[21/10/15]
GT:
[...]
As
to your own piece, the first thought (sorry) was that we could do an
anthology of this stuff! Poetry, or poetry and poetics essays, making
use of computer software language? But let's leave that thought aside
for now.
This
is only a starting point for a discussion. I'm not an expert, I've
only dabbled in coding many years ago and I have only basic html. If
anything, my interest is in my inability to make computer code
functional: I fill it with mistakes and fall into recursive traps,
lose track of my variables and collapse the sense of what I'm doing.
That in itself fascinates me, and that's why I turn to it repeatedly.
The
part that struck me recently, when I was thinking about your poem
(I've been thinking about it on and off for a couple of months since
we met and you showed me the print outs of your work) is that
computer languages often separate out functional language from
'commentary' or 'notes to programmer'. So there's a separation of
language which needs to be interpreted by machine, and language
intended for the human robot working on the code.
That
suggests hierarchies and the ability in semiotic terms to construct
simultaneously a language that 'does work' and a language that
reflects on the work done. Some of the early drafts of 'Static Exile'
were written in that kind of format, as 'dismissable' sections of
code which were designed not to be read by the 'authorities' lurking
in the poem.
Your
piece has that in abundance - a hierarchy and ancestry of precision
and lists, but also a disruption of reading approaches, as if a
machine might make sense of the code where a human can't, but
accesses the narrative, or the emotion, or, more likely, the
structural politics. Who talks about the structural politics of
computer code? (That reminds me of a story I heard about Cold War
coders, about how Russian programmers had so little storage space,
they had to work harder to execute the same calculations as US
programmers using fewer lines of code.)
The
question of reader/processor is a strange structural problem in
reading such texts: the layout in your piece forced me to read with
two heads, a machine-head and a poetry-head. I found myself delighted
by certain lines in your work, but they weren't 'yours' or anyone's
so to speak, even where they were credited. They belonged to some
kind of process; and the idea of the 'code' poem being decodable was
fascinating, that there was only process in front of me, no sense of
meaning. And that became meaning, forced attention to how structure
carried meaning.
The
'resistance' Perloff takes from Adorno and discusses in one or
another of her books (I think reflecting on conceptualism in
Unoriginal
Genius)
lies in a resistance at the level of process: language, at the level
of the word, the line, or units and stanzas, has actually begun to
recede as the alienness of process (against the partial familiarity
of syntax) takes over. Which sounds a lot like conceptual poetry, but
done without the need to devolve responsibility for the 'curation' of
texts so far from real world issues.
Am
I making sense? I think my point is, I was hit by the context and
concept. When you showed me some of these a couple years ago, I was
puzzled and found the difficulty overrode my sense of enjoyment of
the lines, but couldn't explain why. Now, with a bit more
understanding from certain 'linguistically innovative' poetries (god,
how I hate having to write that phrase for job applications), and the
context of my own slightly more McSweeneyish response to a similar
conundrum, I 'get it' at the level of process better. I can see a
degree of human motivation behind it, even where I haven't decoded
the specifics of your content, the arguments you've assimilated
(although I take signifiers and signposts to the direction they point
in).
[I
would love to chat more about the process of these poems. It matches
up with some experiments Andrew Bailey tested out on me once, and
still occasionally uses, though you've a much more developed
architecture in these and you did explain some of the simultaneity
and serialisation at work. Rather than go into the coding influences,
where you found things, I'm fascinated by the effects on language at
this stage. I'd love to attempt a dialogue in writing, if you have
time, maybe we can use these emails to think about a conversational
essay for Gists
& Piths,
which, incidentally, I've been full of plans to restart now the
thesis is over.]
[28/10/15]
TC:
[…]
Many
thanks for reading and thinking so thoroughly about 'Codeswitching'.
There is so much I want to expand on what you have written but I
think you have really zeroed in on what I was trying to do with this
observation: "That suggests hierarchies and the ability in
semiotic terms to construct simultaneously a language that 'does
work' and a language that reflects on the work done."
This
piece was written on a January morning 2004 almost in one go. I am
definitely trying to work my way out of some of my own frustrations
re. machine and human language, but I think more importantly I am
trying to think what it means to write as a writing subject whose
sense of agency is gradually slipping away.
So,
yes I did try to write in different styles and different discourses
(hence, my attempt at using the Dewey Decimal System and transcribing
as accurately as possible a Scottish accent); in the end, it did not
matter: I wanted to put down a feeling of alienation and alienness to
the whole idea of writing. I am always thinking that writing is the
most natural thing to do but if you ask me how certain lines have
come about, I have no idea. I know this sounds like I am veering
dangerously close to fairy-land stories about the "transcendental
nature of writing" but in fact, what this piece is trying to do
is to figure out how the process of writing (and language) actually
has a very material consequence.
