been bells blacken-

ing bones breath colour dark disappoint dol-

orous far fatherless Fields

flower

has heart heaven hills hold Hooves Horse

I into leaves left

let line me me

melt morning Morning My my

O of of off

or out People Regard rust sad-

ly slow Starless

stars step still-

ness The The the the the them They

threaten through To to train water whiteness

As we go forward through the semester, I find myself questioning how best to work through these ideas and texts with my students. My students are mostly Computational Media majors, meaning they have a bifurcated background in the humanities and computing — most of them likely will move on into industry, though some, I know, want to go into grad school in areas like human-computer interaction. Here, then, is at least one area of knowledge where the students have an upper hand; other areas include computing in general (all Georgia Tech students take at least an introductory computer science class) and digital culture in general (all of the students are young enough for themselves to have been “born digital,” just as I was “born televisual,” so to speak.

I skimmed (and plan to read) a post on The Volta blog about teaching irony and sincerity, alt-lit and confessionalism, about creating a space for students and teachers to ask questions and explore lines of inquiry. So, my pedagogical questions (at least this week) are:

1. How do I enfranchise students’ prior knowledge in the classroom? How do I give them the authority they deserve?
2. How do I then combine that authority with my own authority in the literary end of things?
3. How do I shift responsibility for creating and sustaining lines of inquiry and discussion from almost wholly me to a more balanced arrangement?

These questions may well be the questions of all higher education. They may also be the questions of the so-called “two cultures” of science and the humanities — now in greater dialogue through the digital humanities and programs like those at Georgia Tech.

These questions may also be at the heart of the poetry we’re looking at, particularly the electronic work. In this work — which at this point I can only say I’ve experienced a small sliver of, and rely on the critical work of those like Strickland to even attempt to encompass broadly — the tension between humanistic artistic and literary tradition and technology seems to come to the fore, often, I think, as a kind of theme.

One way — returning to the practical pedagogical issues for, say, tomorrow’s class — I’ve thought of answering the questions above is by clarifying my own questions and identifying my own areas of ignorance and bringing those questions to class. Here are the broad questions I asked in a previous post before the semester began:

1. How do poets’ responses to digital culture change how we understand poetry?
2. How does the influence of digital media on poetry extend, turn, or swerve away from modernist and postmodernistic poetics?
3. In what ways has digital culture affected how poetry engages with materiality, virtuality, and simulation?
4. How has digital culture influenced the projections of subjectivity, individuality, and personhood in poetry? How has it influenced projections of groups, societies, nations, and cultures?
5. What are the political implications of new poetics influenced by digital culture?
6. In what ways may a wholly digital composition process — from composition in Microsoft Word to publication on a website to distribution through Facebook and Twitter — affect the way poetry is composed and read?
7. How has the ability of digital media to handle and present multiple media — text, image, sound, interactivity — affected how poetry on the page works?
8. How has digital culture’s influence on language — how we talk, type, text, post, communicate — affected poetry?
9. How has the digital dualities of interface/code and search/database affected how poetry is conceived, made, and consumed?
10. What is the relationship between digital-age poetics and related, but analog poetics such as those of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low’s chance operations and procedural works, the experiments of OULIPO, and the long tradition of appropriation in poetry? What is the influence of early (sometimes analog) computers and computing processes on poetry?
11. How has digital culture’s effects on attention, cognition, and reading affect how we interact with poetic compositions?
12. Where does poetry go from here?

Here are my more specific questions having completed the unit on The Network and moving into electronic poetry:

1. One of the apparently clear differences between electronic and print poetry is e-poetry’s bifurcation of code and interface. Has this bifurcation as an element of digital culture influenced works such as The Network? Can we draw any useful analogies to a bifurcation in print between the “code” of the printed poem and the “processor” of the brain running the code?
2. What essential distinctions need to be made in the way we define and translate particular terms in computing and digital culture into the humanistic realms? What are the precise and useful ways to define terms such as algorithm, program, code, database, interface, and process?
3. How are the new media objects we’re studying like the new media objects students study and make in other classes?
4. How are print poems another kind of “new media object”? Can we come to terms with a translation from the digital realm to the print realm and find underlying commonalities in the production and consumption of these works?
5. What is the thematic consideration of the technological tension between interactivity and control? How has this thematic binary marked print poetry in the digital age? How may we draw comparisons to the thematic of chance and control in earlier analog works by John Cage and Jackson MacLow?
6. What do we make of the paradoxical emphasis on textuality in the decidedly virtual world of e-poetry?
7. How do later developments in digital-culture-influenced poetry and e-poetry stem from the intermedia experiments of groups such as Fluxus?
8. How may print or e-poetry be acting as a kind of interface to the ontological database of reality?
9. How may the metacognition Strickland says is prompted by e-poetry affect the conditions under which we read print poetry? Can the metacognitive habit of mind be transferred to a different medium, opening up newer routes of interpretation and imagination?

