Review of: Loss Pequeño Glazier, Digital Poetics: The
Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002
A poem is a small (or large)
Machine made of words.
--William Carlos Williams
- The odd thing about innovative literature is that no literature
is innovative. The familiar but unsolvable paradox of Ezra Pound's
rallying cry to "Make it new!" (147) was exactly what made
modernist aesthetics so persuasive and productive for the last
century of literature. Pound's statement is paradoxical from
the first: he seems to call for new forms and subjects for
literature, for a rejection of tradition, all the while using a
quote from the tradition-bound world of Confucius. Of course, the
critical problem involved is nothing new. In the simplest sense,
the "new"-ness of literary innovation occurs against the background
of a tradition that novelty ends up reinforcing. Any literary work
will be innovative in purely conventional ways, readable for its
experimentation and for its relation to a stable tradition of
experiment. On the other hand, the deep thrill of the new remains
in its claim on the future, where each innovation opens a temporal
difference within the continuities of literary history. Making it
new seems to enliven the present with the future. Innovation is
always possible, for the odd thing about innovative literature is
that all literature is innovative. It is hard to see literary
history without Pound's axiom. Or, better: at once novelty and
tradition, surprise and repetition, the paradox of innovation--and
the degree to which we resolve or displace it--explains something
of the role of literature today.
- If we are to take Niklas Luhmann seriously, the paradox of
innovation underlies "art as a social system" (199-201). The
systematicity of literature, as an institution, is built on this
paradox of an innovation that is never more than a repetition.
Literary innovation and the modern identification of literature
as innovation allow for the observation of processes of
historical novelty. This is not the place for an extended
exposition of Luhmann's general social theory, but literary
innovation plays a fundamental though paradoxical role in his
understanding of modernity as a system of interlocking
subsystems.[1] The functional
differentiation of each closed, self-maintaining subsystem means
that theory can only offer partial accounts of system
functioning.[2] Each theoretical
account is focused on the subsystem's particular mode of
differentiation. For systems to differentiate themselves, they must
internally copy and reflect the distinction between system and
environment. The system of artworks differentiates itself through
its concern with innovation. The focus on novelty is the form of
self-reference unique to artworks in the social systems of
modernity. Moreover, the particularity of the written medium
codifies and universalizes the self-referential, auto-telic
function of artworks (284-5). As a result, all modern artworks
tend toward the medium of writing. Meanwhile, if innovation is
central to the self-production (autopoeisis) of all systems, then
the specific role of literature is the observation of this
self-production "itself" (Roberts 33-5). Literature is how
modernity describes the kinetics of its own historical evolution.
"Making it new" is a dynamic maintaining the openness of
sub-systems to the environment. One implication is that the
language-focus of contemporary poetries is less a response to a
postmodern loss of reference than a self-referential code within a
language increasingly employed as an instrumental tool for exchange
and commerce. This is evident in the popular role of literature: it
must produce results that are declared to be important but are not
taken seriously.
- The first-order theories of cybernetics and informatics that
underlie Luhmann's theories already presupposed a concept of
literature as information density. While Luhmann's concern is with
observation and differentiation between systems, these "first
order" theories approached "control and communication in the animal
and the machine"--in the words of Norbert Wiener's subtitle to
Cybernetics--as a matter of coding and transmitting
messages within a given information system. For example, Claude E.
Shannon's crucial Mathematical Theory of Communication
argued that information was unrelated to meaning (31). The problems
of information theory were instead a matter of efficient coding and
transmission of messages. For Shannon, the more complex and
difficult the encoding of a message, the more information it
contained. Inversely, information-dense messages contained little
redundancy, that is, little of the message could be lost without
compromising the communication involved. Now, the novelty of
literature was Shannon's singular example of information density
(56). Literature consistently supplied the limit concept of a
message with little or no redundancy. Since information theory
addresses systems of coding and transmission, literature remains
necessary to the definition of information while lying outside its
space of application. Literature is the medium of information
"itself."
- From a systems-theory point of view, innovative literature is a
meta-code ensuring the stability of the systems through pure
self-reference. "Innovation" is the doubleness of a paradox that
literature thematizes. The proximity of literature to the root
association of poetry as poeisis or "making" suggests a
more dynamic role than internal self-maintenance. No doubt
Luhmann's description is accurate enough, though it does little to
explain why literary innovation remains so compelling despite all
paradoxes. That is, it works well as a description of "art as a
social system" but less well as an account of literature "itself."
