: “The book is a ‘home’ because it is a space in which words reside, where they belong. Yet through Bergvall’s conscious design choices, which draw attention to the book as a book, what kind of language is or isn’t ‘at home’ there is questioned, and the book, like the notion of ‘home’, becomes a politicized social space in which neither writer nor reader is always at ease or ‘wel . . . come’ ” (3). Arguing that the “home” is both phenomenological grounding as well as a metaphor for the grounding of gender and sexual identity, Robinson states: [B]ergvall, through the way in which the book is structured and the language of instruction used, encourages us to dwell in the in-­between spaces where the dialectic of inside/outside is undermined. Thus, concepts of “navigation” and “orientation” are complicated, as Bergvall always seems to be urging us outwards or between. If, as [Sara] Ahmed argues [in Queer Phenomenology], “sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence, of how we inhabit spaces”, then Bergvall’s text orientates us queerly in that we are encouraged to be lost, enter trapdoors, and linger in the between-­spaces and doorways of the text. Our experience of the house is thus uncomfortable, and like the “floreign” guide, we are the outsider on the inside. (4)

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In Éclat, characters seem to emerge and recede into the page like ghosts or flickers of orphaned Dasein as conversations are merely overheard—Joyce-­ like: “Owdooyoodoo. Owdooyoodoo.” (13)—at one point the text shouting, “HI. I’M KATHY ACKER” (39), while the reader, a “you,” is directly addressed by an equally ghostly tour guide (or real estate agent) as must have occurred in the origi­nal installation version of the piece: “You’ve decided to follow on through? (Well done.)” (16). Robinson’s reading accommodates both the visual and figural versions of Bergvall’s “book” while linking it to some substantial social groundings: “The margins—through being a place in which the binaries of male/female, tenderness/violence, desire/­ disgust and so on are broken down and reworked—bleed into the centre in order to undermine the assumed ‘naturalness’ of their construction and the barriers which keep them polarised. The ‘deadly elasticity of heterosexist ­presumption’—­in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terms—upon which the social and spatial arrangement of the house and family unit are his­tori­cally built— ­is challenged” (9). We can extend this “denaturalization” by understanding Éclat as functioning something like a machine; to this degree, further binaries are dissolved: between nature/culture (following from Latour), human/­ cyborg (following from Haraway), and even, in the manner of ­Olson’s “objectism,” poet/object. One telling (though hardly fatal) mistake that Robinson makes in her discussion of Éclat is in her reference to the object of her study as a “book.” Indeed, in 1996, Sound & Language published a 55-­page book titled Éclat by Bergvall “commissioned, written and presented as a site-­specific piece for the Institute Rot ‘Literature Live’ series in May 1996, Lon­don,” which is cited by Robinson in her notes, but she refers for the duration of her essay—­in­clud­ ing illustrations and page number citations—to the recreation by Bergvall and a collaborator, Marit Münzberg, of the book Éclat in the form of a PDF in 2004. Rather than merely reproducing the typesetting and graphics of the origi­nal book, Bergvall wanted to both preserve the origi­nal aspect of the book, a square measuring roughly 5.8 x 5.8, while extending the structural subversions of the installation and print version into the expanded spaces of the 8.5 x 11 page.4 What this allowed Bergvall to do is explore—­both construct and contaminate—a further “margin” outside of a physi­cal book itself, something that could only really be done physically by extending pages beyond the trim size (like a Playboy centerfold), by in­clud­ing interactive elements (like things to pull or that pop out, as in children’s books) or, in the case of Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962) or B. S. Johnson’s The Un­ fortunates (1969), by publishing the work as a series of loose pages in a box. The poignancy of this virtual play of inside/outside is only readily apparent if one understands the central visual motif of the 2004 version of Éclat,

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a black square, as bearing an indexical relationship to the book object itself, measurably designating a physical absence, in the way the two square pools at the center of the Sep­tem­ber 11 Memorial designate the former location of the Twin Towers. Robinson notes that words in large print on page 7 of the text, “WEL” and “COME,” are “traced backward in grey on the next page, a concretisation of the material ‘shadow’ of words” (2). My intuitive sense of the relationship of the words printed in solid black and the reverse image in gray on page 8 was that we were looking at the text from behind, like one sees the text on a glass storefront in reverse from the interior. Page 7 thus becomes the threshold to the work, page 8 the confirmation that you are, indeed, inside the book, like Alice in the rabbit hole. But the notion of the text on page 8 being the shadow of the text on page 7 is more compelling: it suggests that, were one to link the two pages—the right side of page 7 (rendered for our purposes slightly translucent) to the left side of page 8—and hold them at a 30-­degree angle, say, and then place a light source behind page 7, the text on page 8 would (correcting for parallax) be the image created. This doesn’t emphasize the so-­called “materiality” of the text in relation to the viewer, but indeed the materiality in relation to another object. The shadow version of the text “WEL COME” would become something like a “delay” or “stoppage” in the sense that Marcel Duchamp understood it: not quite photographs, just a mere trace of the movement of some wave, the “slow body” of matter, through time and space. That Bergvall understands her vari­ous horizontal, vertical, and diagonal bars and the vari­ous gaps and “doors” therein as both metonymies of an actual architectural structure as well as an alternative, or “expanded,” form of punctuation is clear early in the print version of Éclat, whose page 11 (a right-­sided page) contains nothing but the following about a third of the way down: Here to be registered as walking at a leisurely or similar pace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . a continuous surface is is interrupted or punctuated by The following page of the print version of the text contains nothing but a glyph roughly resembling a very large < or less-­than sign with a shortened lower stem, starting about a half-­inch from the top and extending to about a half-­inch from the left edge (i.e., with a standard page “margin”) and ending midway down the page. While it’s easy enough to understand this shape as another form of playful, expanded punctuation, this page in the PDF version of Éclat (see fig. 7.4) suggests that Bergvall had something more spe-

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cific in mind. The black < sign has become yellow—the only other color permitted in the universe of the digital Éclat (and obviously not yellow in the reproduction here)—and it now forms something like an interruption of the bounding black box (the top half of the glyph cuts into the box while also maintaining the integrity of its perimeter) while also extending into the space of the box, suggesting an intrusion of the very frame into the interior. It’s unclear whether one can retroactively understand the glyph in the print book as somehow commenting on the boundedness of the page—its distance from the page edges argue against it—but the PDF version animates a set of meanings that suggest 1) that the yellow glyph now intrudes upon the glyph of the black box intended to be an index to the material book, and 2) that the yellow glyph itself is indexical to something as yet invisible. The color of the < glyph indexes, for example, the color of the print version of the book; however, its existence on what must be called the same ontic plane as the clearly indexical black box suggests, to me, a meeting of worlds: a mundanely formal one in which signs merely reference a material other (that is, logic and metaphysics), and a ‘pataphysical one of epiphenomenal signs that belong to a sphere exponentially more singular and complex. More importantly, though, is that the digital version of Éclat engages in a form of poetic kinesis that is unavailable to the print version due to the “stoppage” of the bounding black box, its relationship to the print book as something like a “shadow” or index. The box is established in the first four pages of the PDF as either an empty yellow square (the cover), a bounded yellow square with front matter (pages 2–3), or a blank black rectangle of the title page. It is first corrupted on page 5 of the PDF—the left line of the square is rendered in yellow with a gap somewhat near the top. In the print version, a vertical line runs down the left hand-­side, once again about a half inch on the left, top, and bottom, with a similar gap. Pages 6–8 of the PDF feature the fully bounded square, while page 9 features a very small section of the square with a dotted line and text below the box, as if the dotted line had allowed text to escape from the boundedness of the print book and appear below it (which, of course, the print book couldn’t do). From there, the plays of horizontal and vertical bars, dotted lines, arrows, changes in color, changes in font, continuities across pages, and excesses of such common punctuation as the colon and parenthesis grow by turns baroque and restrained. One page contains something that looks like a staircase, while another set of pages can be viewed, flip book style, as something like a short animation, as each page contains the same top-­to-­bottom column of gray text, but with the top section darkened on the first page, the middle section the next, and the bottom the third. Most importantly for our purposes,

Figure 7.4. Caroline Bergvall, pages from Éclat. Courtesy of Caroline Bergvall.

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though, is the fact that Bergvall seeks both to establish the formal black bound of the box as something like a symbol with a one-­to-­one relationship to a thing (a concept, a geography, a vector, a magic site) which she then mutates and transforms in succeeding pages. Éclat is pointing toward something like the establishment of a formal language through abstract symbols, not unlike the way Frege attempted, in his Begriffsschrift or “concept language,” the first systematic attempt to ground principles of logic in a set of glyphs that cleansed thinking from the “psychologism” of purely verbal logic (discussed in the next chapter). Frege’s sys­ tem of notation, which was not widely adopted, actually shares features with Bergvall’s PDF in that it extended below the line of standard prose, much as a descender in the letters g, j, p and y extend below a baseline in regular text. Frege’s logic statements could not be contained within a series of prose lines, though the arguments they proposed were as expressible with standard, lineated logic notation. While I am hardly suggesting that Bergvall has a background, or even remote interest, in analytical philosophy, there is some way that the figurative and metaphorical referent of the “house” in the origi­nal print version of her work, and the unarticulated referent of the “book” in the PDF version, point to some of the dynamic inherent in establishing formal languages that bridge a triad of elements: the abstract (or arbitrary but systematic) glyph, the number (either as concept or variable), and the concrete referent—the content of “logic.”

The Visual Proof The phenomena of what I am calling “poetic kinema” suggests that eye or mind understands the marks on a page—a diagram, a set of words—as concrete and engaged in a dynamic play of forces. The graphic elements of Éclat, for example, don’t merely evoke a house or suggest the movement of a character, but they create real relationships between themselves like the string connecting the hand to the axis of a yo-­yo. The premise of Cummings’s poem about the grasshopper is that we understand the initial arrangements of letters as persisting as objects through time and space, reconfig­ured finally at the end as the legible word. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, the collection of Wittgenstein’s later theories of numbers and proofs, form, with their parable-­like character, their occasionally contemptuous tone, and their sense of ethical imperative, a natural complement to the Philosophical Investigations and, naturally, a sequel to his early wrestling with formal languages in the Trac­ tatus. Wittgenstein’s position on the ontology of numbers was, in fact, quite unique. He wasn’t a Platonist, naturally, nor was he an empiricist—he didn’t

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believe that numbers denoted anything like eternal essences or that they were facts founded on encounters that could be proven, on experiment, or can be abstracted from experience. Intuitionism was also rejected, as it relied too much on mathematics as something of a “private language,” divorced from social confirmations (the criticism leveled against Piaget in his notions of logic deriving from a psychic “equilibrium”), but he was also not a Formalist, as he felt that such an approach erased the component of a human subject, on which he placed a large importance, engag­ing with mathematical symbols and diagrams. Formalism might be the perspective most related to the perspective on mathematics in the Tractatus, but a fifth general approach, Conventionalism, might be the one closest to his writings in the Remarks. Wittgenstein “maintains that logic and mathematics need no ontology, that they merely provide a sys­tem of rules for inferring one proposition from another,” and he “insists that the role of the human agent is decisive in mathematical inference, that it is what human beings do with their axioms and rules which determines what follows from what” (Klenk 40). Conventionalism—which satisfies Wittgenstein’s understanding that mathematics doesn’t point to anything, are merely the movement of symbols according to largely tautological laws—fails to the degree that it doesn’t acknowledge that humans work with mathematics through time, that proofs don’t present themselves the moment the question is proposed. Wittgenstein couldn’t abide that “we have specified the axioms, rules, and definitions . . . the theorems follow of their own accord, and there is no need for any kind of synthesis on the part of the human agent, as Kant and others have maintained. The theorems are simply an automatic, analytic consequence of the deductive structure” (Klenk 40). Wittgenstein writes (referring to the concept-­script): “In his fundamental law Russell seems to be saying of a proposition: ‘It already follows—all I still have to do is, to infer it’. Thus Frege somewhere says that the straight line which connects any two points is really already there before we draw it; and it is the same when we say that the transitions, say in the series +2, have really already been made before we make them orally or in writing—as it were tracing them” (Remarks 45). Mathematics is, rather, “synthetic”—it “determines, or ­creates, concepts, rather than just deriving propositions on the basis of concepts which it finds ready-­made” (Remarks 50). Badiou, an avowed Platonist, might agree with Wittgenstein—whom he classed as the great Sophist of the twentieth century—on this simple point: that mathematics is evental, not static or mechanical, such that fig­ures like Cantor can be seen as adventurers rather than merely computers. A unique feature of Remarks, written over 1936–1944, is what could be called its “theory of diagrams,” as it treated mathematical proofs as mere pic-

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tures, subject to the whims of the hand that draws them. One aspect seems to focus on the infelicities of hand-­eye coordination, as when he observes of a drawing of two identical parallelograms stacked on top of each other such that their outer sides (the sides that don’t conjoin with the other parallelogram) form two parallel lines: “One might for example take this fig­ure as a proof of the fact that 100 parallelograms arranged like this must yield a straight strip. Then, when one actually does put 100 together one gets e.g. a slightly curved strip. But the proof has determined us to use this picture and form of expression: if they don’t yield a straight strip, they were not accurately constructed” (58). Playing on notions of paradigm and anomaly, he argues that the observer must conclude that the proof is wrong if it conflicts with something like an immediate Gestalt-­based experience of symmetry and order. In our first experience with parallelograms in Remarks, they are not intended to imply infinity but instead are arranged with two identical triangles (with complementary angles to the two parallelograms, such that they form a rectangle: A rectangle can be made of two parallelograms and two triangles. Proof:

A child would find it difficult to hit on the composition of a rect­angle with these parts, and would be surprised by the fact that two sides of the parallelograms make a straight line, when the parallelograms are, after all, askew. It might strike him as if the rectangle came out of these fig­ures by something like magic. True, he has to admit that they do form a rectangle, but it is by a trick, by a distorted arrangement, in an unnatural way. I can imagine the child, after having put the two parallelograms together in this way, not believing his eyes when he sees that they fit like that. “They don’t look as if they fitted together like that.” And I could imagine its being said: It’s only through some hocus-­pocus that it looks to us as if they yielded the rectangle—in reality they have changed their nature, they aren’t the parallelograms any more. (57)

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This magic—the emergence of a shape characterized by four right angles out of an arrangement of objects characterized by only obtuse and acute angles—is something related to Gestalt psychology, with its contrasts of tensional and static shapes, but additionally (given that our hero is a child) something like Piaget’s notions of logic as a gradually developing facility. This snapping-­to of forms also suggests something like the emergence of the concrete from the metastable in Simondon or of a concept from the “plane of immanence” in Delueze and Guattari. Wittgenstein compares this shape emerging from four angular, symmetrical objects to the type of rectangle one would see if two puzzle pieces (imagining our puzzle having only two pieces) were put together, which he depicts in a drawing of a rectangle bisected by a squiggly line. He asks: “For why do I say that the fig­ure [of the parallelograms and triangles forming a rectangle] makes me realize something any more than this one: After all it too shews that two bits like that yield a rectangle. ‘But that isn’t interesting’, we want to say. And why is it uninteresting?” (63). In fact, a central term in Remarks is his notion that mathematics is guided largely by human interests of greater or lesser nature, with no ontic status independent of the mind. Possibly his most famous diagram from Remarks, known as “Wittgenstein’s rod,” involves deriving a mathematical proof from what is essentially an engineering problem. What is unusual, but also quite compelling, about his explanation is the emphasis on the affective nature of the diagram (which I highlight below with italics): Consider a mechanism. For example this one:

Figure 7.5. Wittgenstein’s Rod (origi­nal).

While the point A describes a circle, B describes a fig­ure eight. Now we write this down as a proposition of kinematics. When I work the mechanism its movement proves the proposition

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to me; as would a construction on paper. The proposition corresponds e.g. to a picture of the mechanism with the paths of the points A and B drawn in. Thus it is in a certain respect a picture of that movement. It holds fast what the proof shews me. Or—what it persuades me of. If the proof registers the procedure according to the rule, then by doing this it produces a new concept. In producing a new concept it convinces me of something. For it is essential to this conviction that the procedure according to these rules must always produce the same configuration. (“Same,” that is, by our ordinary rules of comparison and copying.) With this is connected the fact that we can say that proof must shew the existence of an internal relation. For the internal relation is the operation producing one structure from another, seen as equivalent to the picture of the transition itself—so that now the transition according to this series of configurations is eo ipso a transition according to those rules for operating. In producing a concept, the proof convinces me of something: what it convinces me of is expressed in the proposition that it has proved . . . The picture (proof-­picture) is an instrument producing conviction. (434–35) As in several of the examples in this chapter, the diagram gives us ac­cess to something of the invisible—an “internal relation.” But this “proof ” can only be revealed in a sort of mental cinema: one has to move the rod in one’s mind, imagining its integrity as an object with extension—volume, space, even temporal properties—and in relation to other objects with similar integrities. Adherence to this imaginary consort of elements (something like a Rube Goldberg invention, in fact) should reveal a fig­ure eight, but as James Robert Brown argues, no such thing should actually occur with such a mechanism—­ which is to say, Wittgenstein, even though he got the initial diagram correct (its his machine, it can only be identical with itself), he was not able to operate the mental machinery correctly. As Brown points out, the two central problems are that 1) A is midway between its leftmost and its rightmost positions, so B should be midway as well instead of being drawn at its right­ most position, that is B should be drawn in the middle of the mechanism through which it slides (as it is drawn, B would only ever cross the mid­point of the fig­ure eight), and 2) the axis of symmetry of the dotted fig­ure eight should be horizontal, not drawn as lying along the moving rod (though as Witt­gen­stein’s drawing situates the right side of the mechanism slightly lower than the left side, the fig­ure eight could in fact be slightly diagonal, though not necessarily lying along the rod).5 Brown’s corrected diagram lies below:

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Figure 7.6. Wittgenstein’s Rod (corrected).

That Wittgenstein got his diagram wrong might not seem so important—the orientation of a fig­ure eight in a Gedankenexperiment will not transform the social order. The interest here is in Wittgenstein’s deep criticism, from the perspective of something like Gestalt psychology, of using pictures as proofs (which he extends, elsewhere, to a critique of the diagonal number proof of Cantor’s theory of transfinites), his suggestion that a faulty hand could lead to an imperfect proof, and his recourse to a kinetic image to (in this series of fragments) punctuate his argument even as the operations of this image reveal his own limitations as a director of shadows.

8 Just Ask Lattice A Poetics of Grids, Numbers, and Diagrams

Crisis In Poetry Paul Valéry’s essay “The Existence of Symbolism” chronicles the poet’s own sense of the shift in artistic sensibility that was occurring in his youth, but from the perspective of being somewhat late to his own party, noting: “The men who lived in the Middle Ages did not suspect that they were medieval, and those of the 15th or 16th Century did not have engraved on their calling cards, ‘Messers So-­and-­So, of the Renaissance.’ The same is true of the Symbolists. That is what they are called today, not what they were” (426–27). Symbolism is defined, for Valéry, initially in the negative—it is that which is neither classic, romantic, or realist—conjuring the necessity of “a fourth pile for these rebellious authors.” The Symbolists were “marked by total differences, by incompatibilities in their styles, methods, preconceptions, and aesthetic ideals” (428), united only in that, in a sort of chorus of disobedience: “They agreed in a common determination to reject the appeal to a ma­ jority: they disdained to conquer the pub­lic at large” (429). “A new path was open to inventors,” he writes: [E]xchanges among the different arts, which had first been practiced by the Romantics, but spasmodically, became a recognized and sometimes excessively methodical procedure. There were poets who tried to borrow from music whatever they could charm away from it by means of analogies; at times their works were arranged on the page like orchestral scores. Others, subtle critics of painting, tried to intro-

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duce into their style some imitation of the contrasts and correspondences afforded by a sys­tem of colors. Still others did not hesitate to create words or to alter French syntax, which many tried to overthrow, while a few, on the contrary, dressed it in the court robes of its ceremonious past. Never was a literary movement more studious or preoccupied with ideas than this movement in all directions of minds whose common principle was the renunciation of any appeal to pub­lic preference. . . . Aesthetics divided them; Ethics united them. (433) Valéry, perhaps inspired by Verlaine’s Les poètes maudits, constructs his own brief hagiography of the damned—“Everyone they admired had suffered: Edgar Poe, found dying in the gutter; Baudelaire, hailed into court by the pub­lic prosecutor; Wagner, hissed down at the Opera; Verlaine and Rimbaud, suspicious vagrants; Villiers sleeping on the floor of a hovel, beside the little valise that contained his manuscripts and his titles to the Kingdom of Cyprus and Jerusalem” (430)—and recalls a nearly “mystical” fidelity, a sense that “a sort of religion was nearly on the point of being born” (434). Valéry himself coined something of a new movement: “In still another quarter, very hostile to that of the romanesque poets, a remarkable experiment was being performed: Instrumentism made its appearance. The Instrumentists preserved most of the rules for writing classical French verse, but added rules of their own, in the shape of something like a table of correspondences between the sounds of the alphabet and the tones of orchestral instruments” (444). What is remarkable is the concretization of the theme of “correspondences” that has existed in poetry at least since Coleridge, ­Carlyle, and Emerson (“There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by the virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit”[25]) and maintained through Baudelaire. But here it is fig­ured as in a table which, presumably, charted a series of rules superadded to those of classical French verse, a table that is, itself, something of an instrument in the form of a diagram.1 This tendency to transform, if only as a mental experiment, quali­ ties into quantities appears in Valéry’s account of first being shown Un coup de dés, in which he evokes the pre-­cognitive experience of a poem and, in the same breath, graphic design. Attentive to the pure abstraction of Mallarmé’s years-­long study of the page, he writes: “He had made a very careful study (even on posters and in newspapers) of the effective distribution of blacks and whites, the comparative intensity of typefaces. . . . [A] page, in his system—being addressed to the glance that precedes and surrounds the

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act of reading—should ‘notify’ the movement of the composition. By providing a sort of material intuition and by establishing a harmony among our vari­ous modes of perception, or among the rates of perception of our different senses, it should make us anticipate what is about to be presented to our intelligence” (312). That moment of “discovery” of the poem—Mallarmé literally took him “into the room where, behind an old tapestry, he kept his bundles of notes” (308) and the poem itself—is reminiscent of the Renaissance laboratory of Leonardo, about whom Valéry was fascinated. He argues in one of his essays about Leonardo that the artwork is, indeed, the ultimate philosophical expression: “Leonardo was a painter: I mean that painting was his philosophy. . . . [H]e regarded painting as the final goal for the efforts of a universal mind” (143). But philosophy is best expressed through fig­ures—shapes, motions— not words: “To paint, for Leonardo, was an operation that demanded every form of knowledge and almost all the scientific disciplines: geometry, dynamics, geology, physiology. A battle to be portrayed involved a study of vortices and clouds of dust, and he refused to depict such phenomena before observing them in a scientific spirit, with eyes that had been impregnated, so to speak, with understanding of their laws” (144). Valéry’s Leonardo, like Monsieur Teste, can be seen, indeed, as the great forerunner of conceptual art, since he only accepts the retinal stimulus as a precondition of thought, a pattern on which to base his mental exercises so that, upon Leonardo's return to the work at hand—Valéry makes it sound as if there were many completed works, but we know of few—he is completely rehearsed in the deepest laws of physics. Valéry’s ongoing war against hypostasis—in this way he is a polemicist, though he names no enemies—is given full voice in this description of Leonardo as “resuming the movement,” remaining in the dance, but he consequently uses the model of the Renaissance painter as a hold against Romantic notions of the overflowing of the emotions and the egotistical sublime. Anticipating a non-­referential art, one “without recourse to hypostasis,” Valéry writes in “Leonardo and the Philosophers”: “Long ago mathematics made itself independent of every aim that was alien to the concept of itself created by the pure development of its technique and by its awareness of the intrinsic value of that development. Today everyone knows to what extent its free­dom as an art, which had promised to carry it far from reality into a world of pastimes, difficulties, and useless elegance, has made it marvelously flexible, besides equipping it to come to the aid of the physical scientists” (130). Mathematics, as Valéry observes, is an art that only bends to the service of physicists—it is an inconstant handmaiden to invention. The question, then, is not so much whether Valéry succeeds in actually applying scientific methods towards the creation of art, or in the prosaic explanation of

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his own discoveries and experiences, but whether he has created or put in place the hunger for the use of a “scientific method,” and somehow enunciated science’s possible use for the artist. Considering the future of modernist art, from Roussel (and the Oulipo writers) to Duchamp, from the Cubists to the minimalists, from the impressionists to Brice Marden, and from the Surrealists to the Language poets, this scientific attitude—an appeal to tables, grids, and vortices—as first mapped by Valéry was prescient.

