Filed under: commentary | Tags: Dickinson, history, literature, poetry, technology, W.C. Williams, writing machines
The technology used to create poetry never becomes obsolete. It lives through physical artifacts and discourse, constantly mediating the reading experience.
I tend to be in the “language camp” of readers. Rhetorical analysis of a text has always been a productive critical approach for me. Yet, I am also deeply concerned with the materiality of a text—specifically the inscription technology or technologies used to compose a text. Upon reading the title, I was immediately attracted to Lisa Gitelman’s 1999 critical-historical study, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Her book positions writing technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the context of the discourse that shaped public reception of the technology, but she also considers also how the writing technology itself shaped the very discourse (in the form of texts or records) it was used to produce. In other words, in her study of print and non-print modes of inscription such as shorthand, phonographs, and typewriters, Gitelman tries to account for “the double-sided boundary at which the built system both represents technology and is technologically represented” (10). For example, the phonograph displaced shorthand as a “vehicle of memory” (51) in court proceedings. Yet, the phonograph was more than a tool for producing records. It shaped the American climate of representation and helped create a culture of the machine and a self-conscious rhetoric of “progress” (70). Thus, as reading and writing practices change, subjectivities change. Gitelman’s method interests me since it answers to both the language and the materiality of texts. Writing machines determine writing practices, but at the same time the rhetoric of technology determines the machine and the ends to which it is used. This “double-sided boundary” is present throughout Gitelman’s study.
If “writing machines, in particular, get some of their meaning from the way they are used, including the writing they produce” (6), as Gitelman suggests, I wonder to what extent the reverse is true, for poetry in particular? Obviously poetry makes meaning from language, and in many ways we could say that poetry’s subject is language itself, but to what extent does poetry get some of its meaning from the writing methods and machines used to create it? This really is a central question for me. From one view, poetry is an artifact in the traditional (dictionary) sense of the word—“any object made by human beings,” or “a handmade object characteristic of an earlier time or cultural stage.” The poet works in and against language, using language as a way to craft meaning. But from another, less anthropocentric view, neither language nor inscription technologies are neutral and passive; the poem is a hand-made artifact but it is also a machine-made artifact. It is a technofact, distinct from artifact, yet one and the same. The poet is a user of language and a user of writing technology, but he or she is also used by the technology to author certain texts and articulate certain identities. Moreover, the poet may be unaware that this reversal is taking place. McLuhan is an appropriate reference here, since he writes that the effects of technology on humans are profound and inescapable, happening below “the level of opinions and concepts,” happening “steadily and without resistance” (“The Medium Is the Message” 114). For Gitelman, the effects happen through discourse:
Artifacts become knowable in part because they are enmeshed within the back and forth and round about telling of what they are, and because telling devolves upon discernible rhetorical conventions, like genres and specialized vocabularies, that are themselves largely the result of unconscious consensus. (7)
As she demonstrates repeatedly in her book, inscription technologies have intended and unintended consequences.
In poetry, specifically poetry that is frequently anthologized, a narrative about the poet’s writing practices and/or methodology accompanies the work and mediates our reading of it. This narrative is sometimes printed with the poem or sometimes circulated as a rumor. For a poet like Emily Dickinson, the narrative of her methods—i.e. hand-copying poems on scraps of paper, binding them into curious volumes, pinning additional lines to the end of poems, and other analog remixes—is well-known and practically permeates the experience of reading Dickinson. In her excellent article, “My Digital Dickinson,” Lori Emerson observes that Dickinson’s exploration of writing technology is key to understanding her poetry. Emerson notices “instances of Dickinson’s desire to draw attention to the mediating effects of pen and paper, and therefore to denaturalize the media” (61-2). Dickinson was not only writing with media, however. She was also being written by the media, written into the literary imagination and American history. Emerson correctly points out that digital poetry is not just an artifact, “an instance of a foreign, textual object of fascination” (65). Digital poetry must also be read within the network of its material context, within “a shared ongoing poetic exploration […] of language as an elusive and yet multi-dimensional dwelling space” (65). This is what Emerson means by saying that we can read pre-digital poetry with a critical lens germane to our present digital moment; we can “[read] the digital into and out of a poet such as Dickinson” to “enrich our understanding of her work” (57). Emerson’s approach does not treat Dickinson’s poems as stagnant artifacts of pure human creation, but rather as technofacts created with a writing technology at a specific historical moment.