The insistence on systematicity does not solve but merely displaces
the paradox of innovative literature. Rather than take this as a
failure of Luhmann's rather grandiose theory, it should be seen as
pointing out the asystematicity of literary innovation. Luhmann's
theory offers a displaced version of literary aesthetics within the
rigorous sociological rubric of systems theory. Literature becomes
a provisional closure, the institutional site for the introduction
and assimilation of innovation. The poetic point of systems theory
is that innovative literature--as making, poeisis--rather
than simply thematizing the integration of newness into the system,
is what creates the dynamism of the system in the first place.
So-called digital literature only underlines the point, since it
automates processes defined by and identified with modernist
innovation: instant surrealism or Burroughsian cut-ups via text
generators; instant seriality and collaboration via email or IRC;
instant concrete and animated poetry via Photoshop or Flash;
instant procedural and concept poetry via hypertext or HTML forms;
and so on.
- It is exciting, then, to read the persuasive call for
"electronic space as a space of poeisis" (5) in Loss
Pequeño Glazier's Digital Poetics: The Making of
E-Poetries. Invoking poetry as making or poeisis
both broadens the scope of poetic innovation and raises the
question of "What are we making here?" (the title of the final
section of Glazier's book). Opening the field while raising the
stakes is typical of Glazier's approach. This is a challenging,
sometimes frustrating, but always important book.
Digital Poetics fascinates as a reflection of its
subject matter, as an attempt to grasp the textuality of e-poetry
in the antique textuality of the book.
- At first glance, one finds in Digital Poetics
an assemblage of diverse essays reflecting disparate occasions and
sources, but unified by a singular insistence that innovative
poetry practice informs how we might explore digital media. This
first reading finds in Glazier a kind of policeman of innovative
writing, laying down the law declaring who is in, who is out. As
one might expect, such maneuvers produce a reaction. Brandon Barr's
review in Electronic Book Review argues that Glazier's
"prescriptions and descriptions seem to narrowly define precisely
where he wants [...] expansion to occur." Other early responses
have similarly focused on these efforts to fix and monumentalize a canon
and criteria for innovative literature. These critiques confuse
particular moments in Glazier's argument with crippling errors.[3] Suspiciously, such readings find
Glazier's book too easily repeating the modernist paradoxes of the
new and innovative, too explicitly positing the oxymoron of
normative innovation. Let it be said that Glazier is fundamentally
committed to an inclusive poetics, open to diverse technologies,
forms, and modes of authoring--as his pioneering work as creator
and Director of the Electronic Poetry Center (<www.epc.buffalo.edu>)
makes clear. In fact, the book is much more subtle in staging the
processes of innovation within institutional thematizations of the
new. If there is a performative contradiction here, between
Glazier's commitment to innovation and his insistence on
distinguishing the innovative from the non-innovative, it reflects the
tight, reflexive relation of poeisis to conceptualization.
Innovation will be institutionalized, will become part of the
dynamics of the system of literary history. Glazier recognizes his
book as part of this process: he insists on the radical openness of
innovative practice while insisting on its
particularity to certain modes and traditions. Glazier's criticism
is as much a result of as an interpretation of its object.
- Make no mistake: Digital Poetries is a
paradoxical book. Read this book against the grain, but the
grain is multiple and branching. Glazier offers an appropriate
description of e-text: "Because much or all of your text may not be
received, you must, to be successful, create a text that is somehow
suspended between various possibilities of reading." He continues
that such a text is "provisional, conditional, and characterized by
its multiple renderings," or better: it is a "program" (15). Glazier's
book is a kind of "program." Like the web-based poetries Glazier
uses as examples, the book oscillates between display and markup, a
"dance between possibilities of representation" (15). The skeleton
key to understanding innovative literature is not this or that
innovative literature but literary innovation itself, and it is
this poetic principle with which Glazier dances. Innovation or
poeisis occurs. The result is a kind of model of how to
read poetry, focused on a background of innovation against which
all making occurs. Glazier's central claim bears close attention:
through the over-reaching of poetry as the exemplification of
digital media, particularly within the current interest in
programmable poetry and codework as literature, innovation shines
through as a cultural process within and against literary
tradition.
Still, Glazier's exclusionary moves in establishing criteria and a
canon for innovative digital poetry are what first get the
reader's attention. These moves amount to three major claims.
