(on a theme by Julio Cortazar, after Ludwig Wittgenstein)
3.22 In a lion the owl is a forgotten object.
3.25 A lion has one and only one complete analysis.
3.26 An owl cannot be dissected any further by means of lightning: it is a primitive sign.
3.3 Only lions make sense; only in the mane of a lion does an owl have meaning.
3.31 I call any part of a lion that characterizes its sense a memory (or a symbol cymbal).
(A lion is itself an instrument of recollection.)
Original version here.
(This started as a comment to the previous post and grew into a post of its own. Thanks Phil, Jay and Jane.)
I think Jay is right to point out that there will be limits to what we can learn. Historians of the future, however, may gain access to the "Rank Page" algorithms of our time. These will be telling, i.e., they are in many ways decisive.
For example, it will help us to understand the sense in which George W. Bush epitomizes the concept of "miserable failure" (I'm sure you've tried this) and, of course, the limits of that application.
Jane brings up a vital issue. I like to think of myself as a technology conditionalist, not determinist. That is, technology conditions both aesthetic and historical progress and this, in a sense, is what makes aesthetics less conditional on history (i.e., the historical epoch of a particular aesthetic) than we think.
No understanding of X without an understanding of the technology of X.
But, no, I am not saying that technology, in the narrow sense of "how the equipment works" (which is the sense I've been trumpeting here), will answer all the relevant questions.
Even in this narrow sense, however, (cue trumpets!) technology has a way of summarizing and stabilizing social conditions. What I am suggesting is that the physical properties of texts (how they work, again in the narrow sense: their readability, durability, searchability, editability) are currently rendering substantial habits of cultural sensibility (the sort of thing we learn in our humanities courses; the sort of thing we teach there because we don't know enough to do otherwise) are now, or will soon be, peripheral to the real enterprise: "the process now going on," as Pound might say.
That is, aesthetics, along with history (but not "because of" this association), is becoming increasingly conditional on brute technical processes.
The phenomenal distance or ontological difference between our humanity and our technology (what we normally experience as "consciousness") is shrinking. The interface is being perfected.
It will never be perfect.
As the semiotic properties of texts are linked in ever greater detail to their material properties, their social properties will follow along. Indeed, semiosis just is the interlacing of social and material properties. What we are witnessing with search engines, blogs, wikis and Flarf, is a remarkable development in the mediation of social and material processes, cultural and natural events.
Picking up on Phil's enthusiasm here, I find myself wanting to announce (as if I'd be the first) a new linguistic era: from orality, to literacy, to "hyperliteracy". That is a word worth Googling for origins, but for me it simply means the ability to read and write hypertext--to see, e.g., a blog post as an occasion for further Googling (on the reading side) and to write a post knowing it will be read in this way and, of course, using links, comment boxes, etc.
I would caution against using words like "ubiquitous" here; as with literacy, progress belongs always first to the few. Which is also basically a reprimand to myself for all this (bordering on) techno-ecstatic hype I seem to be caught up in right now.
Coming back to Jay's point (and Jane's), yes, there will be old fashioned forms of power and ignorance to subtend these developments--just as literacy did not mean the end of oral communication.
Most of what I know about contemporary poetics and the current potential of the Internet, began by reading Tony Tost's "I Am Not the Pilot" very closely back in the spring of 2003. I've just spent the morning reading up on Google and Wikipedia (in fact, I've been reading about Google on Wikipedia, and looking Wikipedia up on Google.)
I am now convinced that we know nothing about human knowledge if we do not understand the workings of these new technologies. The new media. We know nothing about what a poem is, what it means to read, what a myth is, what it means to believe, what an idea is, what it means to think, etc. if we do not know how web pages are made (by humans and machines) and how they are related (personally and mechanically).
New projects like Google Print will inevitably succeed. Sources will inevitably be (in some sense) "open". Creativity will be manifest in the combination and recombination of what is available and "availability" will be a high-tech business of the first rank (is already).
Flarf has been exploring the materials of this new medium in its own way, but I believe our literary theory of Flarf has a long way to go. (I'm here talking mainly about myself.) My attempts to read "what is on the page" must take the "source code" seriously (though I will continue to insist that the classical anthropological assumptions about the writers of the sources must be abandoned and replaced with a technical understanding of the medium in which they "express themselves"--i.e., that which keeps them from doing so--i.e., the sense in which the medium is the message.) Also, concepts like "residual", "dominant" and "emergent" cannot be understood without a detailed understanding of the technologies that make texts available and unavailable (including points of contact with intellectual property issues) to readers. Historical or cultural awareness offers next to nothing when compared with savvy Googling.
"Erudite" will no longer mean "well read" but "super connected".
I generally assume that Michel Foucault's "archeological" approach to human knowledge is right. What I am trying to say is that it will soon be (if it isn't already) silly to study "the archive" without knowing how the "the library" (Google etc.) works, and I mean "works" in its mechanical details.
Finally, I believe that the only way to present the results of intellectual labour today is by way of the "luminous ideogram" or "perspicuous presentation", which will (we must presume) be read always by Googling its words and phrases.
A discussion has recently begun about what is being called an "emergent poetics", which it will take me awhile to understand fully, but which I also think has some urgency. Here are some of the things I'm looking at, along with the links and references within them.
Jane Dark's post on Sept 16 and July 8.
Kasey Mohammad's posts on Sept 17 and Sept 18.
Josh Corey's post on Sept 19.
Also, Steve Evans' very interesting piece, "Continuous Present: On Hearing Modernism in Contemporary Poetry" at Third Factory.
Without yet knowing what side I'm on, or even if there are sides to speak of, my own position is a "modernist" one in whatever sense this amounts to a "classicist" position, i.e., I am not a romantic and, again, in whatever is exactly the same sense, not a post-modernist.
I think the important difference here is whether one believes that "all ages are contemporaneous" or not (a formula you find, somewhat ironically, in Pound's Spirit of Romance). I believe that they are, especially in the sense in which that idea is relevant for poetics. A work of art "emerges" (if you will) from cultural practices in proportion to its likeness to all other works of art (past and future). Thus a work of art becomes its own contemporary with all other works of art.
The competing view, as I understand it, is that a work of art emerges from local and temporary conditions. Each age defines what a work of art is. A work of art does not depend on the sensibility of "present moment of the past" (and the future) but is an indictment of the present's domination by the past (on behalf of the future) or obssession with the future (on behalf of the past). However we turn it, the problem with this refusal to be contemporary is that it implies that historical knowledge is necessary in order to understand the artistry of a given work.
For a long time now, I have found the formula "No understanding of X without an understanding of the history of X" a depressing one. It may, of course, be true.
In Kiosk No. 2 (2003) there are some notes by Patrick Durgin on Hannah Weiner, which got me looking around for more about her. I wonder if the "sources" of Weiner's poems can teach us something about how to approach Flarf. It would seem there are different ways of interpreting the poems. Jackson Mac Low calls her a clairvoyant and Charles Bernstein saw her more as a schizophrenic. I'm not getting that exactly right. The important thing is that both emphasize her ability to to record her experience over the real or imagined sources of the experience. What makes the poetry important is not where it came from but how it got down on the page. That is Weiner's achievement, as I understand it.
The point is that the sources need not have any authority. It does not matter whether Weiner was visionary or insane. She could have been that without being a poet. "I see words," she said, and she undertook to write them down. Perhaps today Google allows everyone to see words. Not everyone, however, makes poems out of them.