William Carlos Williams, successful physician and figurehead of the Modernist poetry movement in America, also is known for experimentation with a writing technology: the typewriter. As Gitelman observes, “the typewriter reportedly became a sort of object-muse, a fetish, in the creative processes of William Carlos Williams” (218). The word “reportedly” is code for “as the story goes…” yet, in the case of Williams, there is truth to the story. The writing technology of the typewriter to some extent determined his composing method and thus the composition of the poems themselves. As Peter Halter puts it, the “Cubist” poems of Williams, like many poems from Spring and All, “are presented not only via language but also visually in the organization of words on the page” (194). It seems safe to conclude that the technology of the typewriter—which allowed the poet to see the typescript on the page and consider blank space as a unit of text—was instrumental in this highly visual creative process.
Williams has left a trail of materiality behind him. The University of Buffalo houses the poet’s “favorite fold-up typewriter” in addition to typed and handwritten drafts. As the library’s web site explains, “often poems originally written on Williams’ prescription pad precede the typed versions,” and the Williams Collection of Buffalo has these artifacts available for viewing and “for literary research.” Treated like objective artifacts, however, it is easy to forget that the poet’s typewriter and manuscript drafts have authorial significance. Each time the typewriter and manuscripts are viewed, Williams is recreated and his poetry rewrites itself in a new technological moment. These preserved writing machines are not dead, but they are alive and they alter our reading of Williams’ poetry. In a sense, his writing technologies authored Williams in the same moment he used them to author his texts. As both artifact and technofact, his poems bear the human and machine touch as all poetry does. If these materials in the university’s collection are viewed only as residual traces of Williams’ creative process—just as we view dinosaur bones in a museum as evidence of prehistoric life—I believe an opportunity to find “the double-sided boundary” that Gitelman mentions is lost. Williams, like Dickinson, could not master his writing machines, no more than we can master his poems’ language and arrive at a transparent understanding of their meaning.
Gitelman’s last chapter attempts to bridge (or rather re-frame) the history of older, non-digital technologies with the digital textuality of the World Wide Web and hypertext. It is quite obvious that she views technological development as an evolutionary process in which digital textuality is just another chapter in the history of inscription technology: “I want to question and elaborate the parameters of novelty that recent accounts of hypertext seem to posit as the foundations of a new democratic future” (222). Gitelman here and throughout her whole book reminds us of the “gleeful claims” surrounding the invention of shorthand, the phonograph, and other inscription technologies from 1877-1914. The novelty and democratizing power of digital hypertext, she claims, has been overstated, especially by authors like George Landow. For Gitelman, the claim that digitality is the biggest revolution since the printing press is reductive and skips over a complex and interdependent history of pre-WWW writing machines, intellectual property laws, and shared experiences of textuality that “are as variable as they are fluid” (225). Gitelman cautions readers to be wary of perspectives that view technological development as a process of improvement. She writes:
All new media, in failure or success, in rejection or in erratic, faddish appropriation, inspire conflicted cultural moments of self-consciousness about the making of meaning. (224)
Her perspective, though at times very difficult to discern in her historical accounts throughout the book, is a valuable one for readers of digital poetry. As both artifact and technofact, new media poems cannot be read exclusively as works in language, authored by a human presence—they must also be read as works in machine, authored by the materials that represent them in our time.
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gentlepurespace/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Filed under: commentary | Tags: lyric, noland, poetry, posthuman, self, technology
What fascinates me about emerging media studies is that its lines of inquiry almost always cause cracks in the most foundational definitions, value systems, and assumptions that a vast majority of people accept uncritically. What we take for granted in the human world, technology calls into question and complicates. What was once transparent, media studies brings into opacity and demands critical attention. For example, considering artificial intelligence, we begin to wonder what it really means to be “human” and what (if anything) makes human consciousness so distinct from machine consciousness. Considering social media and how it complicates our privacy, cognition, identity, and supposedly our health, the definition of “self” obfuscates so that a fractured/incoherent online identity actually suggests a fractured/incoherent offline identity.