The Grid Some of Valéry’s Symbolist rhetoric—the silences, the purities, the Siren calls of agency, and the enveloping abysses—appears in Rosalind E. Krauss’s discussion of the use of the grid in modernist art in her essay “The Originality of the Avant-­Garde”: “The grid promotes this silence, expressing it moreover as a refusal of speech. The absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-­referential character, but— more importantly—its hostility to narrative” (158). She anticipates, in a way, Lev Manovich’s contention that the database, structured like intermingling grids in the form of tables, is the “natural enemy” of narrative. Arguing that the grid is “impervious both to time and to incident” and results in silence, Krauss continues: This silence is not due simply to the extreme effectiveness of the grid as a barricade against speech, but to the protectiveness of its mesh against all intrusions from outside. No echoes of footsteps in empty rooms, no scream of birds across open skies, no rush of distant water—for the grid has collapsed the spatiality of nature onto the bounded surface of a purely cultural object. With its proscription of nature as well as of speech, the result is still more silence. And in this newfound quiet, what many artists thought they could hear was the beginning, the origins of Art. For those for whom art begins in this kind of originary purity, the grid was emblematic of the sheer disinterestedness of the work of art, its absolute purposelessness, from which it derived the promise of its autonomy. (158) The grid becomes, for Krauss, a poor man’s version of the purity of mathematics—and the banishment of prose and “hypostasis”—that Valéry has already explored, though without the analytic difficulties on the artist’s part which Valéry posits (and indeed, if the grid represents “absolute stasis,” as Krauss writes, then it is a failure in Valéry’s terms since his goal is continua-

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tion of the movement of mathematics). The grid, though a “fraudulent origi­ nal,” gives the artist the sense or the feeling—remember Valéry’s use of this word—of “origi­nality,” though she later states that the grid is “extremely difficult to use in the service of invention,” and that the artist who uses the grid is necessarily condemned to a series of “self-­imitations” (160). Krauss uses the grid as a metaphor of “ground zero,” a sort of deep grammar that no one, the artist included, would believe is more than a cartoon. However, the grid presents the possibility of techne as it contains the poetry of utility—the possibility that a “mechanism of meaning” can be superadded to the visual image. In this way, both the anxiety of beginning and the fear of superfluity are partly ameliorated with the creation of the grid, which Krauss rightly posits as being somewhere both on top of the canvas—a “doubling of the surface”—and behind it, in the form of a summary of “visual texts” that have preceded it (161).

Visualizing Data On a less artistic front, a discussion of diagrams and their interaction with literature can begin with Franco Moretti’s advocation of visual models of “big data” in academic studies in such books as Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2007) and Distant Reading (2013), particularly the former. Moretti’s general argument for the use of data sets in the analy­ sis of literature is that humanities professors traditionally only focus on less than 1 percent of all the literature produced and that the vast collections of data that are being assembled permit a sort of satellite view of the movements of texts (or what he calls their “devices”) across countries and continents over a relatively large expanse of time. This 1 percent is not so much a “canon,” though bearers of Moretti’s flag will call it so, injecting something like an ethical heat: “[W]e need to decide what to ignore. And the answer with which we’ve contented ourselves for generations is, ‘Pretty much everything ever written.’ [C]anons—even in their current, mildly multiculturalist forms—are an enormous problem. [W]e need to do less close reading and more of anything and everything else that might help us extract information from and about texts as indicators of large cultural issues” (Wilkens 251). Claiming that his “Marxist formation” grants him a “great respect for the scientific spirit,” Moretti notes that his three graphical methods are borrowed from other disciplines: “Graphs from quantitative history, maps from geography, and trees from evolutionary theory” (1–2). Noting that “quantitative research . . . provides data, not interpretation,” (9) data analy­sis of the spread of literary influence is “a more rational literary history,” (4) assuaging what he perceives as the deep suspicion among humanities scholars for

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data-­based research by arguing for the eruption of concepts from observations of pattern, a movement from “texts to models”: “[I]nstead of concrete, in­di­vidual works, a trio of artificial constructs—graphs, maps, and trees— in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading,’ . . . where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection” (1). Moretti’s writing, along with that of other commentators on “big data” and the digital humanities, reflects an almost cavalier attitude toward the integrity of the data itself, a complacency with the infelicitites of mass amounts of scanning and automated OCR. In A Statistical Guide for the Ethically Per­ plexed, statisticians Lawrence Hubert and Howard Wainer call the field of statistics “the science of uncertainty,” and for this reason, as they i­llustrate through several case studies, statistics and its visual display have a direct relation to ethics, noting that “[c]ourt opinions are not commonly excerpted at such length in texts such as this [i.e., on statistics], but these par­ticu­ lar opinions represent the intersection of ethics and statistics in a way that other mechanisms cannot” (7). They list among the cases Buck v. Bell (1927, concerning mandated sterility for the “unfit”), Brown v. Board of Educa­ tion (1954), and Loving v. Virginia (1967, which struck down Virginia’s anti-­ miscegenation law of 1924). Hubert and Wainer, in a discussion ranging through probability theory, sampling models, psychometrics, (mis)report­ ing of data, rules of evidence, etc., isolate a danger for someone interested (as Moretti claims) in “explanation” over “interpretation”: Recalling . . . the traditional adage that “correlation does not imply causation,” we might add a corollary: merely identifying a plausible causal mechanism doesn’t change the import of this caveat. The plausible mechanism may result from a third confounding or “lurking” variable just as the origi­nal correlation is spurious and due to the influence of a third variable. A salient illustration of this faulty reasoning was the initial observation that women with herpes are more likely than other women to develop cervical cancer. Because of general beliefs about biomedical activity, some investigators concluded that the relationship was causal and cancer must result from the herpes. Later research, however, showed that the primary cause of cervical cancer was human papilloma virus (HPV), and herpes was just a marker for sexual activity. (309–10) Moretti’s approach to this problem of the “lurking variable” is generally to bracket the initial causal statement inherent in his “explanation” and replace

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it with a sec­ond causal statement that, more or less, could still support his initial contention (of­ten premised on Marxist theories of the exchange and value of goods), then to subject this sec­ond causal statement to data-­driven scrutiny and, if it is found wanting, reject it and reinstate the initial causal statement without troubling the notion that a causal chain in fact exists. For example, describing a “tree” attributing Arthur Conan Doyle’s success to his handling of clues in his works, Moretti notes: “This tree, said one of the participants, assumes that morphology is the key factor of literary history: that Doyle owes his phenomenal success to his greater skill in the handling of clues; to his being the only one who made it to the top of the tree, as it were. But why should form be the decisive reason for survival? Why not social privilege instead—the fact that Doyle was writing for a well-­established magazine, and his rivals were not?” (74). “Social privilege” does not mean, as it might in general conversation, the author’s economic or educational background, generally markers of having had a head start on writing, but the prestige level of the journals in which Doyle published (which seems like an odd definition of “social privilege”). Moretti then runs the numbers and observes that several authors published as of­ten as Doyle did in the same journals, thus allowing him to dismiss this argument in favor of his initial contention—the use of clues. The procedure is to accept the hypothesis that a “lurking variable” could be mucking up the explanation, conceive of that lurking variable somewhat arbitrarily (a “what if ” offered by a student), then argue it down to preserve the simple causality of the initial claim. The notion that a range of values or even a cloud of causal relations exists is never considered, since the data set is of­ten only limited to a set of properties— “metatags” of­ten curated by the organizers of the information themselves— of the texts being examined. In Johanna Drucker’s view, humanists working with digital representation should not be tethered to notions that they are working with data that, arranged and analyzed, add up to a stable version of reality but, rather, with capta that reflect the stochastic, fluid, temporally contingent nature of their materials. Drucker argues compellingly for a form of digital humanities in­ terface that makes a virtue of its creator’s lack of comprehensiveness, perhaps even the lack of a stable epistemological frame, describing new forms of “realist models” that express “ambiguity and uncertainty.” To overturn the assumptions that structure conventions acquired from other domains requires that we reexamine the intellectual foundations of digital humanities, putting techniques of graphical display on a foundation that is humanistic at its base. This requires first and fore­

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most that we reconceive all data as capta. Differences in the etymo­logi­ cal roots of the terms data and capta make the distinction between constructivist and realist approaches clear. Capta is “taken” actively while data is assumed to be a “given” able to be recorded and observed. From this distinction, a world of differences arises. Humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre­exist­ing fact. (3) Drucker’s point about data, which implies truth, and capta, which implies contingency (in the Rortian definition, as always subject to redescription) is that the affective power of the interface is hindered because it refuses to turn in on itself, to exhibit doubt—in a sense, to become recursive. As noted above, recursion has qualities of being both circular, calling upon itself over and over again, and terminal—at some point the condition is realized, the user “gets it,” and the constant self-­calling is ceased. This recursive model would be useful to investigate in information-­oriented digital humanities projects, making the ludic take center stage alongside the more common qualities: availability, configurability, and accountability. Drucker’s solution to these issues is premised on a sort of programmatic indeterminacy, representational methods that waver between the realist bar and pie chart and the sorts of graphical constellations one associates with avant-­garde painting, particularly Russian Constructivism. Drucker calls for the mobilization of the entire digital “humanities” enterprise in a war, of sorts, on other forms of digital visualization common to the “sciences,” especially as they spill over into pub­lic forms of knowledge consumption: At stake . . . is the authority of humanist knowledge in a culture increasingly beset by quantitative approaches that operate on claims of certainty. Bureaucracies process human activity through statistical means and when the methods grounded in empirical sciences are put at the service of the social sciences or humanities in a crudely reductive manner, basic principles of criti­cal thought are violated, or at the very least, put too far to the side. To intervene in this ideo­logi­cal sys­ tem, humanists, and the values they embrace and enact, must counter with conceptual tools that demonstrate humanities in their operation, execution, and display. The digital humanities can no longer afford to take its tools and methods from disciplines whose fundamental epistemological assumptions are at odds with humanistic method. (“Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display” 2)

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Reflecting her career as an experimental poet and graphic designer (as well as major scholar of avant-­garde verbo-­visual linguistic practices), Drucker argues that “[t]he shift to expressive metrics and graphics is essential in changing from the expression of subjective information to the subjective ex­ pression of perceived phenomena” (14). Her essay is replete with compelling designs that offer ways to transform data into capta in the minds of the viewer—to unearth the subjective nature of frames, facts, and num­bers while not subverting the essential quality of the visualization—notably introducing methods for visualizing indeterminacies (in the sense of unknowable, not undecidable) in a systematic (nearly linguistic, if purely graphical) fashion. Though randomization and the courting of “chance” has been an allure to poets and artists since early Modernism, its applications in computer visualization—video games, feature films, and countless simulations of weather patterns, economic models, “war games,” and so forth—has exponentially maximized the mimetic powers of the artificial image, introducing the possibility of nearly organic responses to the real while introducing a temporal and volumetric indexicality to visual formalism.2 Alan Turing once suggested that a randomization function is inherent to the “free will” (or at least a convincing simulation of it) exhibited by biological organisms: “An interesting variant on the idea of a digital computer is a ‘digital computer with a random element.’ These have instructions involving the throwing of a die or some equivalent electronic process; one such instruction might for instance be, ‘Throw the die and put the resulting number into store 1000.’ Sometimes such a machine is described as having free will (though I would not use this phrase myself). It is not normally possible to determine from observing a machine whether it has a random element, for a similar effect can be produced by such devices as making the choices depend on the digits of the decimal for π” (445). As Turing anticipated, randomization in early computers was generally linked to a hard-­coded table of values that never repeated (the digits of pi); for this reason, one could run the same program twice and, even with the randomization function, it would execute in exactly the same way (this was why, in the first version of Pac Man, players would, after hours of play, learn the patterns of the ghosts and win the game by rote). Randomization is now generally tied to the internal clock of the computer so it will never repeat its output.

A Theory of Diagrams I’m using the term “diagram” to encompass any form of graphical information that suggests some sort of indexical relationship to a set of objects and

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their relations—“what is the case” in Wittgenstein’s term from the opening of the Tractatus. An “object” can be abstract as in mathematics, concrete as in a statistical chart, or linguistic as in the proposition “Mary likes robins” represented in the trees and formal syntax of transformational grammar. Diagrams, however, will never be entirely linguistic—“ambulo” might be observable as a “picture,” but it is not entirely useful to think of it as a diagram—but will include specialized glyphs, shapes, and spatial relationships that exceed the normative use of written languages, though, of course, diagrams will employ language in the form of, for example, titles, keys, names, and captions. Diagrams, in addition to charting “maps” of thinking and condensing large amounts of data into gestalts, work toward evacuating statements of qualia—units of feeling and thought—in favor of something like quantity or “objectivity.” A more encompassing term than “diagram” would be “model,” which Badiou notably examined in his first major publication, The Concept of Model. Paul M. Livingston describes Badiou’s model theory as: “the intra-­mathematical study of the ‘interpretation’ of natural or formal languages in terms of set-­ theoretic structures, and hence of the ways in which a regular language speci­ fied wholly syntactically may be seen as bearing semantically on a structured ‘reality’ in principle separate from it” (3). For Badiou, the model provides, through the avenue of set theory, a way in which to bridge “regu­lar language” (in this case, both natural and formal languages) to a sys­tem of referents which are, by definition, not encompassed within the signs and syn­ tax of the language itself—a model is, to this degree, transitional between the signs and syntax of a language and some “out there” that is reality. My definition of “diagram” however will encompass formal languages such as Gottlob Frege’s “concept language” and Charles Sanders Peirce’s “existential graphs” (and not natural languages or its subsets such as Basic English). I will also include two other categories: traditional diagrams such as Venn diagrams, Feynman diagrams and nomograms that offer a visual and syntactic versioning of “reality,” and graphs such as maps and charts that are more common to geography and statistics to which one must ascribe an “aesthetics” premised on an ethics of accountability (a central concern of Edward Tufte). A final category of diagrams includes graphical musical scores, whether of the conventional sort that is recombinant like written language or of the experimental sorts that were either constructed after the fact of the music—that is, scores for electronic works—or which are nearly indeterminate, only hinting at rules and instructions, in the manner of John Cage’s “Fontana Mix.” This last category has had the most influence on poetic “scores,” but the epistemological imperatives of more traditional, indexical diagrams has provided a constant source of models for poetic construction.

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a. Formal Languages Frege is of­ten considered the most important philosopher after Leibniz to try to conceive a sys­tem of markings, what he called Begriffsschrift or “concept script,” that evacuated statements of “psychologism”—the “power of the word over the human mind” (Kanterian 42), the tendency for opinions, predispositions, and vagaries to enter logic due to the lack of vigilance over the slipperiness of language. Edward Kanterian notes: “This is Frege’s Pythagorean aspect—an enthusiastic faith in the possibilities of mathemati­cal symbolism, coupled with a distrust of what he calls the language of life” (10). An extension of mathematical syntax and an attempt at a characteristica univer­ salis, Frege’s Begriffsschrift introduced new symbols for the natural numbers (which conventional fonts can’t reproduce) and had the unique property, one which rendered it untenable to nineteenth-­century typesetters, of exceeding the boundaries of the typographer’s baseline by extend­ing into two dimensions, employing a complex set of horizontals, verticals, and curves intended to signify “judging” or equivalence, negation, quantification, and identity which modern formal logic expresses with relatively conventional glyphs. “While other logics proceed linearly, Frege uses both dimensions of a writing surface for articulation of logical content of in­di­vidual formulas. But there are other unusual features as well such as the verti­cal judgement-­ stroke combined with the horizontal content-­stroke, the content-­stroke by itself, the sign for generality, that is, the universal quantifier, the sign for definition, two different inference-­strokes, a special notation for substitution schemes, and a whole range of different letters for different purposes, capital Greek letters, small Greek letters, small and capital German letters and small Latin letters” (Kanterian 47–48).3 Figure 8.1 is a page from the English translation of the Begriffsschrift, which contains a num­ber of these fig­ures, notably the conditional stroke, depicted as a horizontal stroke, representing in general “if x then y,” the thick verticals on the left side of the fig­ures noting that this statement is not merely an “idea” but a “truth,” and the universal quantifier (the Fraktur “a” nestled in a horizontal curve) that means, roughly, “For all objects.” Frege’s gamble, based on his consideration of the geometric imagination and the commonality of phenomena (mental objects) derived from Kant and an anxiety concerning the “privacy of the inner,” which anticipates Wittgenstein, derives from a faith in what could be called his own “ideogrammic method”: “Frege gives a further justification for the two-­dimensionality of his notation, pertaining to the difference between temporal and spatial intuition. He distinguishes between audible and visible signs, that is, spoken and written language. Audible signs are signs of internal states and ideas, and since they are sounds, their order is temporal, like the ideas they represent. They are also as malleable as internal states

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Figure 8.1. Gottlob Frege, from Begriffsschrift.

apparently are. Written signs, by contrast, have sharper boundaries, and if they are used to designate the object itself, they will enforce the sharpness required for precise inferences. They also last longer than sounds” (Kanterian 52). Though Frege’s notational sys­tem has some distinct advantages over contemporary logical formalisms that hew more closely to mathematical notation, Kanterian notes that the Begriffsschrift—impractical if one were concerned with publishing relatively portable books of logical proofs—had no influence in any discipline.

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Figure 8.2. Feynman diagram.

An interesting contemporary development, one equally not influential, is Charles Peirce’s sys­tem of “existential diagrams.” Peirce’s sys­tem exists somewhere between the Venn diagram with which most are familiar and Frege’s notation system, the former because of the predominance of circles that either remain distinct or overlap, and the latter in that Peirce describes strict transformational rules—i.e., a way for one diagram to become simplified or expanded to create a new diagram, and a way for a diagram to be rewritten using other forms of logical notation. Rules of transformation are the key element that links all formal languages—George Spencer Brown’s The Laws of Form, which employs yet another visual notation system, is notable primarily for its articulation of the these rules—as it is these rules that permits one to construct “proofs” in the manner one does in mathematics. Yet another example of a largely graphical formal language is the Feynman diagram, whose basic units are straight lines with directional arrows embedded in them and curved lines that suggest waves along with their vertices. A unique feature Feynman diagrams is that very similar diagrams can have very different meanings if turned 90 degrees, or if the direction of the arrows were reversed. The first diagram in fig­ure 8.2, for example, shows an electron and a positron annihilating into a photon, which then pair produces into another electron and positron, while the sec­ond diagram shows an electron and a positron interacting by sending a photon between them. The “left right” distinction that is unique to quantum mechanics (the difference of valence which depends on the spin of the particle) is expressed by the direction of the arrows, whereas the aspect of time (traditional “causality”) is not represented.

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b. Nomograms A more approachable type of mathematical diagram is the nomogram, a form of “paper computer” developed by Maurice d’Ocagne in France in 1884 to assist engineers on-­site at making rapid calculations without the use of long formulas. Despite the roots of nomography in practical applications, some nomograms take on a sort of ethereal beauty that suggests a ‘pata­physi­cal element, in that they seem to allude to an imaginary science, or a set of tools from an alien race, rather than reveal what they actually are, mundane as a ruler or protractor for assisting in the devising of geometric models. As Douglas P. Adams notes in Nomography: Theory and Applica­ tion, there is a “magic and fun” that “arrived full-­blown with d’Ocagne,” and there is “apparently an inner satisfaction that comes with each use of an alignment diagram—as though somehow the operator were getting away with something that was quite smart and for which he could claim some portion of the credit” (v). Nomograms having been retired by the advent of electronic computers,4 they embodied for the first time the enthusiasm for “technogenesis,” a first brush with a Turing machine, that one sees in writings ranging from George Landow to N. Katerhine Hayles, not to mention Christian Bök in his writing on “robopoetics.” Echoing Frege’s distrust of “psychologism,” nomography “cannot be practiced with ‘approximate’ dia­ grams. It is not ethical to use the term ‘nomogram’ for a diagram which looks like one but was put together surreptitiously. A nomographer’s algebraic procedures should either have a clear mathematical pedigree or state clearly what their limitations are” (vi). Nomograms, to this degree, represent, in skeletal form, the basic necessity of a diagram intended to represent thought in that they have to be indexical in a manner that can never obtain in literary studies. All nomograms will have something like a key, not just to the terms used (though certain elements like a “line” will not have to be defined) but to how the physical proportions of a page relate to the abstract fig­ures generated— a “scale of this chart in inches” is a common phrasing. In addition, they of­ ten have titles that betray their mundane uses: “Stress in the Walls of a Hollow Cylinder,” “Cost of Peat Excavation and Granular Backfill for Highway Construction,” and “Nomogram for the Setting of the Buerger Precession Camera” are among the examples in Nomography. The nomogram of a perpetual calendar (see fig. 8.3) that will determine what day of the week a date landed on “Back to the Birth of Christ” is an approachable—“useful in banking, law, science, family records and after-­dinner conversation”—example of a multi-­step nomogram. A line between column I (the given day of the month) to column III (the month) bisects column II (which is valueless).

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Figure 8.3. Nomogram, “The Day of the Week for Any Date of History Back to the Birth of Christ.”

Similarly, one draws a line between column V (the century) and VII (the year) bisecting columns VI (which is valueless). One then draws a line between the points on columns II and VI which intersects column IV containing the days of the week. Important to note is that, though the lines II and VI don’t contain values or a scale, a value does pertain to the line given its specific proximity to the other straight lines—it is not dropped arbitrarily, or for merely aesthetic reasons, equidistant from the other columns. Figure 8.4, “Nomogram for Determining The Lead Angle of a Cycloidal Cam,” demonstrates that many nomograms don’t contain verbal instructions but embed wordless simulations within them, while fig­ure 8.5 depicts a multipart nomogram resembling a Simondonian "ensemble." Both examples are well beyond my abilities to explain, but they are each notable in demonstrating how nomograms provide a terribly rational way to create assemblages of objects in strict relationship to each other while acquiring a sort of unearthly beauty, suggesting a certain justification for Kandinsky’s meditations in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Nomograms resemble some of

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Figure 8.4. “Nomogram for Determining the Lead Angle of a Cycloidal Cam.”

the experimental musical scores described above, such as Cage’s “Fontana Mix,” though they have quite opposite aims—to delete “psychologism” and indeterminacy, not to encourage it. Nomograms are constructed using a form of reverse engineering in which a range of known x values are drawn on a graph to create a set of points through which a line or curve—the abscissa—can be drawn and extended. Once these known values of x are erased, a series of lines and shapes remain that seem suspended in undifferentiated space. As a mediation between the depiction of mathematical formulas (which can otherwise be depicted “linearly,” as noted above) and aesthetics, one can argue that all nomograms share several features:

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Figure 8.5. Nomogram, “Solution of Lamé-­Maxwell Equation of Equilibrium.”