Some of these questions aren’t appropriate to bring into class as of yet. For example, we’d have to talk a lot more about Cage, MacLow, and Fluxus to get a handle there.

But, at the same time, that question leads us to tomorrow’s class, and the Fluxus member Alison Knowles.

Knowles used a computer to generate “House of Dust,” a poem printed out on old computer paper that students will likely find funny. In a reading, Knowles refers to the poem as “a computer poem” — which leads me to want to define the differences between computer, digital, and electronic poetry. Clearly, a computer was instrumental to creating “House of Dust,” and somewhere there is a program of code that did it–though, likely, no extant computer to run it.

But what we seem to have now is just the material output — the printout — which begins to get at this interesting conversation between the virtual and material. What is the real poem, the output or the code? Or is it some ur-poem, a database that is the combination of all possible configurations of the phrases Knowles (or a collaborator) input into the program?

Strickland would likely not call this e-poetry, in that “House of Dust” relies on the printout to be read — though it is very close to Strickland’s criteria. As such, it stands as a middle ground between the Cage/MacLow school of analog chance operations and born-digital electronic works.

Nichol’s “First Screening” is more clearly a born-digital work, the result of experimentation with new tools and new forms. While most of the individual poems partake liberally of the concrete poetry tradition, they also all employ the ability of the computer to move and animate text — to treat, as Strickland notes, language as an object. (Thus, is the paradoxical digital textuality inherent to the affordances of the computer?)

Most importantly, Nichol recognizes the importance of the interface/code bifurcation and prompts viewers of “First Screening” to view the code, which embeds other poems including “Off-Screen Romance.” This move incorporates interactivity and agency into a program in which the viewer, after starting the program, cedes most of the control to the program itself.

Perhaps it is this intervention of agency I find so interesting. What is the analogous process in print poetry?

I take my cues from N. Katherine Hayles, who, while spending more time on theorizing born-digital electronic works, also takes up the question of how the affordances of digital media affect analog literary production — as she writes in her Electronic Literature:

The attempt of the print novel to one-up electronic textuality is thus inextricably entwined with the simultaneous recognition that electronic textuality makes possible many of its innovative developments. The complexity of this dynamic can be seen in the emergence of two apparently opposed but actually complementary strategies: imitating electronic textuality through comparable devices in print, many of which depend on digitality to be cost effective or even possible; and intensifying the specific traditions of print, in effect declaring allegiance to print regardless of the availability of other media. Recursively entwined, the two strategies often appear together in the same text. Moreover, they tend to morph into one another. (162)

Though Hayles does confine her analysis to the novel, I elide it to “print literature.” Print literature, then, both imitates electronic textuality and intensifies the specific traditions of print in response to electronic textuality.

This paragraph, as a “digi-cult-crit” neophyte, is at the heart of my project, and of the course, as they currently stand. Further, it helps clarify the role of pre-digital traditions of digital-like textuality in print. It also adds more depth to Bernstein’s schema of poetry’s epic, lyric, and textual functions, with the textual function coming into prominence with the emergence of digital and electronic media as the primary means of storing and transmitting cultural memory and information.

What then do Osman’s book and Vincent Miller’s “Key Elements of Digital Media” (and, extrapolating, the topics and texts of the course) tell us,

1. about the ways print poetry responds to digital media by either “imitating electronic textuality” or by “intensifying the specific traditions of print”?
2. about the ways that these two strategies relate to Bernstein’s paradigm of poetry’s textual function and to the traditions of the epic and lyric functions?
3. about other ways — beyond imitating electronic textuality, per se — that print poetry may be imitating elements of digital culture: automation, for instance, or “immersive experiences,” as Miller discusses in his book chapter?

Part of the challenge of the next class and of the course is to navigate this tension. Miller’s article discusses digital media directly, and does not pertain specifically to non-digital artifacts or texts. Osman’s book is clearly analog (though with a digital backstory through composition, publication, and distribution). Given Hayles’ paragraph as a kind of permission to use Miller’s criteria as ways of approaching Osman’s texts, how does that translation take place?