Noland takes Guillaume Apollinaire as her starting point and agrees with his provocation that external forces (namely commodification and technology) would ultimately not threaten lyric poetry but actually would “play an instrumental role in the composition of the lyric text and […] in the construction of the autonomous (lyric) subject” (5). Apollinaire does not just seek a new poetic language, but more radically a new conception of how subjectivity is constituted through social interactions, discourse, and mechanical interventions. In her chapter on Adorno, titled “Confessing Philosophy,” Noland analyzes his atypically confessional philosophical work Negative Dialectics. One important conclusion that Noland makes in this chapter is that the concept of self-exposure and confession is a troubled one. In using a first-person pronoun to “confess philosophy,” Adorno highlights the fact the the “I” of lyric poetry has never represented the autonomous, transcendent, individual self. In fact, confession is “a highly public gesture, defining […] consciousness as a rhetorically and historically overdetermined form” (63). To understand how the self is determined by external conditions, Noland writes, Adorno focuses on “the technologies responsible for the production of what is commonly taken to be the self” (64), i.e. the lyric confession and the personal memoir. Like Apollinaire, Adorno worries about the myth of the individual, autonomous subject since it is too easy to forget that it has a source external to itself and that it is mediated. Noland concludes that Negative Dialectics is “the testament of the human subject as cyborg, a creature who must write through a distorting apparatus in order to achieve, paradoxically, an authentic voice” (88).
The tension between poetry and the distorting potential of technology is clear in the chapters following “Confessing Philosophy.” In her chapter on Blaise Cendrars, she finds that poetic language and popular commercial discourse make a tenuous opposition, since each category constitutes the other. We can only identify poetic language insofar as it is distinct from the mediated language of popular culture. In the chapter on René Char, Noland analyzes the paradoxical relation that Char has with technology in his poetry. On one hand, Char affirms Heidegger’s view that poetry (poiesis) is a privileged receptor that can channel a pure essence, whereas technology (enframing) only reduces and vanquishes nature. On the other hand, Char was a member of the Surrealist movement and at least partly endorsed “theories of the technological and its potential relationship to poetry that were decidedly not Heideggerian” (143). Also, Char was willing to host a technological Other in his poetry, since he integrated elements of encrypted radio code transmitted during World War II. As Noland points out, the presence of the technological language (code) in his poetry is complicated and reveals Char’s admission that poetry cannot remain totally removed from technological mediation. According to Noland, Char’s Feuillets d’Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos) demonstrates the question of “poetry’s relation to cryptography, and, therefore, of the poet’s relation to the radio-controlled, ideological actor in history” (159). In other words, by integrating radio code into his poetry, Char admitted that the language of poetry—like the language of communication technology—has an origin outside of itself.
In her chapter on contemporary performance artist Laurie Anderson, the relationship between the individual self and communication/reproduction technologies is at issue in a more explicit way than in her previous chapters. (Noland begins the chapter with a mention of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.”) Noland’s primary premise is that Anderson, similar to Apollinaire, “problematizes the distinction between what is intrinsic (internal to the self) and what is extrinsic (technology, institutions, politics, the media, etc.)” (189). In Anderson’s work, the self as an individual mind and body is penetrated by technologized messages and what we commonly consider nonhuman, self-destructive systems. Although it is a little unclear how Anderson fits into Noland’s expressed focus on lyric poetry, the analysis makes an important point that poetry should “strive to confess mediation [...] while simultaneously challenging mediation’s limits” (211).
In following this last point, the final impression I have is that subjective expression in poetry has traditionally assumed a concept of the individual, autonomous, and transcendent self, and that this concept functions in lyric poetry only as it is placed in opposition to technology, popular culture, or some other external entity. Thus, only by excluding technological mediation as “not poetry,” the identity of “poetry” emerges. To interrogate this binary means that more than poetry is at stake, since we must also “place ‘natural’ images of selfhood at stake [and] recognize them as objectifications and yet continue probing their traumatic content” (Noland 216). At the point where media studies and poetry analysis begin to elucidate each other and blend, a chaotic and radical line of inquiry emerges.