1. Whatever lines, circles, graphs, etc. are drawn, they do not represent values within themselves but only in a relationship to a scale (which, in turn, references something “in reality”); one can change the granu­ larity of an a, b line arbitrarily (instead of days of the week, hours of the day) though of course the final calculation will have to be adjusted a­ ccordingly. 2. The spaces between the fig­ures themselves are also “to scale”—they

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are not arbitrary volumes or transformed for reasons of clarity or aesthetics; that is, the “space” between fig­ures contains value as a sort of mathematical preindividualization, and grounds elements of the calculation; if line a is situated, say, an additional inch from line b, the ­calculation will not adhere. 3. “Cases of failure” occur due to the material support of the nomogram as lines and curves of nomograms only infinitize internally, which is to say that lines as they are depicted in nomograms do not adhere to the traditional definition of a line, which is that it can extend to infinity in either direction—only a set of values on a line can produce “results,” as values that extend beyond the scope of the nomogram are indeterminate. In other words, a poorly constructed nomogram could contain occasions when a line from a to b will not intersect with x, either because the full extent of x has not been depicted or the construction and situation of the lines and curves were faulty. 4. Because of this property of being able to infinitize internally, nomograms hold calculations in reserve, as they present the remainder even as the calculation suggests a decision, they respond to manipulation (ergodics) by producing a value which, nonetheless, is subjective. ­Nomograms are, in fact, “undecided” prior to their “use”—drawing a series of lines on them to reach a solution—but that brings unsought for values, previously entirely “indeterminate,” into a new relationship to this decision, i.e., as remainder. If the key element that formal languages such as Frege’s and Peirce’s introduce to poetics is their capacity to embody transformational rules, nomograms illustrate the manner in which making decisions (or formal distinctions) affects the range of values in reserve, pulling them from mere indeterminacy into something like a potential decision.

c. Semiology of Graphics Jacques Bertin’s Semiology of Graphics is an encyclopedic account of the sign systems of graphics, suggesting both their use as formal languages—one can deduce new truths based on a firm understanding of the image’s syntactic structure—and a relationship to nomography as a still image that bears an indexical, ethical relationship to a state off affairs. Howard Wainer notes in his introduction: “[T]oday’s printing techniques do not distinguish between word and image—the page is merely a matrix of white and black to be arranged,” suggesting a sort of continuity between the basic practices of a writer and graphic designer, continuing: “One of Bertin’s insights is his observation that while no one makes the mistake of confusing language with

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writing, the turn of phrase with calligraphy, few make the analogous distinction in graphics—there is widespread confusion between ‘the construction of the image and the quality of the stroke’ ” (ix)—namely, that aesthetic qualities somehow suggest the level to which an image is grounded in reality. “The entire problem is one of augmenting this natural intelligence in the best possible way, of finding the artificial memory that best supports our natural means of perception,” (xiv) Bertin notes in his preface, situating graphics well within a number of frames such as David Chalmers notion of the “external mind,” Stiegler’s pharmakon, Hayles sense of human-­machine technogenesis, and the reliance of nomograms on conventional Cartesian coordinates: This discovery of the power and universality of the x y z construction leads directly to the “matrix theory of graphics,” which defines graphics as the sign-­sys­tem representing any problem conceivable in the form of a double-­entry table. This definition excludes “pictography,” the sole purpose of which is to define a given set. It applies directly to cartography and, in fact, defines its specific, salient property: a constant x y that serves as the basis for comparing z components. However, this theory also defines the limits of cartography, as we shall see. But these limits prove, if such proof were necessary, that all human logic appears to be based on the visual properties afforded only by the x y z construction, that is, on the natural and immediate perception of the relationship among these “dimensions.” Beyond that lies the fourth dimension, time, accessible only to human memory. (xiv) Bertin is not writing philosophy or psychology here, but merely stating that conventions have existed, at least in print, that have somehow outlined a certain “limit” to human understanding, at least in its relationship to images. Graphics has a “double function . . . as a storage mechanism and a research instrument,” and “graphics and mathematics are similar and construct the ‘rational moment’ ” (2–3). Tracing something like a Mallarméan lineage, Bertin writes that, “One had to wait until the fourteenth century to suspect, and the eighteenth century to confirm . . . that the two dimensions of a sheet of paper could usefully represent something other than visible space” (4). These pages are far from inactive, but can in fact be thought of as machines: “When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphics images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the ‘illustration,’ to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the ‘representation’ of a final signification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their

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justification” (4). The earlier parts of the Semiology of Graphics concern the components of these visual machines, describing such concepts as the “invariant and its components” (linking graphics to logic), visual organization (number, length, and level of components), the plane, “retinal variables,” the “rules of the graphic system,” and definitions of his three main categories, diagrams, networks and maps. Unlike Frege, Bertin doesn’t express any hostility to “psychologism”—­ aesthetics and the general limits of human comprehension are obviously of interest to a graphic designer—and enters into some phenomenological musing in his theory of the image. Appealing to Zipf ’s notion of “mental cost,” Bertin writes: “Efficiency is defined by the following proposition: If, in order to obtain a correct and complete answer to a given question, all other things being equal, one construction requires a shorter observation time than another construction, we can say that it is more efficient for this question” (9). This suggests something like Simondon’s theory of the technical element: all things being equal, an element contains more technicity than an ensemble even if providing the same outcome (or amount of work). He identifies three stages in the “reading process”: the first, “external identification,” is when the human mind identifies the three axes of signification and recognizes the nature of the tool; the sec­ond, “internal identification,” is when the viewer acquires an understanding of how the key or legend— where the transition from formal content to semantic meaning occurs— operates in the image; and third, the “perception of pertinent (new) correspondences,” a merging of the mathematic or axial (x y) perception of the first stage with the sec­ond stage in which graphics acquire something like a syntax, at which point the image can actually be queried to find a value for z (“On a given date, what is the price of stock X?”). He echoes Charles Olson’s proprioceptive poetics as he closes out his definition: Answering a given question involves: (a) an input identification (a given date) (b) perception of a correspondence between the components (a point) (c) an output identification (the answer: “so many francs”). This process implies that the eye can isolate the input date from all the other dates and DURING AN INSTANT OF PERCEPTION can see only those correspondences that are determined by this input identification, but can SEE ALL OF THESE. During this instant the eye must be able to disregard all other correspondences. This is visual selection. We can state that in certain graphic

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constructions, the eye is capable of encompassing all the correspondences—determined by any input identification within a single “glance,” a single instant of perception. The correspondences can be seen in a single visual form. The meaningful visual form, perceptible in the minimum instant of vision, will be called the IMAGE. (42) Bertin’s stages of the perception and cognitive manipulation of the image mirrors the stages one traverses when using a nomogram. Though one could, in fact, use a rule to derive new values from a map or graph, the suggestion is that this concrete manipulation happens mentally, not by drawing. Levels of grounding are described, first in the axial relations, then in the un­ fold­ing of the meaning of lines and shapes, prior to employment. Further, a sort of economy is described in which some meanings, the price of stock on such-­and-­such a date, is privileged over others, the price of stock on the other dates, but all bleed into each other, or extend along a gradient. This is the “magic” of graphs: even after their meanings have been exhausted for a particular task, they hold meanings “in reserve” for later consumption, or perhaps merely as a remainder contributing to an aesthetic effect or, in Harman’s terms, an “allure.” These general observations on the diagram suggest, I hope, new ways of discussing visual art premised on maps, charts, and grids, asking to what degree they operate along this axis of use and allure. Concept scripts, nomograms, and graphs dramatize the collapse of the undifferentiated or pre­in­ di­vidual into the decided, bypassing what is normally considered a reliable indicator of aesthetic value, allusiveness, or indeterminacy. The two projects I will now consider trouble these binaries between the utile and art, the indeterminate and the graphable, and, perhaps, between the self and number.

William Poundstone’s New Digital Emblems Florian Cramer’s 2005 treatise The Word Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagi­ nation makes a slightly different claim concerning the nearly occult properties of digital code and algorithm: Ever since computer programmers referred to written algorithmic machine instructions as “code” and programming as “coding,” “code” not only refers to cryptographic codes, but to what makes up software, either as a source code in a high-­level programming language or as compiled binary code, but in either case as a sequence of executable instructions. With its seeming opacity and the boundless, viral mul-

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tiplication of its output in the execution, algorithmic code opens up a vast potential for cultural imagination, phantasms and phantasma­ gorias. The word made flesh, writing taking up a life of its own by self-­ execution, has been a utopia and dystopia in religion, metaphysics, art and technology alike . . . From magic spells to contemporary computing, this speculative imagination has always been linked to practical— technical and artistic—experimentation with algorithms. (9) Code is equated, here, with the language of spells—symbols turn into action—in more analytic terms a form of “performative utterance” as described by J. L. Austin. The technicity of code brings into a being what Stieg­ ler would describe as a “third order”—the pursuit of life by means other than life—by “self-­executing” textual objects. But the hermetic is never far away: “Speculative imagination is embedded in today’s software culture. Reduction and totality, randomness and control, physics and metaphysics are among the tropes it is obsessed with, of­ten short-­circuiting their opposites,” with paranoia at their base as “computer users know these obsessions well from their own fears of crashes and viruses, bloatware, malware and vaporware, from software ‘evangelists’ and religious wars over operating systems, and their everyday experience with the irrationality of rational systems” (9). William Poundstone’s New Digital Emblems, a suite of sixteen pieces created in Adobe (once Macromedia) Shockwave5, revives the Renaissance form of the emblem to both enact and critique aspects of what was then emerging internet culture, meanwhile being uncannily attuned to the hermetic spirit of code that Cramer describes. The Renaissance emblem, with its tripartite structure of image, motto, and epigram, represented a major genre of popu­lar literature during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mostly in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France. Not quite as popu­lar in England, some pages of Emblems by Francis Quarles occasionally make appearances in larger anthologies of Renaissance English poetry (he’s in my edition of the Anchor Anthology of 17th Century Verse). Alexander Pope, perhaps the world’s first detractor of “multimedia” poetry, wrote in the Dunciad that Quarles’s Emblems is a work: [W]here the pictures for the page atone And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own. The Rennaissance emblem was not an innovation borne of artistic insight but invented rather accidentally and for purely commercial reasons—as a way to sell an unauthorized edition of poems—an origin that might have crippled the emblem’s chance of being taken seriously. The first edition of

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the Emblemata of Andrea Alciato, a selection of poems by Alciato coupled with woodcuts that had been chosen by the publisher, was published in Augs­burg, Germany, in 1531; it was frequently republished in over one hundred editions and started a trend across Europe. Chrestien Wechel’s Latin edi­tions (from 1534) “can be said to have set the standard for clear presentation of emblems, with each emblem beginning on a fresh page, featuring the motto or title, the pictura below that, and then the subscriptio or verse text” (Adams 1). A famous emblem by Alciato depicts Pythagoras, whose moral philosophy was closely linked to his theory of the meanings of numbers (Russell and Badiou have both been criticized as being “Pythagorean” in this manner), pointing to a flock of cranes flying in formation, the motto stating “Lap­sus ubi? quid feci? aut officii quid omissum est?” (“Where have I transgressed? What have I committed? What thing incumbent on me has been left undone?”). Nothing in the image offers any suggestion of failure or transgression, just as nothing in the motto suggests cranes. The epigram, a verse of six lines, states that “the Samian,” a common epithet for Pythagoras, “himself wrapped up his own teaching in a brief verse,” which constitutes the motto. “He pressed every man to render this account with himself. It is said he learned this from a flock of flying cranes, who bore in their talons a stone they’d seized in order not to yield, lest ill winds bore them off course. By this rule, the life of men ought to be governed” (Barker). The epigram thereby binds the once enigmatic image to a closed circuit of meanings, consequently offering some insight into the triangular nature of the formation of cranes in the image. Poundstone, in his updating of this image, suggestively replaces the flight of cranes with the square root symbol (see fig. 8.6). One could creatively expand the emblem model to describe many phenomena of Web 2.0, such as the tripartite structure common to Facebook: the status update, the accompanying image, and the comment stream that, if the picture is enigmatic or otherwise open to interpretation, of­ten contains comments that want to flip the gestalt—the duck-­rabbit divide—“labeling” the picture as either one thing or another. The New Yorker cartoon contest works along these lines as well: the viewer is invited to submit captions for drawings to explain its contrasting elements. However, this seems to do a disservice to a peculiar quality of the emblem, which is its use in describing moral sentiments, a quality preserved in the Scottish concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay’s booklet Heroic Emblems and, most recently, the work of Poundstone. The title of Poundstone’s work bears a double meaning: it refers to the ensemble itself—here are “new digital emblems,” just as Rilke titled a book of poems New Poems (Neue Gedichte)—as well as the purported subject of

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Figure 8.6. William Poundstone, selection from New Digital Emblems.

these assays, reflections on something “new” to the culture, the argument for a genre. Alluding to the emblem’s relationship to the hermetic tradition, Poundstone’s work begins with a brief cinematic treatise that states that the “emblem spoke of the perfect language,” a language that mated text and image, which he provocatively states is “part of the sales pitch for the Web today.” “Today” was 2000: the waning years of the Clinton era, the country still coasting in the economic and creative optimism of the first dot-­com bubble. Poundstone’s language, which could have been called snarky at the time, has, as I argue in an earlier chapter, been confirmed: the discourse about the internet has evolved from the utopian anarchy of Temporary Autonomous Zones into the ubiquity of commercial interests among “social networks.” We are then introduced to the main interface: the sixteen pictures of the in­di­vidual emblems arranged in the shape of a spiral, recalling not only Saul Steinberg’s multistable cartoon but a host of canonical artworks that employed this most basic expression of factal recursion, such as Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Once clicking on the first emblem, the user is greeted with an element not of Poundstone’s creation, the Adobe Shockwave Player loading screen

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with its standard horizontal progress bar. Following this screen is a short introductory animation: the sec­ond hand of a clock moving for what I count to be thirteen sec­onds across the face of a clock with only 11 to 4 represented with a series of dots, no numbers. Interestingly, the starting point of the countdown seems to be generated randomly with each page refresh— it starts at a different place on the clock face, and is not always contained within the arc from 11 to 4. That is, the sec­ond hand could start in the void where no graphical dots signify the sec­onds (the arc from 5 to 10 that is devoid of symbols), or start from the graphically depicted arc from 11 to 4 and remain within those confines, or move from the empty “void” to the graphic part, something of an animation of the moves from determinacy and back in structures like nomograms. As the clock ticks, the following paragraph, broken into text blocks, fades in and out (note that words in bold are in bright red):

Madness alone is truly terrifying

says Mr. Vladimir, satiric villain of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Vladimir complains that the bourgeoisie is no longer affected by heresy, mass slaughter, or ­attacks on high culture. They know that their comfort is founded on science and reason. “Since bombs are your means of expression,” Vladimir advises his ­anarchist flunky, “it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics.” Mathematics in the form of a violent interruption and the seduction of numerology fig­ured as a sort of mythos are central themes of the New Digital Emblems. The countdown at the beginning denotes not merely the timer on a bomb also the movement into and out of indiscrete continua and the ra­ tio of sec­onds. Important as Poundstone’s animations are, however, the central operating feature of the emblems is how the picture and motto are unpacked by the epi­graph. In the case of the first emblem, the pictura is a depiction in a three-­ dimensional purple typeface of the symbol for the empty set—0—leaning slightly forward and casting a shadow on a gray background. In a standard, two-­dimensional white sans-­serif typeface, the phrase “WHETHER IT BE” arcs above it, while the phrase “OR BE NOT SO” below. In set theory, the only element that is present in all sets is the empty set; this property of the empty set is what leads Badiou to his notion of the multiplicity of being, but also of the void being ultimately generative of what he calls events. While

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Poundstone was most likely not reading Badiou (he doens’t appear in the bibliography), his emblem seems almost like a cartoonish depiction, an ontological Doonesbury, of this meeting of void and material reality. A crow, depicted in silhouette, sits outside of the circle of the emblem; a basic piece of navigation appears in the lower right corner: a conch shell (which returns the user to the spiral), a minus sign (which leads to the previous emblem in the chain), and a plus sign (the next emblem). In the upper left-­ hand corner sits the text box, roughly fifteen lines tall, about five to six words per line, with a scroll bar—a white square on a gray vertical line, directional triangles on the top and bottom, rather antique looking by contemporary s­ tandards—­on the right-­hand side. The text of this first emblem presents something like a “poetics” for the entire project: an initial key concern is the “hermetic philosophers of the Renaissance” who felt that “words [were] inadequate,” that dualities such as “life” and “death” were essentially false, and that truth could be revealed “through the agency of mathematical permutation.” He illustrates this by describing an emblem from Philotheus’s Symbola Christiana that “shows a nearly blank paper or canvas marked with a perspective grid” and “the earliest indisputable picture of nothing in the West, [the] Paradoxa Emblemata of Dionysius Andreas Freher (1649–1728), which was never published but circulated in 18th century manuscript copies on both sides of the Atlantic. One of Freher’s emblems has no picture, its absence significantly framed by the motto and rectangular border.” As Craig Dworkin explains in No Me­ dium, a book-­length meditation on blank works in print and across the arts, “Erasures obliterate, but they also reveal; omissions with a sys­tem permit other elements to appear all the more clearly” (9). Significantly, the representation of blankness in digital art would more accurately be through turning the transparency level (the alpha channel) of an image to zero—basically, “invisible”—rather than in turning it “white,” since all colors are essentially equally positive (a sort of “flat ontology”) on the computer screen. The RGB value of the color white is, in fact, the opposite of empty—255, 255, 255, or FFFFFF in hexadecimals—and the first unit of any array or set in computer code is numbered zero. This section about pictures of nothing includes a round-­up of Modernist artists—Rodchenko, Cage, Paik, and Klein—who, on a “quest for nullity,” created “serious” art works depicting or containing no imagery. Poundstone then describes the emblem itself: “In the present emblem, the picture is most plausibly read as the slashed zero of digital typography, half of the binary number system’s yin and yang, the new medium that leaves no paper trail. It is a zero all the more emphatic for its rejection of the letter O of ordinary text. The symbol loosely resembles the slashed red glyph of

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signs of prohibition, and the Greek phi, mathematical symbol for the null set. It may further be seen as the superimposition of a 0 and 1. By joining the binary digits underlying our digital age, it creates a conundrum not unlike the mu of Zen.” While Poundstone starts off by describing the glyph as indeterminate, “open to interpretation,” he is also describing the multiplicity of the symbol, as it occupies a firm place in any of the frames—a typo of the 0 and 1, a zero that rejects the letter O, the sign of prohibition, the null set— when employed. (As for the sensual real, Poundstone notes: “The symbol is rendered in matte rubber texture whose hue is derived from International Klein Blue, the custom-­manufactured pigment that Klein used for many of his monochrome paintings.”) Poundstone then writes of the nearest thing to a blank poem possible, the one-­letter poem, “T,” by François Le Lionnais, that “much like Duchamp’s ready-­mades, Le Lionnais’ T acquires significance only by being labeled a poem.” Similarly, Plutarch’s essay on the third inscription at the shrine of Apollo, consisting merely of the letter E, attempts to render the single glyph interpretable as a text: “In ancient Greek, E can designate the number 5, the word if, and the sec­ond person singular of the verb ‘to be.’ ” As we noted, Alice Notley will re-­employ the letter E in her long poem Disobedience as the symbol of “commonality,” it being the most frequently used letter in English. Returning to his emblem, he writes, “In the present case, the act of framing a symbol within an emblem promises nothing . . . The Greek phi, symbol for the null set, may be understood as a botched attempt to create a text even more minimal than the famous T or E.” Poundstone’s text then moves on to discuss the outsider artist Richard Dadd (1817–1886), whose conventional technique of painting “tightly drawn illustrations of fairies, inspired by literary sources such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream” transformed—after the onset of insanity brought on by an obsession with the “gods of the hieroglyphs” and which led him to murder his father—into a sort of all-­over style: “Dadd spent nine years painting Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke (which measures only 21 1/4 by 15 1/2 inches) dispelling any assumptions of spontaneity. Where Dadd’s art might relate to conventional notions of schizophrenic art is in its horror vacui. Every square centimeter of the picture is packed with space-­filling detail.” Dadd wrote a poem to explain this complex painting: But whether it be or be not so
 You can afford to let this go
 For nought at nothing it explains
 And nothing from nothing nothing gains.

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Poundstone writes of his motto: “Like the null symbol it surrounds, the quotation is text commenting on its own failure to say anything.” In the context of the present volume, Dadd’s poem seems paradigmatically recursive—­ nonsense, but only because it describes an impossible logical shape, the infinite regression of “nothing.” Poundstone continues: “With its nursery rhyme meter, Dadd’s line suggests a kind of innocence while alluding to the fundamental dichotomy of the digital age: 1 or 0? To this question, the null symbol provides an answer as insistent and certain as that of Poe’s r­ aven.” In the very last line of the epigraph, Poundstone finally explains the one recalcitrant image on the screen, revealing that the “crow” was indeed a ­raven, that the raven was part of the emblem (even if outside the magic circle), and that the raven, “insistent and certain,” provides somehow an “answer” to the core binary of Boolean logic, the 1 or 0—being or non-­being—simply by never being a raven but a picture of one. New Digital Emblems works as a critique of the assumptions about the web, not to mention the interface itself, while amplifying what he sees as a sort of Manichean element in digital creation. “Madness, mathematics, and culture”—one could instead say “paranoia, algorithm, and the social”—­ constitute the recipe for an understanding of the symbolic order as a matter of scales and continua rather than a matter of discrete forms, largely as a result of the apparent assimilation of all human thought and creativity into the language of 0s and 1s. Poundstone evokes this notion of the continuum (a central facet of Manovich’s writing about the logic of streams and composites) in less abstract terms in an interview where he comments on one of his series of backlit, digitally modified photographs: “One thing that I think is intrinsically digital is the idea of the continuum. With the androgynes, for instance, the morphing program can generate any numerically specified mixture of genders whatsoever, say 46% female and 54% male. That would be a challenge to do in an oil painting or a non-­digital photograph. The effect of ‘Androgyne with a Gun’ hinges at least partly on the idea that, whether gay or straight, male or female, there’s no cultural autopilot response to cheesecake images of androgynes. Culture is a useful fiction that supplies absolutes. With its ‘slippery’ way of denying categories, digital art of­ten stands in opposition to culture (‘Arithmetic is the enemy of culture,’ one of my emblems reads)” (Stefans 1998). Poundstone’s arguments are, then, the opposite of what is of­ten termed “technological determinism,” in which culture, and human actors, are more or less slaves to, or mere symptoms of, the media culture—his pharmakon is cure, not toxin. Poundstone sees the under­ly­ing “arithmetic” as somehow animating a pre-­conceptual field, existing beneath—­and increasingly erupting into—the useful fiction of cultural

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forms and values. Poundstone’s “hermetic” vision, consequently, superimposes the continuum between genders and that one between being and not-­ being, pointing to a type of infinitizing inherent in thinking one’s own identity.

Christian Bök’s Crystallography Christian Bök’s Crystallography attempts to establish a continuum between a poetics of diagrams and constraint-­based writing, in­clud­ing within it a transparent tipped-­in page of a “photomicrograph of the letter ‘Y’ magnified 25x,” illustrated pages resembling those of the origi­nal Encyclopedia that Simondon cherished, and a number of lattice-­like structures composed of the intersections of the names of atoms—oxygen, aluminum, silicon, etc.— intersecting at their shared letters to form something like word molecules. The book is at once an anthology of forms and the description of an interzone in which both poetry and science, never one or the other, share and exchange language and devices. Originally published in 1994 and republished, revised, and reset with digital typefaces, in 2003, Crystallography can be said to operate under the sign of ‘pataphysics, the “imaginary science” invented or discovered by Alfred Jarry in Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pata­ physician, published posthumously in 1911. In no small part due to the success of Bök’s own Eunoia, ‘pataphysics, along with the related phenomenon of the Oulipo, has enjoyed something of a revival, with popu­lar books on the subject and translations from sec­ond-­generation French ‘pataphysicians such as René Daumal appearing in the last decade. While commentators, for example Andrew Hugill in ‘Pataphysics: A Use­ less Guide, of­ten can’t seem to decide whether or not to take ‘pataphysics seriously, adopting a tone that is too wary of turning a good joke into a doxa, Bök’s treatment in ‘Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science, which investigates three fields of practice, that of the Italian Futurists, the French Oulipians, and the Canadian “Pataphysicians (note the double quote), works a line characteristic of all of Bök’s essays, at once dogmatic, insistent, and yet decidedly “mad.” As Bök notes: ‘Pataphysics, “the science of the particular,” does not . . . study the rules governing the general recurrence of a periodic incident (the expected case) so much as study the games governing the special occurrence of the spurious accident (the excepted case). ‘Pataphysics not only studies exception but has itself becomes an exception—dismissed and neglected despite its influence and relevance. [. . .] ‘Pataphysics has ultimately determined the horizon of thought for any encounter between philosophy and literature, but criticism has largely ignored this impor-

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Figure 8.7. Christian Bök, from Crystallography.

tant principle of the postmodern condition. What irony: ‘pataphysics has replaced metaphysics so slowly and subtly that, once noticed, the transition seems at once sudden and abrupt. (8–9) ‘Pataphysics, an “epiphenomenon” in Jarry’s definition that relates to metaphysics to the degree that metaphysics relates to physics, seems to have found its ultimate success in contemporary philosophy by largely disappearing, like Marx’s state, behind the language of the contingent (in Meillassoux’s language) and the void (in Badiou’s language), both being elements of a uni-

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verse of the possible that exists beyond chance to the same degree that the transfinite exists beyond the finite. Bök, following Deleuze, articulates a relationship of poetry to “Royal” science, noting that Royal science “values[s] the renovation of what Kuhn calls a ‘paradigm’ ” in the face of anomalies, while Nomad sciences “value the innovation of what Lyotard calls a ‘­paralogy,’ a ludic language game that must systematically (ap)prove its own inconsistency and inefficiency by convolving problems, invoking anomaly for the sake of what is abnormal and unknown” (14). Bök continues: Like poetry, science is a bricolage of fig­ures, an assemblage of devices, none of which fit together perfectly—but unlike poetry, science must nevertheless subject its tropes to a system, whose imperatives of both verity and reality normally forbid any willing suspension of disbelief. [. . .] Foucault observes . . . that science and poetry have evolved opposite relations to the authorial function. Science moves toward anonymity. Poetry moves toward eponymity. The absence of the author in science serves an allotelic interest (justifying itself for the sake of a finality outside its own language), while the presence of the author in poetry serves an autotelic interest (justifying itself for the sake of a finality inside its own language). Whenever science gains the anonymous power to speak the truth about things, poetry seeks an eponymous refuge in the space of its own words. (15) Bök’s favorite rheto­ric fig­ure, the chiasmus, which he elevates to an axiomatic principle of ‘pataphysics (along with clinamen, the swerve) is on full display here as poetry and science express their relationship as much through a his­tori­cal compossibility as through an exchange of terms and shared suffixes (“-­nymity” and “-­telic” in this example). That is, even in prose, one could nearly graph the relationship of poetry and science through markers that, in themselves, have no content, are nothing but hinges, just as one could graph the entirety of ‘Pataphysics between the three national frames, Italian, French, and Canadian, he uses to organize it. If science, like poetry, is a “bricolage” of “devices,” then naturally Bök would ask that Crystallography be understood as a work of science, as each section adopts a different set of logics in its expression. The first, “Preliminary Survey,” contains the set of word molecules juxtaposed with anagrammatic lyrical reflections on fractals, crystals, glass, and other structures, while “Diamonds” is a series of short lyrical reflections in­clud­ing, notably, evocations of “my father . . . a gemcutter,” which is, by conventional standards of biography, fictional. The following section, “Geodes,” is again a largely lyrical, or at least mellifluous, series of stanzas, but ends in what is the first

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truly “scientific” element of the book, “The Cartographic Key to Speleological Formations.” Speleology is the study of caves, their geographic, physical, even biological properties; the “Cartographic Key,” then, converts the preceding stanzas, and presumably the entire book, into a new semantic register, away from normative hermeneutic or even deconstructive practices of determining “meaning” into a survey of entirely nonhuman, ecological formations. The basic trick of the “key” is to re-­vision letterforms (in­clud­ ing elements of punctuation) as discrete elements of non-­linguistic, composite structures: f – waterfall sluicing over precipice g – eroded obelisk of flowstone h – cliffwall with abutting archway i – plinth from broken stalagmite j – precipice with collapsed ledge k – cliffwall with flying buttresses l – unbroken6 column of dolomite m – cavernous vault of stalactites n – archway of oolitic limestone o – weathered7 boulder of dolomite [. . .] - – sandstone bridge over canyon , – rock fragment containing fossils . – rock fragment containing geodes : – exposed seam of precious minerals8 (61) Notable in this table, two columns of fifteen alphabetized entries, is the harnessing of the graph’s powers of engaging the viewer, as Bertin notes, in a three-­stage approach: an articulation of the x y grid, the recognition of the grid’s relationship to its proposed “content,” the text of Crystallography itself, and the offering of the diagram for use, the determining of the z value, by the reader. As in the earlier “micro­graph” of the letter y, which this schema seems in some ways to contradict (the “y” being no longer a snowflake but a “cleft with underhanging ledge”), Bök asks, like compatriot bpNichol in his vari­ous cartoon meditations on the letter “H,” that you look at these letters, their architectures and proportions, very closely.9 “A Hagiography of Snow” scolds the scientists for trying to name the stars since—like naming snowflakes—it is a practice that “stems in part from the unfulfillable desire to perform a mathematical paradox: the attribution of cardinality to every element in an infinite set.” Most troubling to the humanist scholar, if not to the reader, is the call by “science” to re-­read the text with

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a different sense of experience favored, that of the geologist charting a terrain of what Dworkin dubs “tectonic grammar,” in which “language is just an immense spheroid of magmatic inscription which has crystallized into solid words” (9). “The Cryometric Index of Poetic Forms” enacts a grander, more substantial intervention into literary studies. The x-­axis of the chart lists a set a formal binaries prevalent in poetry—metered/rhymed, grammatical/ referential, iconic/phonic, asemantic/polysemic, and satiric/elegiac—while the y-­axis consists of twenty-­seven crystal formations (“Hollow Column,” “Solid Column,” “Stellar Crystal,” “Dendritic Crystal,” etc.) along with small illustrations of each. One uses the chart to determine what linguistic properties each of these twenty-­seven crystals possess; for example, one learns that the “Columnar Needle” is metered, referential, and grammatical, while the “Columnar Cluster” is referential, grammatical, phonic, iconic, poly­semic, asemic, and satiric (containing all listed properties except rhymed and elegiac). Compared to the “Cartography,” this chart is largely inscrutable, but its valorizations of ratio, symmetry and measure and allusions to columns illustrate a less-­noted quality of Bök’s work which is its neo-­classical nature, to such a degree that its relationship to poetic form resembles that of a “traditional” versifier as much as it does one of the “avant-­garde.”