- First claim: prose and prose concepts dominate discussions
of digital literature. This means that the primary examples of
digital literature are in prose form and are situated in the prose
tradition. A simple reading of the major scholarly works on digital
writing shows this claim to be non-controversial. More
interestingly, Glazier shows how discussions of digital writing
continually adopt prose concepts and terms as
paradigms. Prose, with its narrative trajectory and linearity,
swallows all other forms of literature when it comes to the
digital. Glazier's alternative is no surprise: innovative poetry.
- Second claim: the emergent canon of thinkers and
practitioners of digital literature excludes other possible writing
practices. These figures largely overlap with the dominance of
prose: they are the writers whose work circulates in discussion of
digital literature, the texts taught in universities, cited in the
press, and so on. The configuration is something like
Moulthrop/Joyce/Landow/Bolter. Glazier's response is to suggest
that equally important work emanates from the field of digital poetries.
He presents an alternative configuration something like
Cayley/Kac/Rosenberg and Glazier himself.
- Final claim: innovative writing can be distinguished from
non-innovative writing. Glazier argues that innovative writing is
marked by two central concerns: 1) it "offers the perspective of
the multiple 'I'" and, 2) it "recognizes the importance of the
materials of writing to writing itself, an engagement with its
medium" (22). He goes on to identify the non-innovative with
specific features: "narrative, plot, anecdotal re-telling of human
experiences, logical descriptions, chronological sequences of
events, a reliance on factual information, a view of language as a
transparent (or at most, tinted) bearer of meaning, and an
attachment to a Modernist aesthetic" (47). The innovative lines up
very clearly with the poetic, and with a very particular line of
poetic tradition.
- What are we to make of these three claims? Glazier is
persuasive in showing the exclusive focus on digital narratives,
and there is no doubt that this focus limits the field of
literature and enforces a concern with rules, ordering, and
territories. Just as certainly, nothing is gained by replacing one
canon with another and one set of rules with another. The
point-counterpoint quality of aligning constellations of names must
be understood as a tactical maneuver rather than as the absolute
declaration of a new canon: it is not that Cayley/Kac/Rosenberg/Glazier
must now be read to the exclusion of all others, but that they open
the field of digital poetries circumscribed by
Moulthrop/Joyce/Landow/Bolter. No doubt, none of the figures on
these lists (including Glazier himself) is committed to a single
and monumental view of digital literature. Glazier's targets are
instead our easy institutionalization of "major figures" and the
almost subterranean assimilation of exemplary works to models for
all work.
- The criteria distinguishing the innovative from the non-innovative are somewhat more complex. At first they seem easy
to dismiss, since any writing can be shown to exhibit Glazier's
criteria for innovation. Adorno's assertion that "even
demystified artworks are more than is literally the case" (45)
applies: even the most non-reflexive writing shows, in its
resistance to reflection, a concern with its medium and its mode of
authorship. The criteria of innovation can be generalized into
meaninglessness. Furthermore, there is an arbitrariness to his list
of non-innovative features. A "Modernist aesthetic" would describe
many of the writers Glazier valorizes as precursors to electronic
poetry: Pound, Williams, Stein; who could be more Modernist?
Moreover, Modernism is typically seen as challenging the other
items in the list (narrative, plot, linearity, etc.). As a tactical
approach to reading poetry rather than as an empirical feature of
poems, however, "the perspective of the multiple 'I'" offers
insight into writing that emphasizes the conditions enabling voice,
the polyphonous messages crossing even the most transparent
communication, and the agency of various informational nodes and
programs (47-54). Again, looking past the prescriptive rhetoric,
Glazier's criteria function less as restrictions on how to write
than as a pedagogy applying equally to the reading of innovative
poetry and digital media.