I
remember being taught Ancient Greek and one of the better teachers
explaining to us the concept of the infinitive as an ice cube and we
must think of the declension of verbs as the melted water that comes
from the ice cube. Does that make sense to you? So, yes as you say I
am hugely interested in process if only because process gives a
glimpse into how we come to think about the world. I am afraid this
all sounds very airy-fairy but I am maintaining this is all very hard
line materialist and we need to question the process of how we come
to say what we say, constantly.
This
is where some of the poets N. Katherine Hayles has been championing
fail: it is fashionable to diss Goldsmith for his politics but the
interesting thing is that for all his talk of appropriation and
process, his work and work ethic seem to be completely unburdened by
the practical ramifications of his own practice. Hope this all makes
sense.
[I
would be very interested in taking this further and yes, I would love
to do this for a revamped Gists
& Piths.
This is a lot to think about. Apologies if I am not making perfect
sense (which, as you know, it would not be the first time).]
[18/1/16]
GT:
[…]
I
wanted to carry on with this discussion about computer code and
poetic language. I completely understand the idea of language as
having a material process. Sociological studies hold that the 'frame'
through which we experience the world is often stronger than the
material evidence, or even the material language we see in front of
us.[*] So, yes, poetry needs to tackle that head on.
Lately
I've been reading studies about climate deniers and the language of
the Anthropocene. I wouldn't say I've yet the grounds for a solid
foundation for the argument, but the idea that language is itself a
filter to our experience of the material world meets up (perhaps a
skewed joint) to what you say.
[I'm
thinking about Kamau Brathwaite's argument that the iambic pentameter
can't capture the experience of people in Commonwealth countries,
like in the West Indies, where snow never falls, even though they
were been bombarded with such poems under colonial rule. What does it
do to your sense of reality when the language you have to respond to
and experience the world is almost exclusively from a culture
thousands of miles away?]
The
ice cube/melted water problem: what happens when you restrict your
vocabulary, as the Dadaists (or was it the Futurists?) attempted, to
just nouns and verbs? What sense of the world do we learn? And so
too, a static, past-tense vocabulary: the close, third person past
tense of a generic literary novel?
The
question of 'doing work' with code had me thinking along related (OK,
possibly tangential) lines. I have a sense of a functional language
in code (accompanied by a reflective //commentary which the computer
is told not to read). Which makes me wonder how 'new' comes about in
coding. If you are given only a finite set of 'functional' words to
work with then 'originality' comes about only through
contextualisation. You can't re-purpose the meaning of words, the
code would 'break'. At least, that's my limited sense of it and I
defer to your better understanding.
Against
this, I started thinking about the 'function of poetry'. Which is a
dangerous path, but hear me out. For myself, I guess I'm still
thinking about the whole 'make it new' (MIN) dictat. And I
acknowledge there's a separate approach which I'll describe as 'make
it safe' (MIS).
The
MIN approach suggests a constant re-purposing, re-contextualising,
restructuring, of language and its architecture: the word, the
sentence, the line, the stanza, the paragraph, the book. MIN is a
moral condition which suggests the world is not right; there's always
a need to open up the structures of discourse so that power can be
reassigned, questioned, challenged; but also a need to think our ways
through external challenges. Both are a form of adaptation.
MIS
then is using language to preserve, conserve, those factors which
supposedly are already OK. You could say, from this reading, that MIS
is written by people who think the world doesn't need changing. The
complacent/bourgeois/already powerful/blind. They're quite insulted
in literary history, even by people who'd fit that category.
I'd
say you need a balance of both (but I would say that (but still)).
And I lean toward MIN. Only, I understand it as a practice of making
poetry wherein the language is simultaneously unfamiliar and
understandable.
I
don't want to start setting up more binaries than I have already, so
I'll put this on pause. But with all the ways that you can
defamiliarise, alienate, make new, with poetry, and the limits to
code languages by comparison, I wonder why or how, you turn to code
language to alienate yourself? Doesn't the code require a degree of
expertise, thereby, familiarity, already? Is it yourself or your
reader you want to alienate?
More
questions than offerings, given how late, how late.
===
[*]
I was thinking of George Lakoff, an article in Alternet full of typos
I read around that time, but his book, Metaphors
We Live By,
might be more relevant now.
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