Just Ask Lattice Readers (or at least the literati) of­ten accept it as a given that Bök’s work has nothing to do with subjectivity, and for good reason—he refers to ‘pataphysics as a “lie,” and the absurd number of constraints inflicted on the writer seem to be (in the spirit of the Oulipo) intended to defeat anything like in­ di­vidual “creativity” on the part of the author. Nonetheless, there is something alluring about the evocation of Bök’s “father,” his very materialization as a form of poetic process (and not as an act of authorial memory) in the sequence of poems titled “Diamonds”: MY FATHER HE MADE JEWELS MORE PRECIOUS WAS A SAD BY SMASHING THEM, SPOKE ONLY GEMCUTTER WORDS PARED DOWN TO THE EDGE OF THEIR SILENCE, AND STROVE

TO BREAK INTO (BREAK OUT OF)

EACH HOUSE OF MIRRORS

HELD AT THE TIP OF HIS TONGS (65)

Poetics of Grids, Numbers, and Diagrams / 293

MY FATHER TOO BROKE TO BE WED NEVER GOT MY MOTHER A DIAMOND

HE CLAIMED TO ADORE HER TOO MUCH TO PROFANE HER WITH GEMS MADE OF ASHES (67)

What emerges isn’t so much the biography of a “father” but an image of the superego swapped out for a set of values, nearly Medieval in nature, prem­ ised on lucidity, formal perfection, stoic reserve, and courtly love. One of the poems appears three times—“MY FATHER / TAUGHT ME / PRECISION”—while a later short proclaims: “MY FATHER / THE MODEL / OF POETIC / RESTRAINT.” The impression is that of an ars poetica or a manifesto; in any case, Bök’s aesthetic principles (especially those of euphony, anagrammatic integrity, and exaggerated symmetry, from which he’s never wavered) are conveyed through the actions of this father conjured from carbon ash. Nathan Brown argues that these graphs and other moments of self-­refer­ entiality in Crystallography—such as the line “The word at the end of this sentence is meaningless.”—reflect the book’s “subtractive” quality: “This subtractive register of the poetics of Crystallography functions as a trap, albeit one into which only the most careful reader can properly fall . . . [W]e notice that our capacity to make meaning, to read signs, has been enlisted by, expropriated into, and then erased by the organization of a semiotic apparatus. The supposedly subjective interpretation of meaning is constrained, captured, and canceled by the operations of a formal system” (231). Brown’s “most careful reader” would be that one who has discarded the relatively normative interpretive practices involved in “avant-­garde” poetry in favor of the practice of examination that Bertin describes in his theory of the image but with the added bonus of a recursion, such as in the line Brown isolates: “The word at the end of this sentence is meaningless.” Consequently, the eponymity of the poet is exchanged for the anonymity of the scientist, a process that, Brown argues, repositions the reader as a flaw in the operations of “lucid writing” since “the perceiving subject is embodied as a blind spot . . . [an] occlusion: a foreign substance absorbed into a crystal structure while remaining an exception to its regularity, deviating from and disturbing the propagation of its symmetrical order. The subject who would solve the object is dissolved and absorbed, undergoing a becoming-­object as an incongruous element of an encompassing inorganic structure, one in which the flaw or occlusion is itself replicated at each new layer of organization” (235). Returning to Mitchell, one can argue that Bök escapes the gravity of

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“mere” metapictures by employing the tools of diagrams, which themselves extend to formal languages by making ontological claims, even as the third term in the science/poetry diad, ‘pataphysics, assures the formal eponymity of the poet Bök in what he would recognize as an authored diagram much as “Euclid’s Modern Rivals,” the seven crystallographers paid homage to in a modest hagiography (see fig. 8.7), signed their own treatises. The closure of this circle, or the integrity of the metapicture, demotes the reader to the status of mere imperfection, a swerve or clinamen in what is (echoing Harold Bloom) a progression of self-­contained masterworks. Crystals as preservers and disseminators of information are central to Gilbert Simondon’s theory of the ontogenesis of substances and the individua­ tion of beings. In contrast to hylomorphism, the theory of form inaugurated by Aristotle and maintained through Aquinas and Medieval scholastics, in which “form is the determining principle of matter”—that is, imposed from the out­side, as the mold shapes the brick—Simondon offers a theory in which the object engages with a milieu in an ongoing act of consisting. P ­ ascal Chabot writes: “The theory of information allows us to reformulate this question. It asks: What is the effect of information on the milieu that receives it? . . . Some of the scholastics held that all forms were static. Those who believed in a unique, rigid form maintained that its sole function was its determining effect on matter. This function is diametrically opposed to dynamism: its adherents refused to accept its role in specifying the properties of in­di­vidual things. Simondon favored the opposite interpretation. In his theory, form and action are combined in a single notion: information. ‘It is necessary to replace the notion of form with that of information,’ he wrote” (80). Crystals, when placed in a suitable “milieu,” that is, a chemical liquid that engages its properties of self-­creation, “serves as a model for physico-­ chemical individuation, which Simondon will use as the starting point for his theory of biological individuation.” Chabot continues: “Form and matter do not explain the genesis of the crystal. They allow us to formulate a theory a posteriori, when the crystal has already been individuated. But if we follow the process of individuation step by step, other observations pre­ sent themselves. The milieu in which a crystal first forms is its mother-­water, a substance (matiére) which crystallographers describe as ‘amorphous,’ to emphasize that its molecules are in an unstable, disordered state, lacking, above all, the periodic order which determines the geometry of the crystal. The amorphous substance must be in a meta-­stable state to produce a crystal; it must be at a temperature that will support rapid evolution. Crystallization will not occur if the environment is too stable” (83). This “amorphous substance” in a “meta-­stable state” is later described as “rich in energy but lacking in structure . . . a self-­organizing chaos” (83). A crystal, with its all

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important periodicity, not to mention its recursive quality of being able to repeat its own shape, its own information, in an orderly fashion, is introduced to the substance. What occurs is both a homology for psychological individuation—which only occurs in the context of the milieu (there is no “self ” and “other” in Simondon)—as well as an enactment of the negentropy, or self-­forming, of matter. Steven Shaviro offers, in his review of Kant, Whitehead, and Delueze, another model for discerning the “subject” arising out of this interaction with pure form. Shaviro’s stated aim is to “unearth this subterranean dimension of Kant’s argument [that] aesthetics has no foundation, and it offers us no guarantees. Rather, it throws all norms and values into question, or into crisis” (xvi). He describes the birth of the subject in experience, a sort of epiphenomenon arising in the interaction of objects, in Whitehead’s “self-­proclaimed inversion of Kant”: “[W]hitehead says that the subject is not self-­perpetuating, but must be continually renewed. The subject does not outlive the feelings that animate it at any given moment . . . Each new experience, even each repetition of what we think of as the ‘same’ experience, implies a fresh creation, and a new subject . . . [A] sense of continuity is easily explained, in Whitehead’s terms, by inheritance. For the ‘­datum’ of any new experience is largely composed of the remnants of immediately past experiences, located in the same bodily mass, or in the same close neighborhood . . . [T]he default situation of the subject, as of everything that exists in time, is to perish” (12). In a sense, Whitehead’s philosophy offers us an image of the reader not being subject to the strictures of aesthetic form (which appeal to, among other things, taste and intellect) but engaging in the moment-­by-­moment constitution of a subject by reflection on the “remnants of immediately past experiences.” What is mistaken for an assault on the subject is in fact an invitation to revive the constantly perishing subject. [F]or Whitehead, the subject is also a superject: not something that underlies experience, but something that emerges from experience, something that is superadded to it. This doesn’t mean that Whitehead abolishes the subject, as “postmodern” thinkers are of­ten accused of doing. Indeed, for Whitehead, just as much as for Kant, there is nothing outside of experience, and no experience without a subject. “The whole universe,” Whitehead says, “consists of elements disclosed in the experiences of subjects.” There is always a subject, though not necessarily a human one. Even a rock—and for that matter even an electron—­has experiences, and must be considered a subject-­superject to a certain extent. A falling rock “feels,” or “perceives,” the gravitational field of

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the earth. The rock isn’t conscious, of course; but it is affected by the earth, and this being affected is its experience. What makes a subject-­ superject is not consciousness, but unity, identity, closure, and transcendence. Each subject is “something in­di­vidual for its own sake; and thereby transcends the rest of actuality.” (12) Shaviro’s interest in object-­oriented ontology comes to the fore here, as he extends (as do Whitehead and Harman) the possibility of a “subjectivity,” even if at a minimum, to inanimate things. But it is from this melee of experiences that the superject—one would almost want to call it a surject to suggest another aesthetic link—emerges, one that is not constituted on the inside/outside binary that bedevils any formulation of the “beautiful” (here I am apart from this object and considering its perfections) but instead understands the subject and object as actualities composing on the same plane of the appearances. Biologist A. G. Cairns-­Smith argues in Seven Clues to the Mystery of Life that clay, which at base is formed by crystals, acted as something like a form of memory, a primordial chip set, an argument in stark contrast to the popu­ lar image of life’s genesis in a sort of primordial “slime,” in which already complex molecules such as amino acids somehow came together to form the first life forms. “There is no doubt that clay structures really do put themselves together,” he writes, “in the sense that they are neither the specially engineered outcome of organisms, nor the products of bizarre geo­chemi­ cal conditions. These are ‘zero-­tech’ materials” (84). The attractive feature of crystals, however, is not that they, in the process of “stacking” new layers, replicate minute structures perfectly, but rather that information is in the form of flaws that survive into subsequent layers. So long as these flaws don’t corrupt the integrity of the structure, their swerves away from an “ideal” replication forms a sort of memory: Let us concede that an information-­containing structure of any sort whatever must be ‘metastable’, that is to say a fixed arrangement but precarious to the extent that it is not the most perfectly stable arrangement possible (there can only be one perfect anything): but—and here is the let-­out—there is no relationship whatever between the amount of information that structures can carry and how unstable these structures are. It all depends on the particulars of how the information in them is being carried. A structure that is only a minute amount less stable than the ideal may very well hold vast amounts of information. The arrangements of letters in this book, for example, or the sequences of units in your DNA molecules: these hardly affect at all the stabilities of the structures that hold them. (91)

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Figure 8.8. Dom Sylvestre, “great cultural medical pekinese / protect steve,” 1969, typed page (carbon), 20.4 x 22.2 cm; courtesy of Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry.

While Cairn-­Smith’s theories have been discredited by mainstream scientists, this conflation of Simondon’s notion of crystals “individualizing” within a milieu of liquid solution and early life-­forms emerging from the repeated patterns of information on a slab of clay suggest an interpretation of Crys­ tallography that is far from the common anti-­humanist one that Bök himself might promote. It suggests that this elaborate game with letters, this conjuring of the technical object out of a rich, untapped chaos, is the very act of individuation itself, of connecting the self or spirit to the “long view” that is equal parts that of the infinite and that of soul. Even purer examples of such emergence—and perhaps the ultimate response to Kraus’s concerns about the grid—are Dom Sylvester Houédard’s typewriter poems, for example “great cultural medical Pekinese / protect steve” (see fig. 8.8), which use the basic typographical gramme to illustrate, if not instantiate, a most primitive form of space and volume perception. Hyper-­Oulipian works prem­ised on

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the recombination of a limited number of objects thus prove, not the ultimate solipsism of human creativity, but the transindividuation, and hence collective memory, possible in even the most esoteric acts—­“Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script,” Bök, or the letters themselves, bark in Eunoia—so long as they are pursued with fidelity. While it might seem nihilistic to believe that the only way humans can “connect” is on this granular, preindividuated, even pre-­semiotic level, nonetheless the possibility for the truly novel is retained.

Appendix “Objects” in Programming and Philosophy

Lyric poems can seem to aspire to be functional objects, but as different, or divorced, from such literary objects as the news article, legal bill, speech, and essay as the programmed object is divorced from linear programming. This homology—of the poem-­as-­function with the programming object— might seem, at first, extravagant; nonetheless, as my own thinking on poetry has been undoubtedly impacted by my own experience as a programmer, I’d like to tease out some of the implications of this argument. The first object-­oriented programming language, Simula, was developed in Norway from 1962–1967 by Ole-­Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard and was initially designed as a language for discrete event simulation, that is, the simulation of the activities of a sys­tem based not on a “command center” that controls different elements but with the elements granted some degree of autonomy, or as Nygaard stated: “[W]here the flow may be thought of as being composed of discrete units demanding service at discrete service elements, and entering and leaving the elements at definite moments of time. Examples of such systems are ticket counter systems, production lines, production in development programs, neuron systems, and concurrent processing of programs on computers” (Holmevik 3). Some confusion has been created by the dubbing of Graham Harman’s particular brand of philosophy as “object-­oriented ontology” due to the proximity of the phrase to “object-­ oriented programming,” which generally denotes the range of programming language (there are several, in­clud­ing C++ and Java) that descended from Simula. Putting off the specifics of this debate for the moment, the ontological argument for the virtue of the object-­oriented programming model

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can be based on a reductive view of what constitutes an object—actor, agent, unit, or whatever other term it might go under—in the world: “In essence, most, if not all, computer programming consists of describing some aspect of the real world in a way that allows the computer to mimic it. From this observation one can deduce that useful concepts for describing programs would be those that are well suited to capture the essence of real-­world objects. In the Simula language, this was done by a construct that encapsulated the state of an object through a set of variables, its relation to other objects through a set of pointers, and their actions and interactions through methods that were considered to be internal to the objects themselves” (Tveito, Brua­ set, and Lysne 115). The key issue is that, though there are linear elements to any object-­oriented program, most importantly the main loop where a series of commands are executed one after another, over and over again, the substance of the program resides in the activities of objects with three central qualities: a state (imagine, for an organism, the state of “hungry” or “not hungry”), a relation to other objects through pointers (this organism can see another organism, a tree, etc.) and actions and interactions through “internal” methods (this organism moves away from or closer to another organism, not because a “central command,” a god or super-­being, orders it but because “instincts” demand). These sorts of interactions between objects are not caused, naturally, by them bumping into each other, but are premised on the sending and receiving of messages between them that alter the state of the receiving object and, in turn, prompt the object to send its own messages. A program can, in general, be broken into two basic parts, the code and the data, though this clean division or dualism is troubled in object-­oriented languages, as objects themselves can constitute a form of data. But conventionally (at least with the loose terminology of new media studies) the term “algorithm” is used with vari­ous degrees of accuracy to denote common methods such as mathematical processes, conditional loops (that evaluate the variables and redirect the program), calls for input (such as from a keyboard, joystick, or sensor), vari­ous forms of output (moving or changing things on a screen, moving a robot arm), and functions (which group a series of these processes together and which can be called upon from anywhere in the program). Data is something like the “content” of code, just as “Bob eats a banana” is the “content” of the abstract shape noun-­verb-­article-­ noun. Objects can contain both code and data—some data it keeps to itself and never changes, other bits can be changed through interactions with other objects. Like the main loop, objects contain within themselves processes that have to be executed linearly over the course of a program’s execution, so that rather than having a programmer retype (or cut-­and-­paste)

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a bit of code into every point in the program where it is needed, the programmer could instead just call a function or object. If I were not using an object-­oriented language, programming Pac Man would entail writing new (if duplicate) code for each bad guy, or ghost, and having its progress evaluated in another part of the code. In any object-­oriented language, however, the programmer would create a PacManGhost object that contains information about the ghost’s position on the screen, what it looks like, what state it is in (toxic or edible), which direction it is moving and how fast, how it relates to other elements on the screen (such as a wall), and whatever AI components it contains that determines where it will choose to head in the maze. Given that Pac Man ghosts seems to increase in intelligence as the game progresses, the ghost object will contain a variable denoting its general IQ, ranging from mindlessly wandering like a zombie to bloodhound hot on the trail. Adding a new ghost to the game would entail simply instantiating a new PacManGhost object. Beyond the essential qualities of having states, relations, and actions/ reactions, objects also share three general characteristics concerning their genesis: encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance. Encapsulation has already been described—it is the grouping of code, variables, and functions (or calls to functions) in a single object. Different elements within an object can be set to pub­lic or private. Public elements are visible to elements of code from outside the object and can even be changed from outside of the object—so, for example, I could have my ghost be controlled from code outside of the object (a part of the program that evaluates where the ghosts are and changes their positions) but most likely would do it from within (parts within the object that grant it a bit of sovereignty or self-­determination). Private elements are not visible or changeable from outside of the object, which is really helpful since it is quite easy to reuse variable names and functions, call them from elsewhere in a program and have them accidentally make a change to some feature of an object. If I were to render this in the biological terms above: I could have a hairstylist cut and color my hair (changing my feature through pub­lic variables) but the hairstylist couldn’t change my feelings for my mother, the regrettable things I did in my youth, or whether I prefer salmon to chicken, all of which are private to the degree that they are properties that cannot directly be changed externally. Polymorphism is a bit more complex, but in general, it can be described under the idea of “one interface, many methods,” in that it denotes that you can use a single object for several different types of functions depending on the nature of the data. You could, for example, have an object whose data is largely textual, and use the same object (if not all of the same methods within the object) for data that is numerical. Inheritance is the most inter-

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esting of these characteristics, as it allows you to create objects out of objects. So, for example, in our Pac Man game above, I could create a general Pac Man character object which has many features—its general height and width dimensions, its response to collision with walls, its relationship to the wafers that litter the maze, its maximum speed, etc.—and create another object, perhaps a sub-­object, that inherits these features from the Pac Man character object but also adds new ones. In formal logic, one can understand this as establishing hierarchies based on statements of truth: “All food is ­edible,” “All fruits are food,” “All apples are fruit,” “All red apples are apples,” so therefore, “All red apples are edible.” In this case, “red apples” has inherited the property “edible” from several elements back in the chain, not to mention the properties of being food, fruit, and an apple. In object-­oriented terminology, the object “food” would be considered the base class—­containing the property of being edible—and the object “fruit” a derived class, inheriting the property “edible” but adding new features (such as “class having seeds”). The derived class “fruit” then becomes the base class of a new derived class, called “apple.” Here is a basic bit of code in C++ that defines an object using the command “class” called road_vehicle. class road_vehicle { int wheels; int passengers; public: void set_wheels(int num) { wheels = num;} int get_wheels() { return wheels; } void set_pass(int num) { passengers = num; } int get_pass() { return passengers; } };

This code makes it possible for the program to instantiate an infinite num­ ber of the road_vehicle object. If I just wanted to create three road vehicles, one for Ben, Carla, and Bill, I could write: road_vehicle BensCar, CarlasCar, BillsCar;

This would create three road_vehicle objects with three very idiosyncratic names. If I wanted to create 100 of these new objects, I would create a loop that ran from 1 to 100 (actually, 0 to 99) that had a line in it which created the new object, but which also named the new object—Car0, Car1,

“Objects” in Programming and Philosophy / 303

Car2—since it would be quite tedious to come up with 100 new names and it doesn’t utilize the greatest strength of objects, which is that they can be created “on the fly.” Evaluating a large array of objects with idiosyncratic names would also prove difficult; with an automatic naming convention, I could create another loop that merely counted from 1 to 100 and used that to evaluate each object in sequence. In our object above, road_vehicle contains two private variables, wheels and passengers, which are distinct from any other wheels or passengers being used in the program (in­clud­ing by other road_vehicle objects). At this point, neither wheels nor passengers are defined and so lack values; these are added through the methods in the pub­lic section of the object. I can give this object four wheels by passing a value through its set_wheels method, in­clud­ing a number between the parentheses, for example: RoadVehicle1. set_wheels(4). Similarly, I can pass a value through the set_pass method: RoadVehicle1.set_pass(3). Later, I can retrieve this information by using the get_wheels and get_pass methods (“return” merely tells the object to return a value when it is called). This is important because at some point during my program the vehicle could lose a wheel, acquire a new passenger, and so forth. I could then create a subclass from this class; in this example, I create a new class called truck, which is a subclass of road_vehicle, and create a new value, cargo, that is unique to it: class truck: pub­ lic road_vehicle { int cargo; public: void set_cargo(int size) { cargo = size; } int get_cargo() { return cargo; } };

The object truck now has all of the properties that are associated with the class road_vehicle with the addition of the cargo variable. To put 20 new trucks into our imaginary video game, I could create a loop that instantiated 20 truck objects and named them Truck0, Truck1, Truck2, and so forth (in this case, I create the name first, then create the new truck object). for (x = 0; x++; while x < 20); string NewName = “Truck” + x; truck NewName; }

{

304 / Appendix

This loop creates a variable x with the value of 0. The ++ sign denotes that 1 should be added to x with each iteration of the loop (everything between the { } symbols). The while command evaluates whether x is less than 20. If x is still less than zero, it creates a new name—“string” denotes a variable made up of text—composed of the string “Truck” followed by the value of x. If, for some reason, I wanted all of these new trucks to have 8 wheels, 2 passengers, and 50 units of cargo when they are created, I could add the following lines in the loop that will pass values through set_wheels and set_ pass (methods of the origi­nal road_vehicles class) and set_cargo (method of the truck class): NewName.set_wheels(8); NewName.set_pass(2); NewName.set_cargo(50); Most likely, though, I wouldn’t create a series of new objects and give them the exact same values for these variables, unless I wanted a game full of clone trucks with the exact same properties and behaviors. I could, instead, randomize the values of each in­di­vidual new truck. To get a random number back from a computer, one would write something like x = random(10), which would define x with an integer from 0 to 9; if I wanted to make sure that x was never equal to 0, one would write x = random(10) + 1 which would give me a value from 1 to 10. I can randomize the values of wheels, passengers, and cargo without the intermediary variable x by inserting the randomization code in the parentheses used to pass variables to the object. For example: NewName.set_wheels((random(4)+2)*2); generates a number from 0 to 3, adds 2, multiplies this by 2 to get trucks with 4 to 10 wheels, while: NewName.set_passengers(random(2)+1); creates 1 or 2 passengers, and: NewName.set_cargo(random(20)+30); gives the truck between 20 and 50 units of cargo. (We could create other variables to denote what these units are—pounds, gallons, stacks, etc.—and what materials were being transported—logs, water, hay, etc.) When objects contain some element of randomization while also having strict codes for its relations to other objects, they can, in a visual simulation,

