Word Toys: Poetry and Technics

By Brian Kim Stefans

An engaging and thought provoking volume that speculates on a range of textual works—poetic, novelistic, and programmed—as technical objects

With the ascent of digital culture, new forms of literature and literary production are thriving that include multimedia, networked, conceptual, and other as-yet-unnamed genres while traditional genres and media—the lyric, the novel, the book—have been transformed. Word Toys: Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought-provoking volume that speculates on a range of poetic, novelistic, and programmed works that lie beyond the language of the literary and which views them instead as technical objects.
 
Brian Kim Stefans considers the problems that arise when discussing these progressive texts in relation to more traditional print-based poetic texts. He questions the influence of game theory and digital humanities rhetoric on poetic production, and how non-digital works, such as contemporary works of lyric poetry, are influenced by the recent ubiquity of social media, the power of search engines, and the public perceptions of language in a time of nearly universal surveillance.
 
Word Toys offers new readings of canonical avant-garde writers such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, major successors such as Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, and Wanda Coleman, mixed-genre artists including Caroline Bergvall, Tan Lin, and William Poundstone, and lyric poets such as Harryette Mullen and Ben Lerner. Writers that trouble the poetry/science divide such as Christian Bök, and novelists who have embraced digital technology such as Mark Z. Danielewski and the elusive Toadex Hobogrammathon, anchor reflections on the nature of creativity in a world where authors collaborate, even if unwittingly, with machines and networks. In addition, Stefans names provocative new genres—among them the nearly formless “undigest” and the transpacific “miscegenated script”—arguing by example that interdisciplinary discourse is crucial to the development of scholarship about experimental work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9780817391225

Book preview

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 TOYS

POETRY AND TECHNICS

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

Introduction: Beyond Estrangement

1. Playing the Field: Figures toward a Speculative Prosody

2. The New Commodity: Technicity and Poetic Form

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

4. Fictions of Immanence: Undigests and Outsider Writing

5. Terrible Engines: Toward a Literature of Sets

6. Miscegenated Scripts: The Gramme and Transpacific Hybridity

7. Discompositions: Troubling Ground in Graphic Design

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

Appendix: Objects in Programming and Philosophy

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Figures

Figure 1.1. Charles Olson, History

Figure 1.2. Reuven Tsur, Arnheim

Figure 1.3. Vito Acconci, The Margins on this paper are set

Figure 1.4. Harryette Mullen, page from Muse and Drudge

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

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

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

Figure 3.1. Kevin Davies, page from Comp

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

Figure 4.2. Toadex Hobogrammathon, Dagmar Chili

Figure 4.3. Tan Lin, page from HEATH Course Pak

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

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

Figure 6.1. Henri Michaux, Alphabet (1927)

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

Figure 6.3. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, excerpts from Cunnilingus in North Korea in four languages

Figure 6.4. Paul Chan, Black Panther font from Alternumerics

Figure 6.5. «when you are old» (Square Word Calligraphy) 2007

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

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

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

Figure 7.3. Ezra Pound, page from The ABC of Reading

Figure 7.4. Caroline Bergvall, page from Éclat

Figure 7.5. Wittgenstein’s Rod (original)

Figure 7.6. Wittgenstein’s Rod (corrected)

Figure 8.1. Gottlob Frege, from Begriffsschrift

Figure 8.2. Feynman diagram

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

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

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

Figure 8.6. William Poundstone, selection from New Digital Emblems

Figure 8.7. Christian Bök, page from Crystallography

Figure 8.8. Dom Sylvestre, great cultural medical pekinese / protect steve

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 correlationist 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 individual 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 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 defamiliarized 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 language 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 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 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 diffusion 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 Gesamtkunstwerk, 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)

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 singularities (even if clear influences and other historical determinants are visible), as objects (instances of graphic design, numerically-based diagrams, as functioning 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 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 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 Undigest, 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 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 McCaffery) 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 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 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, Darren 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 metaphysical 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 like space, and explanatory of why things appear to change. Keith Robertson 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 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 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