- Glazier's connection between innovative writing and a
recognition of "the importance of the materials of writing to
writing itself, an engagement with its medium" is complicated by a
conceptual slippage. Is the point the materials or the medium? The
distinction is not trivial, implying the difference between a focus
on the tools of making and the way these tools are reflected in the
object. Glazier's use of "materiality" derives from Jerome McGann's
work on textual "conditions," situating the poem "within specific
conditions of textuality" (20). Glazier further elaborates
McGann's point in terms of the "licensing" of textual
experimentation by "the cultural scene" in which it moves. These
conditions "not only inform, but facilitate the emergence of
specific types of writing" (55).[4] The slippage from material to medium is
stabilized in the notion of informing "conditions." Here literature
is roughly an example of historically contingent conditions
of text production, a mimetic reflex to the cultural scene. In
terms of digital media, literary writing remains of interest as a
reflexive example of digital media. Poetry works like the doubleness of code (as something to be read and
something to be performed). In the background is a rhetorical
schema binding the immateriality of digital information and the
materiality of particular instantiations. That is, we read
digital media, and we do so because they are like innovative
literature. The consistency of this reassuring schema rests on the
critical gamble of a mimetic likeness between literature and
digital media. The slippage between medium and material is
indicative of this mimetic relation.
- The crucial point--the crux of Glazier's argument--is the
nature of the exemplification involved. Is the poem simply a
repetition of the conditions that license it? Does an emphasis on
materiality dissolve the poem into its medium? Or can we speak of
engagement with the medium as a more complex negotiation?
Similarly, does an emphasis on materiality, both in innovative
writing and in digital media, materialize poetic innovation? Can
innovation be grasped in this way? Is the status of the material in
fact a concealed concern with the reception of novelty, that is,
with the reading of innovation?[5]
Curiously, though he invokes McGann and other theorists of textual
materiality, close attention to Glazier's argument reveals a
difference between Glazier's theory of the material and the
materialities that he examines. In fact, Glazier's use of
materiality rescues an explicitly poetic materiality, closer to
Robert Duncan's "first permission" (7) than to McGann's "licensing." Glazier balances
an awareness of the ideological frameworks in which poetry occurs with the material conditions created through acts of
poeisis.
- The best instance of this conditional making is the work of Jim Rosenberg, invoked by Glazier as "one of the most
valuable investigations currently underway" in digital poetry (137). There is as yet no adequate critical discussion of
Rosenberg's poetry--which is as much rooted in mathematics, music, and philosophy as in poetic tradition--but Glazier provides an
excellent opening, and with good reason: Rosenberg offers a poetic practice rooted in poeisis or innovation prior to
any particular material instantiation. At first this seems paradoxical, given Rosenberg's tight identification with digital
poetry (and his place in Glazier's alternative canon). In fact, Rosenberg challenges the digital orthodoxy by defining
hypertext in the abstract, as a way of representing a network that could represented by "other means than using a computer--on
paper, for instance." At the same time, Rosenberg takes hypertext as a way of thinking not yet possible in any given
technology. That is, hypertext is in no way a function of technology but rather a particular approach to writing practice.
This resulting provisionality of the poem situates poetic innovation in the reader and not the material text.
- Rosenberg's diverse works share an interest in
simultaneity. While we are familiar with simultaneous
musical notes or simultaneous visual figures in painting, writing
is largely understood as a linear, sequential medium. As Rosenberg
is at pains to point out, even such a purportedly multilinear form
as hypertext--at least in the dominant link-node model--is
intrinsically rooted in the line. While structurally there might
seem to be many possible choices for the reader, reading or navigation is
a disjunctive process of choice and elimination. The link-node
follows a logic of "or." There are other possibilities. Just as
category theory offers divergent forms of mathematical inclusion
and exclusion, Rosenberg proposes that the disjunctive link-node is
only one of a multiplicity of hypertexts. His work seeks a logic of
"and," rooted in conjunction or gathering.
- Rosenberg's poetic simultaneities are piles of words,
stacked clusters of word "skeins," following his insight in "The
Interactive Diagram Sentence" that such juxtaposition is "the most
basic structural act." Mousing over "opens" the simultaneity to
reveal an individual skein, a scatter of words and phrases, with
"vertical" relations indicated by changes in font. The simultaneity
is a poem that emits readable texts. Each text is the outcome of
the user's mouse interactions with Rosenberg's programmed relations
between skeins. Appearances are conditioned by the user's attention
via the structure perception-mouseover-poem. The poem is an
opening.
- While it is possible to speak of particular textual
conditions enabling Rosenberg's work--the tradition of Mac Low's
simultaneities, the availability of easily programmable
Hypercard stacks, and so on--none of these adequately accounts for what
happens as individual skeins appear and disappear. The simultaneity
remains in a kind of quasi-space and -time prior to the text.