“Objects” in Programming and Philosophy / 305

exhibit emergent properties—that is, produce patterns that are, in a sense, epiphenomenal over or above the in­di­vidual objects. The search for artificial “thought” is of­ten premised on the hope that thinking will be epiphe­ nomenal in a properly simulated neural network (the premise behind the “Chinese Nation” thought experiment). Simulations of birds or fish “swarming” or “flocking” involve objects with methods denoting its relationship to other objects—to avoid them, follow them, collide with them, move adjacently to them, and so forth—as well as to changes in the state of the visualization, such as a change in wind speed or a shift in gravity, which themselves have bits of randomization thrown in to keep things interesting. Other popu­lar examples of “emergent” behavior include the vari­ous iterations of the Sims (in which factories, parks, populations, weather, and economic transactions are all objects) and films that depict large masses of beings— armies of Orcs in the opening sequence of Lord of the Rings, or the crew of haute bourgeois on the decks of the Titanic—each having shared characteristics (how the flesh conforms to a skeleton, general range of skin tones, minimum and maximum speeds, how far the arm can swing, and so forth) and many distinct characteristics (size, musculature, weapon, clothing, and so forth). In the future, self-­driving cars, once they become ubiquitous, will also be characterized as having emergent properties. Computer “objects” cannot bear many of the features that Harman associates with objects, such as their withdrawal from relation and, in his theory of “vicarious causation,” their relating to each other only as “caricatures.” Programming objects are by definition relational, otherwise they would just be bits of code executed in a linear fashion along with other lines of codes (they would not have internal properties, either, as they would have no internal variables, no state). Objects relate to each other through methods that are coded to the standards of a particular shared language (you can’t drop an object written in Java into a C++ program), and so could not be “caricatures,” even if these methods don’t exhaust the internal properties of the object. Harman’s “fourfold” or “quadruple” object (the details of which I will forego for now) argues that space and time are constituted by the very tensions an object has, not just with other objects, but also with itself: When the real object lies concealed behind any of the qualities that it manifests to any relation, this is what we mean by space. For space is simultaneously the locus of both relation and non-­relation. Things make contact in space, but space also has distinct regions in which things can hide from each other . . . The difference between such unified objects and their transient surface fluctuations is exactly what we mean by time. Time is not just

306 / Appendix

change, but change of that which endures; otherwise, there would be a mere rhapsody of experience. Time is the tension between intentional objects and the accidental, specific, changing ways in which they are manifest. (“Intentional Objects for Non-­Humans” 10–11) Computer objects can’t produce intentional objects in the way that Harman (adapting a concept from Husserl) believes, partly because programs don’t exist in space or time, and so cannot be constituent of space (though, as I argue elsewhere, they can be constituent of what is colloquially known as “cyberspace”). Objects also don’t have that tension between real and sensual qualities—what can actually be sensed of an object, except perhaps its structural beauties by the programmer reading or writing it?—that Harman contends, at his most speculative, is responsible for time. Harman’s most polemical writings concerning the philosophy of Bruno Latour, an extension of the general speculative realist argument against post-­Kantian subject-­centered philosophies (not to mention philosophies that privilege the social constructedness of identity and other phenomena), argue against the understanding of objects as merely the sum of their relations, whereas it’s pretty clear that computer objects are nearly all about relations, since even their “molten cores”—the elements that are denoted as private—are of­ten given access to the outside through pub­lic methods. Computer objects share some features of the Leibnizean monad, which is to say that they are autonomous elements that are nonetheless limited by, and fully available to, a “god,” in this case the architecture of the computer language itself. No object can do something that is not defined in the protocol of the programming language (it will most likely draw up an error if it tries), and so the programming language (or maybe the motherboard) orchestrates the behavior of objects by merely being the ground from which possibilities can emerge. But unlike monads, objects do seem to have “windows” in that they are directly transformed by behaviors outside of them, and they petition the program for more data about elements in the environment (perhaps its milieu), such as other objects and the state of certain variables, to determine what it will do next. The Platonic duality between the ideal or essential object and its vari­ous manifestations in the world—the binary of Being and Appearance (or the ontological and the ontic)—seems to be encoded in the very idea of the instantiation of a new object based on an otherwise non-­sensible model. That is, any vision of an object on the screen is an instantiation based on a prior class definition; the class definition itself never produces output for the cave of the screen. And yet, every object created from a definition is a perfect replica, not an artifact after the Fall, and every object definition can include,

“Objects” in Programming and Philosophy / 307

within it, the essential features of another object (the initial class is included in every following subclass), and hence a relation obtains even between non-­ instantiated objects, which is not something that ideal forms do. This fact of inheritance, in fact, suggests Deleuze’s two key concepts, repetition and difference, and all that entails, which perhaps explains the reception of his philosophy among early theorists of computer and networked culture. However, there are some features of Harman’s definition of the object that are of some interest when considering what I would call the ontological status of an algorithm. Harman argues, in The Quadruple Object and elsewhere, that objects can exist for however long or short a time, at whatever size, regardless of whether that object makes a substantial alteration in “reality,” and certainly regardless of whether a human perceives such a change. Harman’s philosophy suggests a level of granularity to the understanding of objects that begs to include not merely computer objects, but in­di­vidual lines of code. Given that programming clearly makes substantial changes in the human perceptual field, it doesn’t seem quite right to exclude a computer object from the real simply because no one can attribute a reality effect to a particular lines of code. Computer objects also bear an of­ten overlooked relationship to the physical structure of the computer itself—programs can heat up a computer, crash it, run very slowly on it, and deny it access to the use of other objects due to limited memory, RAM, and CPU resources; the computer “bug”—essentially, a failed object—was (proverbially) so-­named because a fly had gotten into the tubing of an early computer. Programs extend beyond the ontological scope of formal languages (and, naturally, mathematics) but nearly always have avenues both for input and output; they might never represent an outside reality or a “state of affairs,” but always represent an internal reality, their own “state of affairs” (which is why they were initially dubbed universal Turing machines: it is always possible that they exploit whatever it is that is possible within them by making changes in their states). Naturally, several programs have even acquired names, whether they are official, such as that of the Windows operating systems and the StuxNet virus, or nicknames premised on their very real consequences in the world. Even elements of computer programs that do not exist seem to have some sort of ontological status—a hole in the defenses of a cloud storage system, for example, that is exploited for vari­ous “leaks” on the internet. There is no question that a computer program as a whole can be called an “object,” of course, but the “object” in “object-­oriented programming” contains several features that seem to resist any easy binary between the relation and the object, the ideal and substance, the free and the predetermined. In fact, the object—and not all of code—sits squarely in the field of technics

308 / Appendix

as Simon­don describes, as the very concepts behind the computer object—­ encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance—are the features that Simon­ don attributes to the technical element. An object is something whose parts perform more than one function, they can in turn be parts of another object, and they seem to trace their own path—a third order between the inanimate and life—that draws from inner necessities (the “preindividual”) and a relationship to a milieu. Many objects, like many functions, are not developed in a flowchart or spreadsheet prior to programming but emerge during the programming when enough redundancy has appeared in a program to necessitate the creation of a class. One could set out, for example, programming Pac Man by only conceiving of a ghost object and a single instance of a Pac Man object, but discover that the more efficient solution is to create a dominant object—the “character” object described above— given that Pac Man and ghosts share many characteristics. This is the creative aspect of programming: observing the unfolding of code in the form of seductive economies that necessitate the creation of objects. The key issue is that objects have non-­meaningful frames—their binding—which gives a secure space for the variable elements of a program—the data—which is in­violable (one can’t change the structure of an object in run-­time, just at most ignore those parts not needed), much like a grammar is inviolable (if one wishes grammaticality).

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Anthologies like Ameri­can Hybrid (2009), edited by David St. John and Cole Swenson, suggest that lyricism—characterized primarily by its subjectivity, its attention to the fleetingness of time, and poetic form’s ability to capture and convey perception—has had a rapprochement with forms of writing commonly associated with the “avant-­garde,” characterized mostly by its love of fragments. Swenson notes that the “two-­camp model” (xvii) is an anachronism, and that hybrid poems “of­ten honor the avant-­garde mandate to renew the forms and expand the boundaries of poetry . . . while also remaining committed to the emotional spectra of lived experience,” (xxi) which she notes is similar to the types of poetry Stephen Burt termed “elliptical” (Burt 1998). While any argument for the newness of “hybrid” poetry would have to be bracketed—only poets who had already published three books were considered for the collection and many included were, indeed, older than the first generation of Language poets—the anthology, with the imprimatur of Norton, suggested something of a “moment.” 2. In What Was Af­ri­can Ameri­can Literature? Warren claims that Af­ri­can Ameri­ can literature experienced something like an ontological shift, what he calls a necessary lack of “coherence,” after the “legal demise of Jim Crow” (2) as black writers were no longer writing “prospectively” for a time when arguments for the virtues of black creativity had to be made, but were now more or less writing for “now.” By expanding the field of Af­ri­can Ameri­can literature to something akin to pan-­ African literature, the paradigmatic quality of the US legal sys­tem is put in brackets. Gesturing toward the “hyperobject” of diasporic culture rather than representing a “minority” suggests a turn of the gaze away from those-­who-­would-­confirm in the United States toward a different type of prospecting. Warren’s metaphysics seems

310 / Notes to Pages 49–123

to grant a greater agency to societal invisibles rather than my own, which are, in a sense, merely formal.

Chapter 2 1. The full run of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, in­clud­ing the issue of Open Letter, is available at Eclipse, http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/LANGUAGE/language.html. 2. This book, published in France in 1958, has not yet been published in English, though drafts of a translation of about two-­thirds of it are available online. The initial translation was made by Ninian Mellamphy in 1980 and revised in 2010 by N ­ inian Mellamphy, Dan Mellamphy, and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy “for the love of Gilbert Simondon.” All citations unless otherwise noted are taken from this translation.

Chapter 3 1. This is also a key term in Badiou’s philosophy, but in Badiou’s case it is fidelity to the event, and not to this transin­di­vidual long circuit, though one could attempt a reconciliation of the two as an event could generally be described as creating a “community”—this is central to Badiou’s “communist hypothesis”—and could have occurred centuries ago, for instance, the “event” of Christ. 2. This review got Coleman into a lot of trouble with writers in the Af­ri­can Ameri­can literary community. Her response was a long op-­ed for The Nation in which she offered a rich alternative history of the black tradition, as well as dissection of the problematics of power in a world characterized, at least partly, by awards committees and writer’s grants. Significantly, the column ends with a plea to counter the general air of surveillance that was attributable, at the time, to such laws as the Patriot Act, but which could be generalized as adhering to digital culture as a whole: “In our post-­9/11 America, where unwarranted suspicions and the fear of terrorism threaten to overwhelm long-­coveted in­di­vidual free­doms, a book review seems rather insignificant—until the twin specters of censorship and oppression are raised. What has made our nation great, despite its tortuous history steeped in slavery, are those who have persisted in honoring those free­doms, starting with the Constitution and its amendments. It is this striving toward making those free­doms available to every citizen, regardless of race, creed, color, gender or origin, that makes the rest of the insanity tolerable. It is what allows me to voice my opinion, be it praise song or dissent, no matter who disagrees” (“Book Reviewing, Af­ri­can-­Ameri­can Style”). “Honoring those free­doms” includes, to my mind, testing periodically, even without cause or necessity, whether these free­doms still exist. 3. They co-­authored a book, The Love Project: A Marriage Made in Poetry, which was published by Red Hen Press in 2014.

Chapter 4 1. Now a collector’s item, the font is far too expensive for me to purchase. This text is transcribed from an image of the book Chan published, The Essential and In­

Notes to Pages 124–133 / 311

complete Sade for Sade’s Sake, containing drawings, notes, and other materials associated with the larger multimedia project that included gallery projections, works on canvas, and the font. 2. But Chan’s fonts are not exercises in the abject: his body of work wavers between what can seem very normative and more utopian, if idiosyncratic, ideals in animations such as Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization (2000–2003) that employ imagery and ideas from De Sade, Charles Fourier, and Henry Darger. 3. Eunoia, the book, has several poems outside of “Eunoia” itself—a remainder that suggests the very pointless expenditure of the paragraph above—that exhausts all the words that have no vowels but the letter “y”—it starts “syzygy pyx / gyp / gypsy / pygmy gyms”—and an homage to the letter “W” dedicated to George Perec, the Oulipian master whom Bök seems compelled to excel. Exploring a remainder to even this remainder, Icelandic poet Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, recognizing that there was no possibility to do a chapter with umlauted vowels in English, composed an homage to Bök using Icelandic words that only use the vowel “ö” called “Höpöhöpö Böks”—“The höpöhöpö of Bök”—which can be viewed on YouTube. 4. The term “outsider art” was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 to help describe the painting of Jean Dubuffet, who himself was deeply interested in the art found in insane asylums. Outsider artists can, generally, be defined as those creators of visual art who have, for whatever reasons—class, geography, race, psychological disposition, or a complex admixture of these and other elements—have not attended art school or had mentors, have not sought out gallery representation, and have of­ten maintained something of a “primitive” style that—following on the coattails of the Modernist interest in Af­ri­can art, children’s art, “naïve” art, and the art of the insane—has gained the attention of the art world. Among the more well-­ known “outsider” artists are Howard Finster, creator of countless paintings and his rural Georgian enclave, Paradise Gardens (and who eventually gained fame as the creator of album covers for R.E.M and Talking Heads); Bill Traylor, who was born into slavery, and mostly practiced his art on the streets of Ala­bama; and Simon ­Rodia, who from 1921–1954 created the monumental Watts Towers in Los Angeles— organic, aspiring to the sky, like a poor man’s Sagrada Familia—a project he abandoned completely by moving north once he thought it was finished. Perhaps the preeminent “outsider” artist is Henry Darger, creator of the huge illustrated novel The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-­Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which he worked on for sixty or so years in vari­ous cramped rooms in Chicago while working as a janitor. Famously, the visual language of this “novel” is almost entirely taken from newspapers and coloring books, and of­ten depicts the Vivian Girls as having penises, the speculation being that Darger himself was confused about female human anatomy. 5. Likewise, practices of homophonic translation in such works as Zukofsky’s Catullus and David Melnick’s Men in Aida (Book One of Homer’s Iliad) are distinctive for being both purposeful and systematic and yet result in a pure production of deterritorialized language, describing a “plane of immanence” behind, or above, the text.

312 / Notes to Pages 134–153

6. Alice Becker-­Ho writes: “This language is not simply discreet and defensive. It theorizes what is about to be done: it already is a project. It never talks for the sake of talking. For those who can understand this language, every aspect of it carries the permanent confirmation of their vision of the world. Slang is not a mere specialized jargon, nor is it a language grafted on to conventional speech. It is precisely the manifestation . . . of an outlook exclusive to the so-­called dangerous classes . . . [T]he dangerous classes enjoy the superiority over ordinary people of having created out of nothing a speech which is artificial in form, but not arbitrary, and in which the meaning of words is divorced from the sound and image commonly attached to meaning by those languages in current use” (“The Language of Those in the Know”). While hardly criminals, codeworkers did style themselves as mavericks who, nonetheless, enjoyed a certain privilege being on the margins. Though codework is never pornographic (at least in my experience), it seemed to offer a bridge not only between code and normative language, but between the writing of pub­lic authors and the obscene, pseudonymous purveyors of verbal smut with which the internet still teems. 7. Similar to Sugarplum in the unfettered free­dom it grants the algorithm is The Pornolizer, a website that “creates a replica of any other web site you choose, and inserts ‘dirty words’ and retard-­speak into whatever is written there. Primarily of interest to 13 year old boys, who can amuse themselves with it for many hours at a stretch, others may find it amusing for a moment or two, on occasion, or more likely just once” (“Pornolizer” 1). Created by a team of Central European programmers with little command of English (and the languages of several other variants they offered) who used a dated slang dictionary to populate their database, Pornolizer used a simple search-­and-­replace algorithm that preserved all of the graphics, links, and other functions of the site while transforming the text into phrases. A recent story in the pornolized New York Times reports: “The thrusting meeting in Singapore between Xi ‘Mistress Anal’ Jinping, the jerking president of China, and Taiwan’s president Ma ‘Rugmuncher’ Ying-­jeou was an act both fingers described as a smacking breakthrough for the muff sniffs.” A similar venture, Shizzolator, which translated any web page into the language of Snoop Dogg, was equally offensive and only lasted on the web for a few days. 8. They proceed to offer four categories of language usage (following upon Henri Gobard) that offer differing degrees of deterritorialization and reterritorialization: vernacular (rural in origin, and territorial); vehicular (or bureaucratic) language and referential language (the language of sense and culture), both of which exhibit degrees of deterritorialization; and finally mythic language, which involved a “spiritual or religious reterritorialization”—which can be seen in Symbolist writing and which, as was noted, Kafka strove to avoid. These categories denote differing social and po­liti­cal qualities in the hierarchies of language usage, which they claim pure linguists such as Chomsky, who “compensated for his scientific apoliticism only by his courageous struggle against the war in Vietnam,” (24) traditionally ignore. 9. In a sense, they offer themselves as source texts for lyric formations, being

Notes to Pages 156–180 / 313

“notes” for poems in the manner that Whitman’s writing was first received as a “mass of stupid filth,” an expression of “a degrading, beastly sensuality, that is fast rotting the healthy core of all the social virtues,” as Rufus Griswold wrote in an early review of Leaves of Grass. Outsider writing, like much conceptual writing, can seem Whitmanic in its hunger for the real, tearing the “door from their jambs” to admit all comers to the party, untidy and dissolute as they might be. 10. Though Conrad doesn’t make himself scarce, and is as omnipresent on the Internet as he is in the Philadelphia poetry scene, he doesn’t suffer from the self-­ stigmatization or self-­censure that the era of Facebook has inflicted. In this way, Conrad is like the video artist Ryan Trecartin, who himself employs marks of the “outsider” in his faux-­amateurish, speedy videos, all of which he makes available on YouTube and ubu.com. Wayne Koestenbaum writes of Trecartin that he is “unashamedly faggy. He digitally alters voices—pitch raised or lowered—to obscure gender  .  .  . ‘Ethnic’ talk-­idioms slide the speaker outside identity categories into spiky, gratifying hipness. Conversation succumbs to monologue: Everyone rants, or issues stinging declarations—diverse idiolects remixed into philosophical investigations” (“Situation Hacker”).

Chapter 5 1. In the formulation of Roman Jakobson, a dominant is the “focusing component of a work of art [that] rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components [and] guarantees the integrity of the structure” (751). McHale employs this concept to resist the tendency (especially in describing the “postmodern”) of employing “catalogues of features [which] beg important questions, such as the question of why these particular features should cluster in this particular way—in other words, the question of what sys­tem might underlie the catalogue—and the question of how in the course of literary history one sys­tem has given way to another” (7). 2. Works of conceptual or “uncreative” writing, as described by Kenneth Goldsmith, are texts composed by human authors behaving according to some pre-­ established set of rules. For example, Goldsmith produced his book Soliloquy (New York: Granary Books, 2001) by recording everything he said for an entire week and then transcribing it meticulously and publishing it as a book. For more examples of conceptual writing, refer to the anthologies Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (Chicago: North­west­ern University Press, 2011) and I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women, edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and ­Vanessa Place (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2012). 3. See Steve McCaffery, North of Intention: Critical Writings, 1973–1986 (New York: Roof Books, 2000). 4. Images from the several editions of A Humument can be found at http:// humument.com/. 5. See Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

314 / Notes to Pages 188–201

6. In contrast, Turkle’s “touch of the infinite” is something only the experienced player, the member of the meritocracy of “hardcore players,” and not the mere counter of feet can ever experience, and is key to any understanding of the aesthetics of algorithmic, or generative, art, in which all players—viewers, inter-­actors—are already members of this elite. Any user of generative art—a good basic example would be Camille Utterback’s interactive abstract digital painting “Untitled 5” (2004)—has some access to this “infinite”; it is a strong component of the pleasure these pieces offer, like a pet cat who is always ready to be lifted and cuddled. Utterback’s website describes “Untitled 5” in the following way: “The goal of these works is to create an aesthetic sys­tem which responds fluidly and intriguingly to physical movement in the exhibit space. The installations respond to their environment via input from an overhead video camera. Custom video tracking and drawing software outputs a changing wall projection in response to the activities in the space. The existence, positions, and behaviors of vari­ous parts of the projected image depend entirely on people’s presence and movement in the exhibit area.” But much interactive art lacks the very elements that bring us to the aforementioned ecstasies, perhaps because generative art designers deem game play as hopelessly trivial and hence detrimental to a work’s status as “art.” In this light, much interactive generative art, as well as much non-­teleological interactive literature, can be said to lack a central component that video games always contain: the assignment of a task. For this reason, I refer to certain aesthetically satisfying video games such as Rez (Sega, 2001) as task-­ based interactive art. Rez seems to thwart the principles of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s theory of “flow,” at least as it applies to video games; resting between something like Utterbeck’s interactive art and high intensity video game, Rez is the closest approximation to video game as mental furniture, a game you could play even without paying attention, but nonetheless maintain the pulse of consciousness, and investment in the passing of time—a video game version of Tan Lin’s “blip soak.” One can get better at Rez, but its pleasures are, like Locke’s feet, available to all.

Chapter 6 1. Imagining Language, edited by Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery, is a sourcebook for, among other things, utopian, ‘pataphysical, or otherwise simply alternative ways to think of written language systems. 2. Christian Bök concretizes the links between writing, programming, and biology with his ongoing “Xenotext experiment,” an attempt to inscribe a poem into the DNA of a bacterium that will, every time it reproduces, write the poem (and its opposite poem in the RNA strand) again and again, potentially forever. The challenge with this project is to write a poem that satisfied both the constraints of the genome and the standards of good writing. “The Xenotext is my nine-­year long attempt to create an example of ‘living poetry’ . . . I use a ‘chemical alphabet’ to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans—an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile mi-

Notes to Pages 201–225 / 315

lieus, in­clud­ing the vacuum of outer space). When translated into a gene and then integrated into the cell, my poem is going to constitute a set of instructions, all of which cause the organism to manufacture a viable, benign protein in response—a protein that, according to my origi­nal, chemical alphabet, is itself yet another text. I am, in effect, engineering a life-­form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem—one that can persist on the planet until the sun itself explodes” (“The Xenotext Works”). Echoes of Meillassoux’s arche-­fossil, Eugene Thacker’s catastrophism, and the recent interest in the anthropocene echo through these passages. More importantly, the poem takes part in the very élan vital of immanent creativity—a new line of animal, a new medium for poetry. 3. For instance, though it is true that there is not much representation of Asian Ameri­can culture or presence of Asian Ameri­can actors in Hollywood movie fare (at least on the level of, say, a Denzel Wash­ing­ton or Meryl Streep, whose names alone have “marquée value”), which suggests that there is an entrenched racism not just in the major production houses but in the Ameri­can pub­lic who pays them, there is a plethora of Asian Ameri­can representation on the internet or cable TV. This networking of major forms of communication—what Marshall McLuhan calls “participatory culture” and Lawrence Lessig calls “permissions culture”—allows an unbridled participation of Asian Ameri­cans without in any direct way rewriting the politics of representation by corporate media creators. For every Asian Ameri­ can YouTube comedy hit such as “Shit An Asian Dad Says” or Jimmy Wong’s funny response to Alexandra Wallace’s notorious “Asians in the Library” rant, there is the fame of William Hung, a talentless aspirant to Ameri­can Idol whose audition tape was played on the show (it also became a YouTube hit), or the relative lack of fame of Margaret Cho, the most visible Asian Ameri­can comedian whose show All Ameri­can Girl only lasted a season in 1994. While the “non-­space” of the internet and transmission-­based mainstream culture will continue to have a complex interaction (and there are, indeed, many signs of both artistic and po­liti­cal stardom in the Asian Ameri­can sphere), it is simply worth noting that it is highly indeterminate: cause-­and-­effect relationships, outside of obvious moments of scandal, are only uncovered with much research and theorizing. 4. Among the many powers granular synthesis imparts to the engineer is the ability to change the pitch of the sound without changing the duration; that is, whereas one once sped up the tape to change pitch (the Chipmunks voice one used to hear when speeding through, say, answering machine messages), algorithms now analyze and then “autotune” a voice to keep it in key (famously exploited on Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe”). This ability to subject thousands of sounds to algorithmic transformations (pitch alterations, arrangements, randomizations, and so forth) is analogical to the way an image filter (“beauty face,” for example, for flattering selfies) operates on an image. In this way, granular synthesis could be understood as a form of audio pointillism, though unlike with the case of George Seurat’s paintings, the grain of the sound would never be discernable “with the naked ear” unless the playback of the graintable were greatly slowed.

316 / Notes to Pages 225–245

5. Digital musicians had, of course, the work of generations of pioneers in bridging “noise” and “music,” such as Futurist Luigi Russolo’s “art of noises,” George Antheil’s scores for sirens and airplane propellers, and the electro-­acoustic compositions of Edgard Varèse, whom Cage thought an important forerunner to his own aesthetic of “sound as sound,” writing: “That [Varèse] fathered forth noise—that is to say, into twentieth-­century music—makes him more relevant to present musical necessity than even the Viennese masters” (84).