Miller approaches digital media through three broad groups of elements:

• Technical Processes
  • Digital
  • Networked
  • Interactive
  • Hypertextual/Hypermediated
  • Automated
  • Databased
• Cultural Forms
  • Context (or lack of it)
  • Variability
  • Rhizome
  • Process
• Immersive Experiences
  • Telepresence
  • Virtuality
  • Simulation

Essentially, each of these elements are ways of describing what digital media objects/processes are and how they work. The question is, following Hayles, how to translate these ways of describing digital media into ways to describe what poetry objects/processes in the digital age are and how to use these descriptions to map influence.

Of course, the question arises as to how can we (or Hayles) be sure that the particular textuality found in Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (as Hayles discusses in the same book chapter as the excerpt above) or in The Network is a response to digital textuality — or the other things that digital media do? What exactly is “telepresence” in the context of print poetry?

Of course, that last question is what excites me in the challenge of this critical project and of this class. It’s likely that I need to know more about how technology and culture work together — any suggestions would be appreciated.

In last Thursday’s class, we looked closely at Charles Bernstein’s essay “The Art of Immemorability,” one phrase of which really stuck out for me and for my students (I paraphrase): all representation is also misrepresentation. We discussed the basics of signifier and signified, how the word “chair” is not a chair and that something gets lost between the word “eye” and an actual eye.

I think Borges’ story helps us really get at the import of signifier/signified idea as it pertains to digital culture. The story was written in the pre-digital 1940s as a parable in which the universe is configured as a possibly infinite library full of books; some of the books contain apparently random sequences of letters; some contain helpful, insightful, or wise information. The great theory of this world is that every possible combination of letters exists in the Library: every event of the past and future, every event in every life, every scientific insight, every literary trope, is contained in those books.

The figure neatly allegorizes digital culture, where, because of binary code, almost everything — visual, verbal, audio — can be represented in sequences of zeroes and ones. The digital version of the Library of Babel is a database full of files of binary code in every configuration, representing everything that has been and ever will be. Of course, following Bernstein (following Barthes, following Saussure, etc.) the representation in the books, in the code, is also misrepresentation — and this gets at (to a certain extent) my course’s emphasis on analog instantiations of digital culture: for the most clear misrepresentation of binary code is materiality itself.

As many traditions and lineages within experimental poetry do, Osman’s book works with the subtleties of representation and misrepresentation; what makes The Network appropriate in light of our discussion of digital culture is that it incorporates formal elements — often on the level of the book as a whole — often associated with digital media. So while Osman engages the material realities of history in the way that words change over time — she wants to, following Cecilia Vicuña, “enter words in order to see” — she does so with an analog-digital architecture. The “network” is clearly the most obvious of these formal elements; others include the use of hyperlink-like bolding of terms referring to other sections in “NETWORK 4: Financial District” and the incorporation of diagrams and images.

Further, The Network‘s transmission of cultural memory reflects the web’s ability to juxtapose historical information in chunks juxtaposed with other discourses. Like other writers we’ll be discussing in the class — Kenneth Goldsmith comes to mind — Osman employs instrumental, a-poetic language filtered, reframed, and re-mixed with other discourses to compose her works. In this case the instrumental language is the discourse of history (or, as it may be, Wikipedia, though Osman dutifully collects her [apparently mostly analog] sources at the back of the book), as here, in her exploration of the word “knot”:

not causal, but a knot. of derivations and kinships. an attempted unraveling:

round lump

1225  wedlock

1398  protuberance on tissue of plant

1400  ornament of dress

1547  the verb form begins

1633 nautical measure

1726  knothole

1940  knothead, no longer in my

dictionary, but I imagine somehow transposed into the current blockhead. So the twining and fraying rope woven together, the place in the wood where a knot drops out, the unintentional loss at the beginning becomes simply a block of wood. (7)

Here’s where I get myself in trouble: would The Network exist without digital culture? Osman’s work can be clearly linked with analog precedents, particularly the documentary poetics of Muriel Rukeyser, the historical-appropriative poetics of Charles Reznikoff, and the archival poetics of Susan Howe — not to mention the traditions of philology and linguistics. Can we tease out the lines of influence here? Can investigate the differences between the technology of the alphabet and the technology of digital, binary code in representing the world Osman presents? Do we need a digital imagination in order to make meaning of Osman’s work?

Returning to the Borges story, Osman seems to me to a character living in that parable, living in the universe-as-library, using the alphabetic and imagistic (and possibly digital) phenomena at hand — for in the Borges story, the Library is nature — to better understand the world in which she lives. In this — and here I am reminded of an essay by Joan Retallack on this very topic – The Network puts the “experiment” (as in scientific experiment) in experimental poetry.