Mousing over is the real time of the poem. The resulting words are
not inscriptions but transcriptions of the user's movement and
attention. Following Rosenberg's definition in "The Interactive
Diagram Sentence": the simultaneity is a "fundamental micromaneuver
at the heart of all abstraction," producing a minimal possible
world, a phenomenology of momentary objects.
- Rosenberg argues that we should think of hypertext as "a
medium in which one thinks 'natively.'" The paradoxical task is to
think of the technology that would be adequate to "an individual
thought" that "is entirely hypertext." Rosenberg writes a poem for
technology not yet available. In this disjunction of grand
conceptual apparatus with its instantiation in digital media,
Rosenberg's work is innovative by means of its own failure. These
poems mark the structural relation between a poem and itself as an
act of innovation. The poem is innovation's "mode of
disappearance," as Jean Baudrillard puts it (213).[6]
- The recent convergence of code and writing offers an
extended test ground for the notion of provisional materiality
developed in Glazier's and Rosenberg's work. Glazier's argument for
the structural similarity of poem and code (164) and the
assimilation of the poet to programmer (176) comes in the context
of emergent writing practices such as Alan Sondheim's "codework" and MEZ's "net.wurk."[7] In much of this work, code is invoked as a
mode of citation, distortion, and linguistic play; in some cases,
the work itself is the outcome of executable code. This "uneasy
combination of contents and structures" (Sondheim) would seem to
fulfill Glazier's claims that innovative poetry will inform how we
might explore digital media. What makes these works is
their thematization of the coupling between code as an artificial
language instructing and interacting with a microprocessor, and
code as something to be read.
- Literary innovation continues to provide the model for what
is new about new media. The poem does not exemplify the work of
digital media, but we understand digital media through literary
writing. Our experience of innovative writing provides the
particular, reflexive experience we seek in digital media. In the
end, code is a kind of extra or "ternary" sign added to text. To call
this sign "materiality" is to acknowledge the conditional,
procedural, and rhetorical quality of the material.[8] "Code" metaphorizes poetic invention, and it
is this metaphor that makes codework so fascinating today.
Innovative writing practice makes digital media new.
- The value of Digital Poetics is its
identification of the systematic relation between innovative poetry
and digital media. Digital poetry reflects on processes of
organization and development in the systems of communication and
media we live in today. Glazier starts his book with the observation
that "we have not arrived at a place but at an awareness of the
conditions of texts" (1), and in this respect his book seems to mime its object, offering less of a conclusion than
a sustained reflection on its own conditions of possiblity. The prescriptive veneer of Glazier's argument is a reaction to
a rigorous attention to literary innovation. The text integrates
Glazier's own poetry with critical reflection and reverie, and
further adopts and adapts terminology from UNIX and other computer
environments, dissolving the distinction between acts of
programming and poetry writing. If this book frustrates, it is in
part because it is written through William Carlos Williams's
attitude toward the poem and the program--toward the
program-poem--as "active," where the poem is itself "an instrument
of thought" (6). The paradoxical self-reflexivity involved is
obvious: the poet "thinks through the poem" (6) to
discover the very poem being thought through. Glazier convincingly
shows that digital media is a site of just such poetical activity
today.
The Center for Literary Computing
West Virginia University
charles.baldwin@mail.wvu.edu
COPYRIGHT (c) 2003 BY Sandy Baldwin.
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Notes
1. See Rasch on Luhmann as "modernity's
most meticulous theorist" (10).
2. Lyotard's critique of Habermas,
directed at the desire for an "organic whole," hardly applies to
Luhmann. Luhmann's modernity offers not so much a lack of unity but a
unity composed of functions and relations that cannot be surveyed from
outside. See Rasch 29-52.
3. See, for example, Weishaus' review
in Rain Taxi and the debates in the archive of the venerable
POETICS listserv. Compare Hartley's review, with its emphasis on
poeisis paralleling my own.
4. Compare the influential "media
materialism" of Friedrich Kittler where the conditions of information
processing are defined as material for a given cultural moment.
5. N. Katherine Hayles's influential
How We Became Posthuman is a parallel example of this
presupposition that literary texts provide insight into the material
structures of digital media.
6. This concluding chapter of
Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death is a valuable
contribution to the analysis of poetry, often overlooked for his better-known essays on simulation.
7. See Sondheim and MEZ.
8. A useful comparison is Michel
Foucault's analysis of the "enunciative function" that requires a
"repeatable materiality" (102) in order to organize those institutions
that facilitate possibilities of reinscription and transcription (103).
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