Chapter 7 1. Some of these concepts from phenomenology seem to be born out in forms of art that rely on the representation of objects and events, that is, of things as they exist in time and space, namely films and what is becoming its bête-­noire, video games. In conventional narrative film (not the “expanded cinema” of Gene Youngblood), “ground” relates to topography and Renaissance or three-­dimensional space, and includes the practice of creating an “establishing shot”—a long view that situates the actants, both humans and objects, in a unified space—or could denote the conventional notion, familiar from cognitive studies of visual art and even poetry and prose, of “fig­ure” and “ground,” the binary of that which is the object of focus and that which frames. The camera eye establishes ground in the perspective it chooses, the length of focus (imitating the eye, choosing which objects are sharply defined and which blurry) and in the framing of the shot (which Benjamin analyzes in the “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). In the field of video games, the “ground” is that which can’t be manipulated, perhaps merely the mise-­ en-­scène but never “ready-­to-­hand,” while everything else—characters, objects, even ­textual elements—­are playable and assigned specific values: good or bad (approach or avoid), or of numerical value as a power-­up, money, or bullets. This form of grounding extends to the controller itself as some sort of threshold between the visual image and the physi­cal motions of the players (responding, in turn, to the cognitive activities of physical body holding the controller); this threshold represents a form of contract between the game and the player, in a sense a formal grounding (rooted in binary language) like that noted in the first example of Wittgenstein above. This formal contract, along with the distinct boundaries of playable and non-­ playable elements, is nearly never broken in commercial video games. 2. Pound and his acolyte Louis Zukofsky extended their criti­cal projects into the creation of ludic anthologies—Zukofsky’s A Test of Poetry appeared in 1948—while poets Robert Kelly and Paris Leary performed a similar task in their joint anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965) which sought to place “experimental” and “traditional” recent Ameri­can poetry side to side to allow them to argue their own virtues free of editorial commentary. The anthology is seen as a form of what I have elsewhere termed a “ludic book,” contrary to the anthology as colonizing tool (as Edward Kamau Brathwaite describes Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in the “History of the Voice”) or some affirmation of the canon (Harold Bloom in the West­ern Canon). 3. Of course, the book cannot exert the same type of control over reading speed

Notes to Pages 250–268 / 317

that, say, a word-­film such as Young-­Hae Chang’s “Dakota” or Bob Brown’s “Readies” do, nor can it do more than encourage one to remember the situation of words and images over the course of pages, unlike a film which, due to persistence of vision, fools the viewer into believing several discrete images projected sequentially at a high speed represent the same object in time and space. 4. As I commissioned this work from Bergvall for the “slash ubu” series of PDFs, she opted to use a standard Ameri­can page size. 5. Brown gives some background to the image, which was based on a hand drawing of Wittgenstein: “G. H. von Wright, one of the editors of Wittgenstein’s posthumous Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, tells me (in a private communication) that the published drawing was provided by the editors, and was based on Wittgenstein’s own rough drawing in the ms. Von Wright agrees that both mistakes are in the published version. In Wittgenstein’s own (a photocopy of which von Wright kindly sent me) things are not so clear. Von Wright thinks one mistake is definite (the incorrect position of B) but that the fig­ure eight is correctly oriented. I’m less confident, and think that the artist who copied Wittgenstein’s rough picture could quite reasonably assume Wittgenstein intended the fig­ure eight oriented along the rod instead of horizontally” (138).

Chapter 8 1. Whatever the properties of this invention, it didn’t help Symbolism: “Little by little the counts of the indictment took shape. . . . Here are the three heads of this average Cerberus speaking in turn: One of the mouths says to us: Obscurity. Another says: Preciosity. And the third says: Sterility,” flipping off these haters with another rare, if precise, joke: “Sterile? But you should praise us for that. If we are sterile, there is certain to be a little less obscurity and preciosity in the world” (445). 2. “Codes typically serve three main purposes. They are used for communication, clarification, or obfuscation,” note Casey Reas, Chandler McWilliams, and LUST in their joint authored Form + Code. The body of Form + Code works somewhere between this world behind appearances—the “code” of DNA and the generally unreadable “morse code,” the algorithm and assembly language written in numbers, and even higher level programming languages like C++ and Max/MSP—and the plethora of visual expressions of code we are all increasingly familiar with: biomorphic architectural structures, computer fonts, video games, ambient and generative art works (such as “Daisy Bell,” a “massive undulating wall projection . . . composed of software models of poisonous flowers” [54]), Photoshop filters, CGI graphics (notably those imitating “swarms”), dynamically generated maps, inter­ active charts and graphics, and so forth. Text itself can serve as the image, either in the tradition of a “shaped poem” (John Hollander’s “Swan and Shadow” is a particularly beautiful one) or in the varieties of textual experiments in movie titles and advertisements. In these cases, the entities of “data” or “capta” are on too large a scale to map the transition from code to form, much as a tick towers over a virus (or, for that matter, the human body towers over that of the atom). The inability of the text

318 / Notes to Pages 270–291

to resurrect from its mathematization and quantification—such that it acquires humanistic value outside of the academy which overdetermines the acceptance of its meanings in the manner ideology does that of the photograph—can be addressed by a reimagining of the digital interface along these many lines of code Reas describes: communication, clarification, and obfuscation. 3. The origi­nal passage includes visual representations of the notations described, but as I can’t find a “Frege font,” I have to forgo this demonstration in favor of an illustration. 4. Adams devotes a chapter to the interaction of a nomogram to a NOEL (NOmographic-­ELectronic) computer, recounting fig­ures that, in the present, sound rather quaint: “For this computing technique, it has been fig­ured that before long for many relationships 10,000 solutions per sec­ond could be obtained with three fig­ure accuracy—a goal far below a theoretical limit of 50,000 solutions per sec­ond. Such rates would be useful, for instance, in solving systems of partial differential equations. For oppositely moving satellites traveling about 100 miles above the earth’s surface, a ten thousandth of a sec­ond can represent a relative displacement of a few feet so as to be useful in proximity problems. Present investigating rates are at about 500 solutions per sec­ond. Both graphical and nomographic techniques are used in conjunction with electronics” (173). 5. Shockwave was, prior to Flash, the standard plug-­in for multimedia websites in the late 1990s. Its development software, Director, utilized a simple scripting language called Lingo that was created in 1989 by John Henry Thompson, chief scientist at Macromedia until 2001. Notable for being one of the few well-­known Af­ri­can Ameri­can computer scientists and designers, he “developed a number of products, in­clud­ing: The VideoWorks Accelerator, VideoWorks II, MediaMaker, Action, and Macromedia Director” and now devotes his time (according to his personal website) to iPhone apps. Shockwave, and increasingly Flash, is no longer being supported by browsers (and doesn’t work at all on phones and tablets), so access to the New Digital Emblems might not be possible for readers of this book. 6. “Unbroken” is “corinthinian” in the origi­nal publication. 7. “Weathered” is “eroded” in the origi­nal publication 8. “Fossils” and “geodes” are singular in the origi­nal, while the final entry, concerning the colon, doesn’t exist as there were no colons in the origi­nal sequence. One appears in the revision. The line “Italics indicate geological seams of previous metals” doesn’t appear in the sec­ond edition. Italics in the first edition were used for non-­English words which, when retained, were simply not italicized in the sec­ ond edition. 9. Readers of Adorno will note a similarity with his essay on punctuation in which he notes that “an exclamation point looks like an index finger raised in warning,” “a question mark looks like a flashing light or the blink of an eye,” and “a colon, says Karl Kraus, opens its mouth wide: woe to the writer who does not fill it with something nourishing. Visually, the semicolon looks like a drooping moustache; I am even more aware of its gamey taste. With self-­satisfied peasant cunning, German

Note to Page 291 / 319

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Acconci, Vito: “autistic” practice, 133; conceptual poetics, 84; “The Margins on this paper are set” as recursive poem, 31–33, 32 Acker, Kathy, 124 Adamic language, 209 Adams, Douglas P., Nomography, 273, 318n4 Adobe Acrobat, 182 Adobe (now Macromedia): Flash, 212; Photoshop, 183; Shockwave, 281, 283– 84, 318n5 adoption and adaptation (Stiegler), 89– 90, 101, 104, 117 Adorno, Theodor W., 88, 135, 318n9 advent, concept of (Meillassoux), 169–70 a-­field, 11, 44–45 Af­ri­can Ameri­can literature, expansion of field, 309n2 Af­ri­can diaspora, hyperobject of, 36, 309n2 Aheui (programming language), 224 Aiken, Conrad, “Preludes For Memnon,” 25 AIM buddy images, 202 Akhmatova, Anna, 98 algorithmically-­produced texts, 70, 120– 21, 147, 162; programmable poetry, 133;

scale of, 162; Sugarplum, 134–35, 147; and transgressive forms of literature, 122–25 algorithmic art. See generative art algorithmic creativity, question of, 188 algorithmic culture, 205 algorithms: and break-­up of material ­singularities into discrete bits of information, 200; “infinite” play of in video games, 185–88; methods used to denote, 300; pure, 171; relationship with humans, 227; symbiotic relationship to data structures, 200; and transformation of sounds, 315n4 Allen, Donald, New Ameri­can Poets, 128 alllooksame.com (Suematsu), 202 Althusserian Marxism, 49 ambient art, 317 ambient poetics (Lin), 117, 144–50 Ameri­can Hybrid (St. John and Swenson), 309n1 Ames, Roger T., 217, 219 Andrews, Bruce, 49, 52, 54, 116; I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up, 100 Angelou, Maya: All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, 106–7; A Song Flung Up to Heaven, 107

334 / Index Antheil, George, 316n5 anthologies, 316n2 antimetabole, 162 Apex of the M, 17 Apollinaire, Guillaume, “Zone,” 99 Aquinas, 294 Arabic, written, transformational or morphological features, 214, 216 Arakawa, Shusaku, 237 Aristotle, 58, 68, 294 Arnheim, Rudolf, notion of perceptual forces, 21–22 Artaud, Antonin: concept of “Theatre of Cruelty,” 125; poems on the relation of the flesh to thought and God, 125–27 artificial intelligence (AI), 70, 301; Strong, 191 artificial intelligence thought experiments: the “Chinese Nation” (Ned Block), 192, 199, 227; the “Chinese Room Argument” (Searle), 191–93, 199, 203, 227 artificial memory, 87, 150 art nouveau, 193 Arts and Crafts movement, 194 ASCII (Ameri­can Standard Code for Information Interchange), 182–83 Ashbery, John, 3, 71, 92; “And Ut Pictora Poesis Is Her Name,” 26; “Europe,” 146; on Knowles, 131, 133; Other Tra­ ditions, 130–31; Tennis Court Oath, 36, 146; “They Dream Only of America,” 233; “Vetiver,” 109 Asian Ameri­can actors, representation of in media, 315n3 Asian Ameri­can poetry: Premonitions (anthology), 206–7; taxonomy of modes, 205–6 Asian and Asian Ameri­can artists, and others, projects of: esolangs, 221–24; fonts, 214–16; and hybrid language systems, 193, 204; ideograms, 208–10; instructions, 216–19; matrices, 205– 8; morphs, 210–11; networks, 211–13; Rhizome, 204–5; scores, 219–21. See also in­di­vidual artists Asian face/body: detachment from identity, 202; motif of facial inscrutability,

193, 203; use of as empty signifier, 191– 93, 198–99, 202, 204 Aubert, Danielle, 148 audio pointillism, 315n4 Austin, J. L., 281 “autistic” practice, 133 autonomous machine, 58 Bachelard, Gaston, 249 Badiou, Alain: Age of Poets, 43, 85; on Arthur Rimbaud, 8; on artists’ “passion for the real,” 129–30; on autonomous function of poem, 43; Being and Event, 85; The Communist Hy­ pothesis, 7, 310n2(Ch 3); The Concept of Model, 269; concept of the event, 43, 85–86, 284, 310n1(Ch 3); criticized as ­“Pythagorean,” 282; description of what happens in a poem, 7; discussion of Rimbaud’s method in Conditions, 8, 23–26; and essence of thought, 28; and fidelity, 116; Infinite Thought, 43, 92; and interruption, 24, 27; Logic of Worlds, 85; model theory, 269; and multiplicity of being, 24, 78, 284; ­Platonism, 255; on poems as evental, 7, 22; poetics of interruption, 9; on postmodern thinkers, 1; Rebirth of History, 7; and set theory, 8, 24, 92; and the transfinite, 8, 92; and the undecidable, 24, 43; and the void, 7, 25, 45, 284, 289 “bad Naturalization” (Forrest-­Thomson), 231–32, 234–35, 248–49 Baraka, Amiri, 114; Blues People, 37 Barendse, Jeroen, 317n2 Barthélémy, Jean-­Hugues, 68 Barthes, Roland, 121; and Asian face as semiotic system, 198–99, 202; and Asian writing systems, 197–98; Empire of Signs, 193, 198–99 Basalla, George: concept of novelty, 59; The Evolution of Technology, 58–59 Basic English, 269 Bataille, Georges, 126–27, 188 bathos, 26 Baudrillard, Jean, 125, 261 Beat poets, 128, 153 Bec, Louis, 2

Index / 335 Becker-­Ho, Alice, 134, 312n6 Beckett, Samuel: translations of his own works, 212; Watt, 133, 140, 158–59 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 130 Bell, Alexander Graham, sys­tem of “Visible Speech,” 196, 213 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 209; “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 316n1 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter, 56–57 Berardi, Franco “Bifo,” 88 Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, 201 Bergson, Henri, Laughter, 61, 164–65 Bergvall, Caroline: Éclat, 10, 249–54; ­poetic kinesis of digital version, 252; recreation of book in form of PDF, 250–54, 253, 317n4 Berke­ley, George, 167 Berlin, Isaiah, 85 Berners-­Lee, Tim, 119–20, 149 Bernstein, Charles, 8, 14, 49; “An ­Mosaic for a Convergence,” 144; argument against language as instrumental, 52; argument for mainstream ­writing as minority literature, 153; “Artifice of Absorption,” 54, 233–34; Con­ tent’s Dream, 19; and ideolectical writing, 153–54; “Lives of the Toll Takers,” 61; notion of a virtual America, 154– 55; numbered sections of different types of writing, 61–62; A Poetics, 55; ­“Poetics of the Americas,” 153–55, 226; “Shade,” 234 Berrigan, Ted, 71; Sonnets, 146 Berryman, John, 84 Bertin, Jacques: Semiology of Graphics, 277–80, 291; theory of image, 279– 80, 293 Bertrand, Aloysius, 130 Best, Stephen, 3 Best Ameri­can Poetry series, 129 Bey, Hakim (Peter Lamborn Wilson), 125 binaries: in an undecided state, 86; being/ appearance, 306; being/non-­being, 287; closed self/commodity, 49–50; “denaturalization of,” 250; fig­ure and ground, 316n1; formal, in poetry, 292; inside/outside, 296; marginal/mainstream, 201; nature/culture, 44, 56–

57, 118, 178, 250; and object-­oriented programming, 307; objects/events (or subject/predicate), 13–14, 27 “Bindigirl” (Murthy), 204–5 binding/binding problem, 20–21, 67, 69, 308 Bissett, Bill, 122, 131 Blade Runner, 102, 193, 203 Blake, William, 53 Blazek, Douglas, 129 Block, Ned, “Troubles with Functionalism,” 192, 199, 227 Bloom, Harold, 294, 316n2 Boing Boing (website), 159 Bök, Christian, 8; “After Language ­Poetry,” 70; Eunoia, 124, 160, 162, 165, 172–74, 288, 298, 311n3; lyric works, 18; ‘Pataphysics, 288–89; recursive paragraph and sentence structure in Eu­ noia, 172–73; “robopoetics,” 159, 273; Xenotext experiment, 314n2. See also Bök, Christian: Crystallography Bök, Christian: Crystallography, 8, 76, 288–98, 289, 318n9; and chiasmus, 290; and clinamen, 290, 294; and continuum between poetics of dia­ grams and constraint-­based reading, 288; “Diamonds” section, 290, 292–93; and exchange between poetry and science, 288; and individuation, 297; neo-­classical nature of work, 292; ‘pata­physics, 288, 294; relationship of ­poetry to “Royal” science, 290 Bolzano, Bernard, 236 Boone, Bruce, and commodity fetishism, 52–53, 56 “bouba/kiki effect” (Köhler), 213 Bourdieu, Pierre: concept of habitus, 60; Distinction, 54, 165 boxed vs. unboxed word, 193–94 bpNichol, 291 Bradley, Arthur, on Marx’s theory of technology, 58 brainfuck (programming language), ­221–22 Brathwaite, Edward Kamaou, 155, 316n2 Brazilian concrete poets, 6 Brecht, Bertolt, Verfremdung, 81

336 / Index Breeze, Mez, m[ez]ang.elle, 133–34 Breton, André, First Manifesto of Surreal­ ism, 94, 131 Bridge (journal), 205 Brito, Manuel, 148 Brown, Bob, “Readies,” 316n3 Brown, George Spencer, The Laws of Form, 272 Brown, James Robert, 258–59 Brown, Nathan, 293 Browning, Robert, The Ring and the Book, 177 Brown University creative writing program, 17 Brown v. Board of Education, 265 Buck v. Bell, 265 Bukowski, Charles, 129 Burning Man, 125 Burroughs, William, 124; Nova Trilogy, 125 Burt, Stephen, 309n1 Bush, George W., 101 caesura, 22 Cage, John, 169, 285; “Fontana Mix,” 269, 275; M, 219; “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham,” 10, 219–21, 220; and pharmakon, 86; sound as sound writing, 316n5 Caillois, Roger, Man, Play and Games, 163, 185 Cairns-­Smith, A. G., Seven Clues to the Mystery of Life, 296 Calder, Alexander, mobiles, 102 Canjie, 223–24 canons, 264, 316n2 Cantor, Georg, set theory, 167–69, 255, 259 Cardinal, Roger, 311n4 caricatures, 3–4, 178, 305 Carlyle, Thomas, 261 cartography, 278 catachresis, 4 Cayley, John: programmable poetry, 133; techniques of transliteral morphing and interliteral graphic morphing, 10, 211 Certeau, Michel de, 88 Cha, Theresa: Apparatus, 206; “Commentaire,” 206; Dictee, 206; murder

in 1982, 208; Spahr on, 116; targeting of cultural and po­liti­cal representation, 10 Chabot, Pascal, 59, 294 Chain (journal), 117 Chalmers, David, 48, 278 Chan, Charlie, 193 Chan, Paul, 214–16; Alternumerics, 123, 214; “The Black Panther,” 214–15; The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade’s Sake, 310n1(Ch 4); “The Future Must Be Sweet (after Charles Fourier)”, 214; Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization, 311n2; hybrid language systems, 10, 193; “Sade for Fonts Sake,” 123–24, 222, 310n1(Ch 4) Chang, Young-­Hae, 212. See also Young-­ Hae Chang Heavy Industries Chaucer, Geoffrey, “Man of Lawe,” 242 Chemical Brothers, 78 chiasmus, 162, 172, 290 Chicherin, A. N., Change of All, 196 Chinese BASIC (programming language), 223 Chinese ideogram. See ideogrammatic writing “Chinese Nation, The” or “The Chinese Gym” (Block), 192–93, 305 Cho, Margaret, 315n3 Cho, Peter: hybrid language systems, 193; interactive fonts, 213; “Letterscapes” and “Wordscapes,” 213; “Takeluma,” 213 Chomsky, Noam, 31, 36, 312n8 Clare, John, 130 clinamen, 290, 294 closed poetry: and page-­as-­field, 18; viewed as commodity, 8, 49–55, 67, 69, 90 close reading, 50 Clover, Joshua, 105 code, 280–81, 317n2 codework, 105, 133–35, 312n6 cognitive poetics, 10, 23, 235 cognitive processing, 21 Coleman, Wanda, 9; application of language of business and economy to

Index / 337 human values, 114; autobiographical elements in poems, 107–10, 112; Bath­ water Wine, 107, 110; “Canned Fury,” 109–10; “The Children,” 114; “Dreamwalk,” 107–8; “Essay on Language,” 114; “Hollywood Theology,” 114; linking of media to panoptic eye, 114; Mad Dog Black Lady, 107; Mercurochrome, 109–10, 113–14; and Nietzsche’s core human behaviors, 112; “No­vem­ber’s Song,” 108; planetary motif, 108–9; poetics of the swarm, 111–15; review of Angelou’s All God’s Children, 106– 7; review of Angelou’s A Song Flung Up to Heaven, 107, 110, 310n2(Ch 3); and the revolution, 85, 114–15; “The Ron Narrative Reconstructions,” 109; shared qualities with Rimbaud, 111, 114; “The Souled Out Generation,” 112–13; “Under My Desk,” 107; and Watts Rebellion, 111, 113; “Where I Live,” 113 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 261 color blindness, neoliberal discourse of, 202 Commedia (Dante), 84 Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP), 128–29 commodity fetishism (Marx), 51–54, 56 composite vs. montage (Manovich), 84, 146, 287 composition by field (Olson), 13, 18, 34, 45, 49 computer “bug,” 307 computer-­generated writing. See algorithmically-­produced texts computer programming: and conflict between alphabetic and ideogrammatic languages, 221–26; reduction of world to data structures and algorithms, 200. See also algorithmically-­ produced texts; algorithms; object-­ oriented programming; objects, computer computer visualization, and randomization, 268 Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), 130

conceptual writing, 33, 70, 74, 84, 117, 133, 137, 149, 155, 159, 180, 313n2 concretization, of technology (Simondon), 58, 61–63 Conrad, CA, 313n10; Deviant Propulsion, 155–56; “P for Interest in Waking,” 156 consciousness, and the real, 1–3, 69, 158 consisting (Stiegler), 92, 105, 219 constitutive rules (Suits), 164, 165 Controversy of Poets, A (Kelly and Leary), 316n2 Coolidge, Clark, Ing, 10, 230, 246–49 correlationism (Meillassoux), 1–2, 166, 188 correspondences: perception of, 279– 80; tables of, 10, 261; theme of in poetry, 261 Cramer, Florian, The Word Made Flesh, 280–81 Crane, Hart: as poet of suspension, 28– 30; “Voyages,” 29–30 Crapsey, Adelaide, 19 creation, ex nihilo and in situ, 219 Creeley, Robert, 138 Critical Arts Ensemble, 135 crystals, and physico-­chemical individuation (Simondon), 80, 294–95 Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály, 314n6 CSS, 120 Cubism, 263 Culler, Jonathan, 231 cultural capital, 54 Cummings, E. E., “r-­p-­o-­p-­h-­e-­s-­s-­a-­g-­r,” 10, 245–47, 254 Cunningham, Merce, Changes, 219 Cureton, Richard, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse, 20 cybernetic literature, 178 cyberpunk, 203 cyberspace, 306 Daalder, Joost, 19 Dadaism, 216, 219 Dadd, Richard, Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, 286–87 Dagentesh, Katie, 70 “Dagmar Chili” (Hobogrammathon), 9 Dahl, Ole-­Johan, 299 “Daisy Bell,” 317n2

338 / Index Damon, Maria, on the “outsider poet” in The Dark of the Street, 127–28, 152 Danielewski, Mark, 10; House of Leaves, 18, 160; and non-­normative data visualization, 181; Only Revolutions, 18, 160–61, 175–78, 176, 180 Darger, Henry, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-­ Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, 311n4 Darwin, Charles, 57–58 Dasein, 2, 87, 93, 198, 237, 250 data, as “content” of code, 300, 308 Daumal, René, 288 Davies, Kevin, 9, 85; and adoption and adaptation, 104; Comp., 99–106; The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, 100, 104–5; heteroglossia, 102; “Karnal Bunt,” 102; line-­by-­breath, 100; musicality of writing, 100; Pause Button, 99–100; social critique, 101; “Untitled Poem from the First Clinton Administration,” 104 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 262 Debord, Guy, and spectacle, 96 de Brosses, Charles, organic alphabet, 196, 213 deconstruction, 1, 72, 124, 291, 319 Deleuze, Gilles: deterritorialization, 14, 55, 74, 150; and essence of thought, 28; and infinite speed, 196; and plane of immanence, 9–10, 14, 72, 80, 86, 125, 257; and repetition and difference, 307. See also Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari); “What is a Minor Literature?” (Deleuze and Guattari); What Is Phi­ losophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) DeLillo, Don, 75 Derksen, Jeff, 100 Derrida, Jacques, 58, 121; and Asian writing systems, 197–98; and difference, 86, 238; and the gramme, 10, 225; language as pharmakon, 86; “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 9, 86–87 De Sade, Marquis, 122–24 Descartes, René, 2, 167

Deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari), 14, 55, 74, 150–51, 311n5, 312n8 Dewdney, Christopher, A Palaeozoic Ge­ ology of Lon­don Ontario, 122 diagrams: definition of, 269; Feynman diagram, 235, 238, 269; instrument in the form of, 261, 317n1; and Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, 9, 38–39; nomograms, 10–11, 80, 235–36, 269, 273–77; Olson and, 15–16, 106; theory of, 268– 80; Venn diagram, 27, 235, 269, 272; Wittgenstein’s theory of, 255–59 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 135 Dickinson, Emily, 53, 93, 99 digital art: in opposition to culture, 287; representation of blankness in, 285 digital composite, 84, 146–47 digital culture: and resurgence of lyric poetry, 17; and shift of identity studies from subject to object, 201–2 digital humanities, 8, 51, 140, 180–85; and mathematization of text, 181–83 digital media experimental writing, 74, 133 digital musicians, 316n5 digital racial formation, 201–2 digital technology, and infinite extension of conceptualizations, 184–85 diodes, 64–66, 65 DiPalma, Ray, Marquee, 225 discomposition, poetics of, 231, 240, 245 distant reading (Moretti), 183–84, 183–85 Divus, Andreas, 84 DNA, 200–201 d’Ocagne, Maurice, 273 dominant, concept of (Jakobson), 158–59, 166, 175, 313n10 Dorn, Ed, 16 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 266 Drucker, Johanna, 8, 266–68; “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” 267; and transformation of data into capta, 267–68 Dryer, Carl, Vampyr, 206 Dubuffet, Jean, 311n4 Duchamp, Marcel, 263; abject and transcendence, distance between, 189;

Index / 339 Anemic Cinema, 283; the “retinal,” 76; “3 Standard Stoppages,” 14, 196, 251 “duck-­rabbit” image, 77–78, 282 Duncan, Robert: The Opening of the Field, 13; use of translated and untranslated passages from a variety of literatures, 84 Dworkin, Craig: “Fact,” 161, 178–79; on Manson’s Adjunct, 137–38; No Me­ dium, 223, 285; Parse, 33; “Poetry Without Organs, 137–38, 148; “Tectonic Grammar,” 121, 179, 292 e-­books, 17 eco-­poetics, 178 Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form, 212 Electronic Disturbance, The (Critical Arts Ensemble), 135 elements, technical (Simondon), 60– 61, 64 Eliot, T. S., 7, 17, 35, 74, 113, 149 elliptical poetry (Burt), 309n1 emblem, Renaissance, 281–82, 282 Emblemata of Andrea Alciato, 282 em-­dashes, 11, 98, 162, 231, 235 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 261 Empire (Negri and Hardt), 99 encapsulation, 301, 308 endless loop, 79 enjambment, 42 ensemble, technical (Simondon), 60– 61, 67 environmental storytelling (Jenkins), 163–64 epiphenomenon, 67, 157, 289, 295, 305 ergodic works, 180, 277 esolangs, 221–24 essence: technical, 59, 67–68; of thought, 28 establishing shot, in films, 316n1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry), 78 eugenics, 201 event/evental: Badiou’s concept of, 43, 85–86, 284, 310n1(Ch 3); mathematics as, 255; and poetry, 7, 19, 22–23, 43– 44, 81

experimental writing: digital media, 74, 133; internet as liberated space for, 124–25; in postmodern era, 131, 174 (See also Language poets/poetry) experimental writing, new trends in: exhibits of, 170–80; and game structures, 163–65; and law of numbers, 159, 161, 170–71, 174, 178; literature of sets, 159, 161–62, 165–70, 174, 179; and non-­ meaningful aspects of language, 162; and Rabelaisian collapse of high/low distinctions, 171, 175; and recursion, 159, 162; and scale, 162, 169; and spaces (27th letter), 174; and subjectivity, 70, 159, 169, 177, 190 Facebook, 155, 201, 282, 313n10 Fagin, Larry, 131 Fall, The (band), 137 Faulkner, William, 158 Fenollosa, Ernest, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 208–9, 216 Feynman diagram, 235, 238, 269 field, the, 13–19; a-­field, 11, 44–45; composition by field, 13, 18, 34, 45, 49; page-­ as-­field, 13, 18–19 films, ground in, 316n1 “Finding Your Roots,” 201 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, Heroic Emblems, 282 Finster, Howard, 311n4 Fiore, Quentin, 245 Flarf poets, 70, 74, 149, 155 Flash morph, 211 Flood Editions, 17 Flusser, Vilém, 1–2, 44, 198 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 10; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 161; Tree of Codes, 18, 161, 179–81 formal grounding, 10, 235–36 Formalist poetics, and technicity, 57 formal languages, 270–72, 271; and abstract glyph, number, and concrete referent, 11, 254; and the model, 269; transformational rules, 272, 277 Form + Code (Reas, McWilliams, and Barendse), 317n2

340 / Index Forrest-­Thomson, Veronica: and “bad Naturalization,” 231–32, 234–35; and meaning as a “technical device,” 233–34; non-­meaningful elements of poem, 8, 231–32; revision of news leader using poetic conventions, 232– 33; theory of image complex in Poetic Artifice, 231–35 Foucault, Michel, 121, 290 “found” writing, 147 Fox, Hugh, The Living Underground, 128–29 Frankfurt School, 49, 88 free verse, 19 Frege, Gottlob, 4, 27, 47, 231; Begriffs­ schrift, or concept-­language, 8, 72, 228, 235, 254, 269, 270, 318n3; distrust of psychologism, 273 Freher, Dionysius Andreas: Paradoxa Emblemata, 285 Freud, Sigmund, 47 Fuentes, Carlos, 158 Fuller, Buckminster, 64, 83 Fu Manchu, 193, 203 Futurists: Asian elements in text art, 193; liberated word (parole in liberta), 193; unboxing of word through typography, 193–94 Gabor, Dennis, 224 Galloway, Alex, 8, 124; The Interface Ef­ fect, 80–81 games, 163–65; environmental storytelling, 163–64. See also video games Gates, Henry Louis, 201 Gauss PDF, 17 Gehry, Frank, 22 generative art, 314n6, 317n2 generative linguistics, 31 genetic ancestry testing, 200–201 Genette, Gerard, Thresholds, 81, 233 genotype and phenotype, 200–201 Germ, The (journal), 17 Gesamtkunstwerk, 6 Gestalt psychology, 257, 259 Ghost Dog, 203 Gibson, William, Neuromancer, 73, 203 Gide, André, 78

Gillespie, Abraham Lincoln, 155 Gillespie, William, 160, 173–75 Gins, Madeline, 237 Ginsberg, Allen, 93, 129 Glass, Philip, 162 Glitch works, 146, 225 Gobard, Henry, 312n8 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 151, 184 Goldberg, Rube, inventions of, 61–62, 64, 258; “Simple Way to Light a ­Cigar,” 61–62 Golding, Arthur, translation of Ovid, 243 Goldsmith, Kenneth: call for plagiarism, 149; compositional law of number, 170–72; immanent concept of language, 172; No. 111.2.7.93-­10.20.96, 159– 60, 170–72, 174; and pure algorithm, 171; Rabelaisian collapse of high/low distinctions, 171; Soliloquy, 313n2 Gondry, Michel, 78 Good Gay Poets, 131 grains (in digital sound processing), 225 grammar Nazis, 237 gramme, 10, 216, 297; defined, 225–26; in­ di­vidual as, 199 granularity, 10, 137, 155, 225, 307 granular synthesis: and algorithmic transformation of sounds, 315n4; in digital realm, 224–25 graphic design: basis of meaning in, 10, 240; grounding in, 10, 235–37; Pound’s assault on grounding element of in The ABC of Reading, 240–45, 244 graphics, semiology of, 277–80 graphomania, 125 graphs, 200, 264–65, 269, 276; “magic” of, 280 Gray, Thomas, 19 “great outdoors” (Meillassoux), 166–67, 169, 175, 190 grid, the (Krauss), 10, 263–64 grounding: in films, 316n1; formal, 10, 235–36; in graphic design, 10, 235– 37; legislative or symbolic, 10, 237– 38, 240; in nomograms, 235–36; phenomenological, 236–38; poetic, and event of poetry, 23; in video games, 316n1

Index / 341 Guattari, Félix, 135; deterritorialization, 14, 55, 74, 150; on infinite speed, 196; and plane of immanence, 9–10, 80, 86, 125, 257. See also Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari); “What is a Minor Literature?” (Deleuze and Guattari); What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) Guyotat, Pierre, Eden Eden Eden, 125 Gysin, Bryon, 133 habitus (Bourdieu), 60, 165 Hadron Collider, 184 Hanbe, 224 Hangul, 213, 216, 224, 226 Hanks, Tom, 161 Haraway, Donna, 250 Hardt, Michael, 99 Harman, Graham, 57, 70, 280; and allure, 2, 280; and intentional objects, 306; and Latour, 306; object-­oriented ontology, 2–3, 178, 296, 299; and objects as caricatures to one another, 3–4, 178, 305; The Quadruple Object, 56, 305–7; Quentin Meillassoux, 169; and super-­ object, 180; “The Road to Objects,” 178; Tool Being, 56; and vicarious causation, 2–3, 305; Weird Realism, 3–5 Harvey, Matthea, 18 Hayles, N. Katherine, 58, 227, 273, 278 Heidegger, Martin: on Friedrich Hölderlin, 8, 27–28; on poem as cognitively grounded and as infinite, 28; and the “present-­at-­hand,” 237; on technology, 50, 87 Hejinian, Lyn, 54–55, 98; and poetic closure, 20, 85 “Hello World”! (program), 222–23 Hennessy, Neil, 134–35; “Jabber: The Jabberwocky Engine “ 225 heteroglossia, 35, 102, 121, 170 Higgins, Dick, 129 Higgs field, 152 high theory, 3, 226–27 Himawari (programming language), 224 Hobogrammathon, Toadex: “Dagmar Chili,” 140–44, 141, 149; Name, 9, 138–44 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 8; conflation of sex

with rhythms and shapes of words, 123; translation of Pindar, 209 Hollander, John, 19; “Swan and Shadow,” 317n2 Homer, 84 homophonic translation, 311n5 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 53, 142, 144 horizontal or “cubist” style (Harman), 111–15 Horkheimer, Max, 88, 135 Howe, Susan, 18 HTML protocol, two or more blank spaces in, 42 Huang, Yunte: granular analy­sis of radicals (roots) of Chinese characters, 209–10; SHI, 208–10; translation practices, 10, 206, 210 Hubert, Lawrence, 265 Hugill, Andrew, ‘Pataphysics, 288 Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens, 163, 185– 86, 188 human genome, 101 Hume, David, 208 Hung, William, 315n3 Husserl, Edmund: “intentional” attention, 78, 306; phenomenology, 1, 87; primary and sec­ondary retention, 87 Hwang, Jeong Won, 200 hybrid language systems, 10, 193, 204, 211. See also miscegenated scripts hybrid poems, 309n1 hylomorphism, 294 hyper-­chaos, 167, 169, 172 hyperobjects (Morton), 36, 309n2 hyper-­realism, 178 hypertext, 121, 123, 135 Hyundai Heavy Industries, 212 ideogrammatic writing: granular analy­sis of, 209–10; and instructions, 217; and musical scoring, 221; Pound and, 53, 206, 208–9, 216; and radicals, 209–10, 220, 223, 226; semiotic investigations in, 197–99, 219 image filter, 315n4 Imagining Language (Rasula and McCaffery, eds.), 314n6 immanent texts, 121, 314n2

342 / Index Impercipient, The (journal), 17 impressionists, 263 indeterminacy, 156–57, 268 individuation, 79–80, 89, 115–16, 121, 152, 297; of crystals, 80, 294–95; and the milieu, 57, 60, 69, 89, 295. See also pre-­ individuation; transindividuation inheritance, 301–2, 306–8 Institute of Rot “Literature and Live” series, 250 instrumentalism, 261, 317n1 interactive art, task-­based, 314n6 interactive literature, 314n6 interface, poem as, 81–82 “intermedia” poetry, 207–8 internal combustion engine, 62–63, 68 internet: evolution from utopian anarchy to commercial interests, 283; and experimental writing, 159; first text sent out into, 119–20; interactive multimedia content, 212; language of “connectedness” in early days of, 104–5; as liberated space for experimental writing, 124–25; voyeurism, 204 internet art and literature, 9, 133 interruption, 8, 23–30, 76, 247, 252; Ashbery’s parody of a Rimbaudian interruption, 26; Bernstein and, 61–62; features Badiou associates with interruption:, 23–25, 27; mathematics as form of in New Digital Emblems, 284; Olson and, 41; poetics of, 9; and process poems, 93; recursion as species of, 33; Williams and, 25–26; and works of Notley, Davies, and Coleman, 33– 34, 94–96, 97, 118 intertextuality, 82, 121 iPods, 146 Irigaray, Luce, 54 Italian Futurists, 288 Ito, Parker, 205 Jacob, Max, 234–35 Jakobson, Roman, 50, 313n10; “Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry,” 30–31 James, William, 47, 54 jamo, 224

Japan, West­ern motif of as dehumanized technological power, 203 Japonisme, 193 Jarmuch, Jim, 203 Jarry, Alfred, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, 288; Ubu Roi, 140 Jastrow, Joseph, “duck-­rabbit” drawing, 77–78 JavaScript poems, 133, 173 Jenkins, Henry, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” 163–64 Johnson, B. S., The Unfortunates, 250 Jones, Bessie, Step It Down, 36 Joyce, James, 158 Kafka, Franz, 145, 150–51, 312n8; “Investigations of a Dog,” 135 Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari), 55, 150–52 Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiri­ tual in Art, 4, 274 Kant, Immanuel, 255, 295; impasse, 179– 80, 188; Meillassoux’s reading of, 166; noumenon, 177; phenomena, 270; transcendental imagination, 87 Kanterian, Edward, 270–71 Kaufman, Bob, 127 Kaufman, Charlie, 78 K-­DOS (operating system), 224 Kelly, Robert, 316n2 Kenner, Hugh: on Pound’s “In a ­Station of the Metro,” 69; Stoic Comedians, 249 Kermode, Frank, Sense of an Ending, 167 kinetic image, 259 kitsch, 24 Klahr, Lewis, 207 Klein, Yves, 285–86 Knowles, Christopher, 131, 133 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 313n10 Köhler, Wolfgang, “bouba/kiki effect,” 213 Kootenay School of Poetry, 100 Kosuth, Joseph, “One and Three Chairs,” 76 Kraus, Karl, 318n9 Krauss, Rosalind E., “The Originality of the Avant-­Garde,” 10, 263–64, 297 Kristeva, Julia: and expectoration, 127–28; on Japanese as a tonal language and

Index / 343 pre-­Oedipal stages of language use, 197–98; “Semiology of Paragrams,” 82 Kuhn, Thomas, and paradigm, 290 Kunin, Aaron, 18 Kurosawa, Akira, 177 Lacan, Jacques, 47 “La muerte” (Quiet Riot), 37 Landow, George, Hypertext, 121, 123 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, The (Andrews and Bernstein), 49, 51–54 language-­game, Wittgenstein’s theory of, 230, 237 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (journal), 49, 310n1 Language poets/poetry, 3, 14–15, 116, 131, 263; convergence with lyric poetry, 16–18; defense of culture against technics, 69; on function of poems, 50; initial identification as Language writing, 50–51; notion of poem as commodity, 8, 49–54, 67, 69, 90; and polysemeity of sign, 166; radical indeterminacies, 36; resistance to formal closure, 50, 75 languages: Adamic language, 209; ­hybrid language systems, 10, 193, 204, 211; mythic language, 312n8; natural, 35, 269; object-­oriented, 173, 300–301; paradigmatic, 201; referential, 312n8; syntagmatic, 201; vehicular, 312n8; vernacular, 312n8. See also formal languages; ideogrammatic writing Latour, Bruno: and collapsing of nature/ culture binary, 44, 56–57, 250; We Have Never Been Modern, 56, 227 Lawrence, D. H., “The Rocking-­Horse Winner,” 170 Leary, Paris, 316n2 Ledger, Heath, 148 legislative/symbolic grounding, 10, 237– 38, 240 Le Guin, Ursula K., Lathe of Heaven, 167 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 167; and monads, 306 Lennon, Brian, 133 Lerner, Ben: “ghost” poem, 70, 76, 82, 226; The Lichtenberg Figures, 9, 70–

76; linguistic doubling, 71, 73–75; lyric works, 18; rapprochement of poetry and science, 76; and recursion, 75, 157; and sonnet form, 76; and technicity of poems, 70, 76; “The dark collects our empties, empties our ashtrays,” 71–74, 79; and undecidability, 76, 157 Leroi-­Gourhan, André, 57, 87 Lessig, Lawrence, 315n3 “Let Forever Be” (Gondry), 78 Lettrists, 194 Leung, Ho Hon, “A Symphony Poem ‘Unfinished’ for Rose Li Kin Hong,” 10, 206–7 Levy, D. A., 129 Lew, Walter K.: “A New Decade of Singular Poetry,” 205–6; Excerpts from Dikte, for Dictee (criti­cal collage on Cha’s work), 207; interest in “intermedia” poetry, 207–8; Premonitions (anthology of Asian North Ameri­can Poetry), 206–7; Treadwinds, 207–8; “Two Handfuls of Waka for Thelonius Sphere Monk,” 207–8 Lewinsky, Monica, 123 Lewis, Wyndham, Blast, 242, 245 Lin, Tan: BlipSoak01, 145–48, 314n6; HEATH, 148–50; HEATH Course Pak, 149; Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, 144–45; “Notes for an Ambient Stylistics, 145; pharmakon, 148; “Talc Bull Dogface,” 144–45 line by breath (Olson), 19, 100 Lingo, 318n5 link, promises of, 121 lipogrammatic works, 173 Liu, Alan, The Laws of Cool, 189 Livingston, Paul M., 269 Locke, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the idea of infinity, 187–88 logicism, 45–48 Los Angeles Riots of 1992, 113 Lovecraft, H. P.: “Call of Cthulhu,” 4–5; stylistic techniques, 3–5 Loving v. Virginia, 265 Lu, Pamela, Pamela, 106, 226–27 Lucas, Michael, 123

344 / Index Lusk, Dorothy Trujillo, 100 lusory attitude/lusory means (Suits), 164–65 Lyotard, Jean-­Francois, and paralogy, 290 lyric poetry: convergence with Language-­ centered writing, 16–18, 309n1; resurgence of in early twenty-­first century, 17–18, 71; source texts for, 34, 82; technicity of, 69–76, 82, 193 Mackenzie, Dana, 168–69 MacLow, Jackson, 169 Macromedia. See Adobe (now Macromedia) Mad Libs, 201, 248 Mad Magazine: cover of Alfred E. Neumann flashing, 77; parody of Norman Rockwell painting, 80 Magee, Michael, 70 Magritte, René, 146; La Trahison des im­ ages (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), 76; Les deux mystères, 76–78, 80 Major, Clarence, Juba to Jive, 35 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 130; Badiou on, 24– 25; study of the page, 261–62; Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, 3, 5–7, 245, 249 Mandelbrot, 30 Manovich, Lev: change in language production from syntagmatic to paradigmatic, 201; “Database as a Symbolic Form,” 162, 185, 263; and digital “composite,” 84, 146; The Language of New Media, 19, 146–47, 200; notion of the continuum, 287 Manson, Peter, Adjunct, 9, 136–38, 148, 230 Marcus, Ben, The Age of Wire and String, 142 Marcus, Sharon, 3 Marden, Brice, 263 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, parole in liberta, 245 Markov chains, 225 Markson, David, Reader’s Block, 136–37 Marx, Karl: critique of commodity, 8, 51– 53, 55–56; and de-­nationalized literatures, 184; on technology, 57–59

Masarik, Al, 129 M*A*S*H, 194 master signifier, 47, 82 “mathematical” reader, 5, 8, 233, 248 mathematization of text, 8, 39, 181–83, 185, 317n2 mathematized planes, deriving “decided” meanings from, 10, 280 matheme, in poetry, 33 mathesis, 4 matrices, 205–8 Matrix, The, 203 Max/MSP, 225 Maxwell’s demon, 171, 226 Mayer, Bernadette, 17, 84 McCaffery, Steve, 10, 52, 135, 219; and commodity fetishism, 52, 54; on Dewdney, 122; on DiPalma’s Mar­ quee, 225; North of Intention, 122; and poetics of non-­referential, 122; and theory of general economy, 188, 226; and writings of Bill Bissett, 127, 131; and zero-­semantic or proto-­semantic ­poetics, 54, 235 McCloud, Scott, definition of comics, 245 McGurl, Mark, The Program Era, 165 McHale, Brian: Postmodernist Fiction, 158–59; and shift in “dominant” between modernist and postmodernist eras, 158–59, 166, 175 McLuhan, Marshall, 17, 245; on participatory culture, 315n3 McWilliams, Chandler, 317n2 Meat School, 129 Mechanism of Meaning, The (Arakawa and Gins), 237 Medium is the Massage, The (McLuhan and Fiore), 245 Meggs, Philip B., discussion of ­Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, 193 Meillassoux, Quentin: After Finitude, 1–2, 166, 179; and the “arche-­fossil,” 179, 314n2; concept of advents, 169–70, 188; and contingency, 167–69, 173, 178, 289; and correlationism, 1–2, 166, 188; critique of Wagner, 5; Divine Inexis­ tence, 169; and “great outdoors,” 166– 67, 169, 175; and hyper-­chaos, 167, 169;

Index / 345 and limits to human thought, 184; The Number and the Siren, 3, 5–7, 166; set theory in philosophy of the transfinite, 8, 36, 167–69 Melnick, David, Men in Aida, 311n5 Melville, Herman, 145 Memmott, Talan, 133 Mesmer, Sharon, 70 metaphysics, 1–2, 26, 127, 166–67, 170, 188, 252, 281 metapictures (Mitchell), 9, 76–81 metastable system, 79–80, 196, 257, 294, 296 Michaux, Henri: calligraphic approach to Roman alphabet, 194–96, 195, 211, 240; and miscegenated script, 196–97; plane of immanence, 196 milieu, 93, 97, 196, 219; individual, 60; technological, 57–58, 69 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 48 minimalism, 263 minimalist music, 162 minor literature, 150–52 Mirsaal (font), 214, 216 miscegenated scripts, 10, 196–97, 216, 226 mise en abymes, 78 Mitchell, W. J. T.: concept of metapicture, 9, 146, 294; “nesting,” 78; Picture Theory, 76–79 Mitchum, Robert, 95 model theory (Badiou), 269 Modernist art, 263, 285; interest in “primitive” style, 311n4 Modernist novel, 158 Modernist poetics, 9, 43, 67, 100, 117, ­232–33 Mohammad, K. Silem, 18 Mondrian, Piet, 205 Monk, Ian, Writings for the Oulipo, 173 montage: Pound’s style of intercultural textual practice, 211; textual, 212; vs. composite, 84 Montfort, Nick, 160, 173–75 Moore, Marianne, 45, 53 Moretti, Franco: argument for use of data sets in analy­sis of literature, 264–65; attitude toward integrity of data, 265; “Conjectures on World Literature,” 8,

183–84; Distant Reading, 183–85, 264; Graphs, Maps, Trees, 264–66; and “lurking variable,” 265–66; and planetary sys­tem of world literature, 184 Morgan-­Mar, David, 222 Morley, David, 203 Morris, William, 18 Morton, Timothy, 36, 57, 227; The Ecologi­ cal Thought, 56, 178; Hyper­objects, 56 “Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet, The” (Ito), 205 “Mouchette,” 204 Moxley, Jennifer, 16–17; “Æolian Harp,” 17 Mullen, Harryette: Muse & Drudge, 33– 39, 48, 116; diagrammatical representation of, 9, 38–39; formality ranging from ballad form to blues, 34; “ghost” poem, 34–35, 82, 226; and lyric, 18, 34; page from as it appears in Recyclo­ pedia, 36–39, 37; poetry grounded in the a-­field, 44; quatrain form, 34–35, 76; relation of the signifier to the referent, 35–36; relationship to Af­ri­can diaspora, 36; suspension, 9, 34–39; visionary heteroglossia, 35 Müller, Urban, 221 multiplicity of being, 24, 78, 284, 286 multistable images (Mitchell), 78–79, 283 Münzberg, Marit, 250 Murthy, Prema, 10, 204–5 musical notation, 206 musical scores, experimental, 269, 275 musical scoring, 221 “myData = myMondrian” (Yeh), 205 mythic language, 312n8 Nakamura, Lisa, Digitizing Race, 201–2 natural languages, 35, 269 Nealon, Christopher, The Matter of Capital, 103–6 negentropy, 64, 66, 75 neglecterino (Fagin), 131 Negri, Antonio, 99 Nelson, Alondra, 200 neoliberalism, 124 neo-­Oulipian writing, 74, 155 neo-­Situationist poetry, 155 net.writing, 133. See also codework

346 / Index neutrino, 44–45 New Ameri­can poetics, 13 New Criticism, 23, 50, 71, 128 new lyric, 16–17 new media, 7, 300 New Yorker cartoon contest, 282 New York School poets, 71, 74 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 105, 111–12 Night of the Hunter, 95 9/11, 101, 125; Memorial, 251 Nolan, Christopher, 78 nomograms, 10–11, 269, 273–77, 280, 284; construction using reverse engineering, 275; and experimental musical scores, 275; formal grounding, 235–36; as form of “paper computer,” 80, 273; key and title, 273; and metastable system, 80; multi-­step, 273– 74; “Nomogram for Determining The Lead Angle of a Cycloidal Cam,” 274– 75; pataphysical element, 273; reliance on conventional Cartesian coordinates, 278; shared features of, 275–77; “Solution of Lamé-­Maxwell Equation of Equilibrium,” 274, 276; “The Day of the Week for Any Date of History Back to the Birth of Christ,” 273–74; as “undecided,” 277 non-­meaningful elements, of poems, 8, 231–32, 235 nonsense, 14–15, 53, 113, 211, 231, 287 Norðdahl, Eiríkur Örn, “Höpöhöpö Böks,” 311n3 North, Michael, 61 Notley, Alice, 9, 33, 85; The Descent of Alette, 94; Mysteries of Small Houses, 94; as “sec­ond generation New York School,” 94. See also Notley, Alice: Disobedience Notley, Alice: Disobedience, 93–99; adoption, 101; dream imagery and themes, 94–96; “E” glyph, 95–96, 286; interruptive nature of, 97; “lacunae,” 98– 99; pilgrimage of spiritual and social negation, 93; space of the cave, 95–96 Noulipian writing, 70 noumenon (Kant), 5 novelty (the “truly novel”), 7, 18, 59, 82, 172, 217, 219, 246, 298

No Wave music, 225 numbers: in formal languages, 11, 254; Goldsmith’s compositional law of, 170–72; in images, 11; and the infinite, 89; and laughter, 163; law of, in recent experimental writing, 159, 161, 170– 74, 178; phenomenological experience with, 187–88; Pythagoran theory of the meanings of, 282; text and, 180–85; thinking of letters as, 165–66; visualization of, 10; Wittgenstein’s ontology of, 254–55; words acting as, 185 Nygaard, Kristen, 299 object-­oriented languages, 173, 300–301 object-­oriented programming: code and data, 300, 308; creative aspects of, 308; first, 299; ghosts, 301. See also objects, computer objects, computer: based on class definition, 306–7; behavior orchestrated by programming language, 306; characteristics of encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance, 301, 306–8; creation of objects out of, 302– 4; emergent properties, 305; non-­ meaningful frames, 308; private and pub­lic elements, 301, 306; qualities of state, relation, and actions/reactions, 300–301; randomization, 304–5; relational, 305–6; relation to physical structure of computer, 307 OCR (optical character recognition), 181–83 O’Hara, Frank, 17, 100; “Odes,” 11; personism, 74 Olson, Charles: charts and diagrams, 15– 16, 106; composition by field, 13; and composition of deeply novel poems, 18; critique of philosophy, 53; elements of Pound, 84–85; “History, 15– 16; Maximus Poems, 18, 84; Mayan research, 54; objectivism, 250; page as a field of processes, 13; poem by breath, 106; poet as object, 84, 250; poetics, 14–16; “Projective Verse,” 14, 41, 49; proprioceptive poetics, 279; spaces and the slash “/”, 41 Ong, Walter, 106

Index / 347 Ook! (programming), 222–23 open form, 18 Open Letter, 49 Oppen, George, 101 Orientalism, 194, 203, 216 Oulipian writing, 10, 160, 161, 263, 288, 292, 298–99. See also neo-­Oulipian writing ouroboros, 138 Outlaw Bible of Ameri­can Poetry, The, 129 outsider art, 311n4 outsider writing, 9, 125–28, 312n9; as aesthetic category, 128; and affinity for the vulgar and excessive, 125, 153; code­ work (See codework); deterritorialized, 151; other traditions, 130–33; and plane of immanence, 152; rebels, 128– 31; and return to autonomous lyric, 125; shared qualities with minor literature, 151; taxonomy of, 128–35; writers who might be mistaken as insane, 131; and writing that “happens,” 121–22 page: page-­as-­field theory, 13, 18–19; as score, 13 Paik, Nam June, 285 Palestine, Charlemagne, 162 paradigmatic language, 188, 201, 287 paralysis, mathematization of text as, 181–83 paratext, 44, 57, 74, 107, 137, 140, 233– 35, 244 Paris Commune, 111 Parkes, M. B., 40 Parnassian rhetoric, 24, 25–26 ‘pataphysics, 2, 44, 76, 121–22, 252, ­288–90 pattern recognition, 45–48 PDFs, 17; from scans, 182; slash ubu PDFs, 316n4 Peirce, Charles Sanders, existential graphs, 269, 272 Perec, Georges, 311n2; La disparition, 160 Perloff, Marjorie, 26–27; Poetics of Inde­ terminacy, 86 Pessoa, Fernando, 123 pharmakon, 102, 110, 116, 148, 183, 287; Derrida and, 9, 86–87; process poetics and, 92–94; roots of concept, 86; Stiegler and, 9, 16, 85–90, 112, 278

phenomenological grounding, 10, 236– 37, 243, 249 phenomenology: concepts from in art forms, 316n1; and materialist critique of “closed” poetry, 50; and suspension, 28 Philips, Tom, A Humument, 179, 248 Philotheus, Symbola Christiana, 285 PHP, 120 Piaget, Jean, 8, 219; and capacity for perceiving structured wholes, 45–47; notions of logic, 255, 257; and not-­me objects, 91; and permanent objects, 90 pictography, 278 picture and information theory, 7 pinball games, 185 Pink Floyd, 113 pixel, 225 plagiarism, 135, 149 plagiarist poetry, 135 plane of immanence, 10–11, 112, 257; and homophonic translation, 311n5; infinite qualities of, 152–53, 196; metastable sys­tem and, 80; and minor literature, 151; and notion of a-­field, 10; and outsider writing, 125; and phar­ makon, 86 Plato: binary of Being and Appearance, 306; Phaedrus, 86–88 Poe, Edgar Allen, 261; and concept of long poem, 83, 206–7; “Pit and the Pendulum,” 185 poeisis and technê, 68 poems: as autonomous entities, 2, 43; as commodities, 8, 49–55, 67, 69, 90; elliptical, 309n1; empty spaces of as information rich, 40–42; evental qualities, 7, 19, 22–23, 43, 81; as functioning actants, 7; graphical representation of, 240; hybrid, 309n1; as interface, 81–82; intertextual qualities, 82; level of suspension of, 42; as a machine, 9; non-­meaningful elements, 8, 231–32; as non-­textual and non-­cultural objects, 2; and object permanence, 47– 48; as “objects,” 2–3, 7, 45; and pattern recognition, 46–48; perception of spaces between words as indeterminate, 41; shaped, 317n2; as singulari-

348 / Index ties, 7; as structures of thought, 45; as tools (toys) of infinite thought, 92; as transitional objects, 90; as Venn diagrams, 27 poetic artifice, 231–35 poetic kinema, 245–49 poetic meter, 19 poetic object, theory of, 82 poetics: ambient, 117, 144–50; of care, 9, 115–18; cognitive, 10, 23, 235; of discomposition, 231, 240, 245; eco-­ poetics, 178; of field, 13–19 (See also field, the); Formalist, 57; imagist theory of, 208, 241; of interruption, 9; Modernist, 9, 43, 67, 100, 117, 232–33; New Ameri­can, 13; of non-­referential, 122; process, 92–93; recombinary, 245––246; “robopoetics,” 159, 273; of the swarm, 111–15; zero-­semantic or proto-­semantic, 54, 235 poetic scores, 269 Poetics of Criticism, A (Spahr, et al.), 55 Poetics of Space, The (Gaston, Jolas, and Stilgoe), 249 Poetics Program, SUNY Buffalo, 55, 117 poetry: capacity for, 46; crisis in, 260–63; digital, 155; and metaphysical tradition, 2; of utility, 264 Poetry.com, 155 Poetry ( journal), 161 Pollack, Jackson, 14 polymorphism, 301, 308 Pope, Alexander, Dunciad, 281 pornography, and network culture, 123 postmodernism, 1, 17, 102; experimental writing of, 7, 131, 174; and indeterminacy, 27, 43, 189; and shift in “dominant” from Modernism, 158–59, 177 poststructuralisms, 1, 23, 82, 123, 208; living, 226–27 post-­traumatic stress disorder, 113 Pound, Ezra: The ABC of Reading, 10, 67, 208, 240–45, 244; and analytic ­geometry, 69; anthologies, 316n2; Cantos, 9, 83–85, 206; Cathay poems, 217; and Chinese ideogram, 53, 206, 208–9, 216, 241; “How to Read,” 53; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 35; “I Gather

the Limbs of Osiris,” 241; imagist theory of poetics, 208, 241; and invention, 67; “Machine Art (1927-­1930)”, 68; and Medieval scholastic philosophy, 102; and method of “luminous detail,” 83, 207–8, 241; montage style of intercultural textual practice, 211; and poem as a machine, 9; “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” 210; “The Serious Artist,” 242; The Spirit of Romance, 83, 208; tradition of open poem that includes history, 92; translation of “Seafarer,” 84; “Usura Canto,” 105; on writing of “In a Station of the Metro,” 68–69 Poundstone, William: “Androgyne with a Gun,” 287; New Digital Emblems, 8, 281–88, 283, 318nn5–8; notion of the continuum, 287; and pictures of nothing, 285 precarity, 85, 93, 104 Prehension (Whitehead), 13–14 pre-­individuation, 9, 45, 60, 72, 151, 196, 280 prelusory goal (Suits), 164–65 Pressman, Jessica, 212 Prevallet, Kristin, 55 primary retention (Husserl), 87 procedural writing, 18, 70 process, 165; in the digital realm, 217; of discrimination, 86; page as field of, 13. See also process philosophy; process poetics process philosophy, 14, 52 process poetics, 92–93; Olson and, 14–16 Projective Verse, 18 prosodic fig­ures, 8, 23 prosody, 19–22, 38 psychologism, 4, 47, 68, 254, 270, 273, 275, 279 pub­lic poetry, 117 punctuation, as mathematized space, 40 puzzle films, 78 Pynchon, Thomas, 75, 138, 158 Pythagoras, 4, 282 qualia, 236, 240, 269 quantum mechanics, 272

Index / 349 Quarles, Francis, Emblems, 281 Queneau, Raymond, Cent mille milliards de poèmes, 161, 170 Quiet Riot, 37 QWERTY keyboard, 182, 223 Rabelais, François, 153, 171, 175 radicals, of ideogrammatic characters, 209–10, 220, 223, 226 Raley, Rita, 133 Ramus, Petrus, 105–6 randomization, in computing, 268, 305–6 Rashomon (Kurosawa), 177 reader response theory, 23 Reage, Pauline, 124 realism: speculative, 10, 170; of subjectivity and of signification, 158–59 Reas, Casey, 317n2 recombinary poetics, 245–246 recursion, 9, 30–33, 64; circular and terminal qualities, 267; in computer science, 8, 30, 78–79; in Coolidge’s Ing, 247–48; in Cummings’ ­“r-­p-­o-­p-­h-­e-­s-­s-­a-­g-­r,” 247; and grammatical parallelism, 30–31; Mitchell’s “nesting,” 78; in nature, 30; and process poems, 93; in recent experimental writing, 159, 162; as species of interruption, 33 reddit (website), 159 Reed, Brian, 53 Reed, Lou, Metal Machine Music, 225 referential language, 312n8 Rehm, Pam, 55 Reich, Steve, 162 representational humanism, 202 Rez (video game), 314n6 Rhizome (website), 204–5 Richmond, Steve, 129 Riding, Laura, 130 Rilke, Rainer Maria: “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” 74; New Poems (Neue Gedichte), 282 Rimbaud, Arthur, 124, 130, 261; Badiou’s discussion of in Conditions, 23–25; “Chanson de la plus haute tour,” 111, 113; “The Drunken Boat,” 24, 85; “I is

another,” 94; and interruption, 94; “Le bateau ivre,” 113; and Paris Commune, 111; poetics of the swarm, 111; and the undecidable, 24 Rjeily, Rana Abou, Cultural Connectives, 214, 216 Roads, Curtis, 224 Robbe-­Grillet, Alain: Nouveau Romans, 177; postmodernism, 158; The Voy­ ager, 139 Robertson, Keith, 14 Robins, Kevin, 203 Robinson, Sophie, 249–51 robots, 70 Rockwell, Norman, 80 Rodchenko, Aleksander, 285 Rodia, Simon, Watts Towers, 311n4 “Roots and Revelation: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the YouTube Generation” (Nelson and Hwang), 200–201 Ross, Kristin, 96; The Emergence of So­ cial Space, 9, 111, 113; on “insect verse” of Rimbaud, 111; notion of the swarm, 9, 111–12 Roussel, Raymond, 130, 263 Russell, Bertrand: criticized as “Pythago­ rean,” 282; formal language merging mathematics and philosophy, 8, 228, 235; Principles of Mathematics, 27, 254; on propositions, 255 Russian Constructivism, 267 Russian Formalism, 3, 23 Russolo, Luigi, art of noises, 316n5 Said, Edward, on Orientalism, 194, 196 Saint-­Pol-­Roux, 94 Saintsbury, George, His­tori­cal Manual of English Prosody, 19 Saporta, Marc, Composition No. 1, 167, 180, 250 Sappho, 143–44 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 126 Sato, Kumiko, 203 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 50, 238; Course in General Linguistics, 165 Saussy, Haun, 197 scanning, 181–82 scare quotes, 232–33

350 / Index Scarfe, Gerald, 113 Schmandt-­Besserat, Denise, theory of origins of writing systems, 10, 237– 40, 239 Schnapp, Jeffrey, 245 Schoenberg, Arnold, 221 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 105 Schrödinger’s Cat, 7, 78 Schubert, David, 130, 131 Schulz, Bruno, Street of Crocodiles, 161– 62, 179, 189 Schwitters, Kurt, “An Anna Blume,” 45, 206 scientific method, Valéry and, 262–63 Scott, Ridley, 203 Searle, John: the “Chinese Room Argument,” 191–93, 199, 203, 227; “Minds, Brains, and Problems,” 191 Seattle World Trade Organization ­riots, 101 sec­ondary retention (Husserl), 87 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 250 Sejong, King of Korea, 213 sequential art (McCloud), 245 sets: in contemporary experimental writing, 159, 161–62, 165–70, 174; literature of, 165–70 set theory, 181; Badiou’s, 8, 24, 92, 269; Cantor’s, 167–69, 255, 259; empty set, 284 Seurat, George, 315n4 Shannon, Claude, 70; “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 39; experiments, 39–40, 145; “mathematical” reader, 8, 40, 248; “Prediction and Entropy in Printed English,” 39, 41; and 27th Letter, 8, 39–40, 42, 232–33 shaped poem, 317n2 Shaviro, Steven: on Deleuze’s notion of the virtual, 154; and object-­oriented ontology, 296; Without Criteria, 2 Shizzolator (Snoop Dogg), 312n7 Sholes, Christopher Latham, 182 signification, 51–52, 150–51, 158, 196, 205, 278–79, 319 sign-­signifier-­referent, 35–36, 225 Silliman, Ron: and commodity fetishism, 51–52; “Disappearance of the Word,” 53–54; and new sentence, 54, 136; and

nonsense syllables in tribal language, 53; and poetry of early capitalist era, 198; Tjanting, 136 Simondon, Gilbert, 8, 11, 20; abstraction of natural objects, 64–65; and act of consisting, 294; on conflict between technical objects and culture, 56–57; criticism of cybernetic theory, 70; and crystals as preservers and disseminators of information, 294–95, 297; development of technology toward concretization, 58, 75; and the diode, 64–66, 65; disagreement with Marx about alienation of industrial revolution, 59–60; on elevation of technical ensemble to technical individual, 64, 69; and epiphenomenal ­invention, 67; on form and information, 294; and human individuation, 57, 60, 79–80, 152, 294; on human reality in technical reality, 56–57; on ­information technology and states of homoeostasis, 66–67; on infra-­in­dividual technical objects, 62; on invention and process it sets in motion, 67–68; and metastable system, 79–80, 196, 257; On the Mode of Existence of Techni­ cal Objects, 56–57, 310n2; on multi-­ functionality of parts of technical object, 74; on ontological limit of and discovery of technical elements, 64, 172; and the pre-­individual, 9, 45, 60, 72, 151–52, 196; on rapprochement between humans and technical objects as social therapy, 60; and regulating, 70; and resolution, 80; technical element, theory of, 60–61, 279; on technical essence, 59, 67–68; on tech­nicity and technical objects, 60–67, 87, 279, 307–8; on third industrial revolution, 65–67 Simula (programming language), 299, 300 singularity: human individuation, 60; poems as, 5–7; psychic, 89 Situationist theory, 90, 135 Skelton, John, 53; Skeltonics, 198 slang, 312n6 slash ubu PDFs, 316n4

Index / 351 Smith, Barbara Heirnstein, on poetic ­closure, 20 Smith, John, “The Sea Marke,” 18 Smith, Mark E., 137 Smithson, Robert, Spiral Jetty, 283 Snelson, Daniel (Danny), 49, 148–50 Snoop Dogg, 312n7 sonnet, 14, 18, 76 Sontag, Susan, “The Pornographic Imagination,” 123–24, 187 Sound & Language (publisher), 250 spaces, empty, as information rich, 40–42 Spahr, Juliana, 55; categories of modernist techniques, 117; Everybody’s Au­ tonomy, 116–17; notion of collective reading, 116, 118; and the poetry community, 116–17; The Transformation, 116–17, 155 speculative prosody, 39, 93 speculative realism, 3, 10, 166–67, 170, 184–85, 189–90, 306 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “The Politics of Translation,” 210 spoken word and slam writers, 130 St. John, David, 309n1 Stalin, Joseph, 31 Stalling, Jonathan, Yingelishi, 208, 210 “Star Guitar” (Gondry), 78 state of affairs, 43, 46, 152, 164, 202, 207, 228–29, 231, 236, 248 Statistical Guide for the Ethically Perplexed, A (Hubert and Wainer), 265 statistics, and ethics, 265 Stein, Gertrude, 3, 116, 123 Steinberg, Saul, cartoon depicting self-­ portrait, 77–78, 283 Stele of Hammurabi, 238, 240 Stephenson, Neal, Anathem, 188 Stiegler, Bernard, 8, 20, 67, 227; and adop­ tion vs. adaptation, 89–90, 101, 117; and autonomy of self and heter­onomy of technical memory, 87; and collective individuation, 89, 115–16; and consisting, 92, 105, 219; ecological approach, 86; and essence of thought, 28; and milieu in relation to human organism over time, 85, 117; For a New Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy, 85; and

pharmakon, 9, 16, 85–90, 112, 278; and phenomenon of infinitization, 92; Technics and Time, 57, 85; and tertiary memory, 87, 90; and third order of being, 20, 57, 281; and transitional objects, 90–92, 116; What Makes Life Worth Living, 87–92, 115–16 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, score for Zyklu, 221 Storyspace, 121 Straus, Austin, 108 stream of consciousness, 158, 177 Strong AI, 191 subjectivity: alienated multi-­valenced, 106; and experimental writing, 70, 159, 169, 177, 190; and inanimate things, 296; intertextuality as critique of, 82; and lyricism, 94, 309n1; material, 173; realism of in modernist era, 4, 158–59 Suematsu, Dyske, “Speech at the Harvard Law School for Asian Pacific Ameri­ can Conference,” 202–3 Sugarplum, 134–35, 140, 312n7 Suits, Bernard, 164 Sullivan, Gary, “Mm-­hmm,” 155 super-­object, 167, 180 “Surface Reading” (Best and Marcus), 3 Surrealism, 94, 148, 263 Susa, 238 suspension: and indeterminacy, 26; and Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, 34; as non-­ evental form of undecidability, 27; as normative state of language in a poem, 26; and process poems, 93; and words as particles or objects in a field, 27; and works of Notley, Davies, and Coleman, 118 Sutherland, Keston, “Hot White Andy,” 156–57 swarm, poetics of, 111–15; and buzzing of language (Ross), 111–13 Swenson, Cole, 309n1 Sylvestre, Dom, “great cultural medical pekinese / protect steve,” 297 Symbolism, 10, 27, 194, 260–61, 312n8, 317n1 symptomatic reading, 3 syntagmatic language, 201

352 / Index tables of correspondences, 10, 261 Taylor, Edward, 93, 99 technical individuals (Simondon), 60– 62, 64 technical objects: conflict with culture, 56–57; technicity of as degree of concretization, 64; tensegrity of, 64; as “units of becoming,” 63–64 technicity, 8, 20, 42, 55–60; and formalist poetics, 57; levels of, 60–67; and lyric poetry, 69–76, 82, 193 techno-­anarchist politics, 9, 135 technogenesis, 273 technological determinism, 287 techno-­orientalism, 203–4 tectonic grammar, 121 Tel Quel, 197, 219 tensegrity (Fuller), 64, 83 Terclo, Don, 205 tertiary memory (Steigler), 87, 90, 97, 110 textual montage, 212 textual production, by machine. See algorithmically-­produced texts Thacker, Eugene: catastrophism, 314n2; In the Dust of This Planet, 44; “the world without us,” 10 theme parks, 163 thinking, beyond human capabilities, 184 third order of being, 20, 57, 67, 281, 308 Thomas, John, 129 Thompson, John Henry, 318n5 Tiffany, Daniel, “On Poetry and Kitsch,” 24 Tone, Yasuanao, 146 transcendental imagination, 87–88, 92 transcendental subject, 50 transfinite, 8, 36, 92, 167–69, 189 transformational grammar, 230 transformation programs, 183 transindividuation, 89, 115, 298 transitional objects (Winnicott), 90–92, 116, 170 Traylor, Bill, 311n4 Trecartin, Ryan, 313n10 Troll Thread, 17–18 Tsur, Reuven, 29; “Arnheim,” 22; Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics, 21–22 Tufte, Edward, 225

Turing, Alan, 268 Turing machine, 273, 307 Turing test, 191 Turkle, Sherry, “Video Games and Computer Holding Power,” 8, 185–87, 314n6 27th Letter (Shannon), 8, 39–42, 174, 2­ 32–33 “2002: A Palindrome Story” (Montfort and Gillespie), 160, 173–75, 234 Ubaid period, 238 ubu.com “slash ubu” series, 17 Uexküll, Jakob von, 44, 58 Ugly Duckling Press, 17 Ukiyo-­e (art style), 193 Umwelt, 44, 58, 93, 184, 205 undecidability, 9, 24, 27, 43, 69, 76, 79, 156–57, 277 underground poets, 128–30 undigests, 9–10, 34, 105, 136–38, 190, 234 Unicode, 174, 182 universal lipogram, 160 unthinkable, the, 166, 168–70, 189 Utterback, Camille, “Untitled 5”, 314n6 Valéry, Paul: “The Evening with Monsieur Teste,” 1, 262; “The Existence of Symbolism,” 260–61; and hypostasis, 262; “Leonardo and the Philosophers,” 262; on mathematics, 262–64; and scientific methods, 262–63; speculative Instrumentalists, 10; on Un coup de dés, 261 Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (Flusser and Bec), 1–2, 44, 198 Vaneigem, Raoul, 96–97 Varèse, Edgard, 316n5 variable foot (Williams), 19 vehicular language (Deleuze and Guattari), 312n8 Velázquez, Diego, Las Meninas, 77–78 Venn diagram, 27, 235, 269, 272 Verlaine, Paul, Les poètes maudits, 130– 31, 261 vernacular language (Deleuze and Guattari), 312n8 vertical or allusive style (Harman), 4–5 video games, 163; ground in, 316n1; and

Index / 353 the infinite, 185–88, 314n6; and sexual or religious rapture, 186–87 Villiers de l’Isle-­Adam, Auguste, 261 Vinsauf, Geoffrey de, Poetria nova, 23 virtual sex tourism, 204 Voge, Marc, 212 Von Wright, G. H., 316n5 Wagner, D. R., 129 Wagner, Richard, 5, 261 Wainer, Howard, 265, 277–78 Wallace, Alexandra, 315n3 Wallace, Mark, 55 Wall, The (Pink Floyd), 113 Warhol, Andy, 205 Warnell, Ted, codepoetry, 133 Warren, Kenneth, What Was Af­ri­can Ameri­can Literature, 36, 309n2 Watts Rebellion, 111, 113 Wave Books, 17 Web 2.0, 120, 124, 134, 282 Wechel, Chrestien, 282 Weiner, Hannah, 131 Wendling, Amy, 58 Wesling, Donald: grammetrics, 20; scissoring, 20 “What is a Minor Literature?” (Deleuze and Guattari), 150–52 What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari), 152 wheel, the, 59, 63 Wheeler, Susan, 18 Wheelwright, John, 130 Whitehead, Alfred North, 2, 49, 245; attempt to create formal language merging mathematics and philosophy, 8; and collapse of binary between objects and events, 13–14; concept of field in particle physics, 13; notion of time, 13–14; prehension, 13–14; “process” philosophy, 14; subject as superject, 295–96 Whitespace, 223 Whitman, Walt, 312n9 Wiener, Norman, 70 Wieners, John, Beyond the State Capitol or Cincinnatti Pike, 131–32

Wilkinson, John, “Mandarin Ducks and Chee-­chee Chokes,” 156–57 Williams, William Carlos: “A Portrait of a Lady,” 25; binding of grammar and prosody, 67; elements of poems, 67; em-­dash, 162; and interruption, 25–26; Parnassianism, 25; and poem as a machine, 9, 67; on Schubert, 130; Spring and All, 25–26, 100; “This is just to say,” 48; “To Elsie,” 25–26, 189; variable foot, 147 Wilson, Robert, A Letter for Queen ­Victoria, 131 Winnicott, D. W., and transitional objects, 88, 90–92 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 7, 50, 270; and act of discomposition, 231; and “atomic facts,” 33, 228; and conventionalism, 255; deep criticism using pictures as proofs, 10, 259; hippopota­ mus, 31; mathematics as ­evental, 255; on the ontology of numbers, 254– 55; Philosophical Investigations, 77, 139, 228–31, 235, 237, 254; Remarks on Mathematics, 8, 10, 188, 254–59; role of single word as a “simple,” 228–31, 235; and “state of affairs,” 228–29, 231, 236, 248; tautologies, 236; theory of diagrams, 255–59; theory of language-­ game, 230, 237; Tractatus Logico-­ philosophicus, 5, 33, 228, 231, 254–55, 269; “Wittgenstein’s Rod, 246, 257– 59, 316n5 Woolf, Virginia, 158 word-­film, 316n3 Worf, Benjamin Lee, 31 World Wide Web: first website, 119; Web 2.0, 120, 124, 134, 282. See also internet World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 119 Wright, James, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” 74 writing systems, theory of origins, 237– 40, 239 Xenakis, Iannis, 224 Xu Bing, 193, 211; “Book from the Sky,”

354 / Index 217, 219; instructions, 219–20; “Square Word Calligraphy,” 10, 216–18, 220– 21, 224 Yau, John, 144 Yeh, C. Spencer, “myData = myMondrian,” 10, 205 Young-­Hae Chang Heavy Industries, 211–13; “Cunnilingus in North Korea,” 212–13; “Dakota,” 316n3; Flash ­movies, 10, 145

Yourcenar, Margeret, 98 YouTube, 155 Zasterle Press, 148 Žižek, Slavoj, 113 Zipf, George Kingsley, notion of mental cost, 279 Zuckerberg, Mark, 105 Zukofsky, Louis: Catullus, 311n5; new aesthetic values, 84; A Test of Poetry, 316n2; translations of Catullus, 210