Blind Carbon

“The burning space between one letter and the next...” -Jabes

 

Opposing thumbs

not the facts

a feeling of if

a feeling of why

an interstice whose art is to work

as relations are

to the wrong facts

I mean formal dynamics

against speech

Man O War who sired 379 foils

heart attack at 30

This is where I

white out of

betweens (love

the crispy crackers)

I never vomit but

swallow chalk

to eject the defined

negative

lyric extreme

Flesh in dreams

inadequate to convict

said snoozefest

subject and object

medicated with

bifurcating hooks

Let us ghost that hammock

and spread acres of fat

a valley's loins

officer, did you take my hat?

Ecopoetics - Alt Tracks - Toward Stengers

Track 2 – An alternate world

I want to talk about Isabelle Stengers' notion of an ecology of practices as a tool for thinking and what the implications of this might be for what poetry and poetics can become, that is, for those who write and read and listen to it.

An ecology of practices, as a tool for thinking, is performative. It attempts to address itself to practitioners of a field. “To dream along with” – “in a mode that is not critical, which [does] not remind [practitioners]… of limits inherent to their activity.”

An ecology of practices addresses how practices relate to each other (though clearly they can only partially relate). There are no practices that can be independent of environment.

Practitioners want their work to cohere. Coherence is not necessarily logical, but rather it is eco-logical. Something coheres in relation to its environment.

What poem or book of poems isn’t an attempt to cohere -- to foster its own force.

“An ecology of practices does not have any ambition to describe practices 'as they are’…. It aims at the construction of new… possibilities for them to be present or, in other words, to connect. It thus does not approach practices as they are… but as they may become.”

Stengers argues that: “… practices must not be defended as if they are weak. The problem for each practice is how to foster its own force, to make present what causes practitioners to think and feel and act.”

According to Stengers, “...tools for thinking are… the ones that address and actualize [the] power of the situation, that make it a matter of concern, in other words, make us think and not recognize.  …recognition would lead to the question-- why should we take practices seriously [e.g., poetics/poetry] as we know very well that they are in the process of being destroyed by Capitalism?  …The ecology of practices is a non-neutral tool as it entails the decisions never to accept Capitalist destruction as freeing the ground for anything but Capitalism itself.”

The challenge is to think: "par le milieu" (with the milieu) which implies becoming through the middle (without grounding definitions or an ideal horizon—in other words, unmapped) and with the surroundings. No theory gives you the power to disentangle something from its particular surroundings.

The ecology of practices as a tool for thinking must be immanent – so to the extent that it’s a critique, it’s an immanent critique. It wants to contrast rather than oppose. In fact it wants to find the stubborn facts and (ala Whitehead) to convert oppositions into contrasts.

An ecology of practices wants to affirm the positive value of attachment – which is what obligates practitioners. So it asks how it is that one belongs, and how that belonging obligates you.  Attachments are what you have and hold, &/or what has you or holds you. I think of belonging as what owns you, or what holds or infects you – at the same time that you own, or hold or infect it.

All attachments that build obligations are in some sense affiliations or involvements with other entities (not just human ones).

Obligation may be created from a practitioner’s attachment to a particular definition or concept of what poetry &/or poetics can be or become.  This is a polite way of saying that we have attachments to ‘esthetic’ style, the manner of how something is done, and/or ideology.  

Stengers says: Attachments are what cause us to think.  It’s probably not just pencil and paper, or keyboard and screen that makes us think, but also how I’m infected – with matters of concern.

 “Attachments matter and the way that they matter becomes apparent when you do not take them into account…  As Latour beautifully showed in Pandora’s Hope, attachment and autonomy rather go together. Attachments are what cause people… to feel and think, to be able or to become able.  The problem… may be that some of us… confuse attachments with universal obligations… and feel free... to judge, deconstruct or disqualify what appears to them as illusions or folkloric beliefs and claims.” (EOP, 191)

A first step in an ecology of poetic practice might be to situate the relevance and limits of poetic practice without engaging in destructive critique. In other words, where are the “borders” with other practices and what questions matter – what questions make us think rather than re-cognize?

Stengers is focused on the constructive, on becoming or how things change, rather than the destructive or the deconstructive.

“You never construct in general, [but] always in relation with … a matter of concern.”  She doesn't want to construct a general theory, she wants to make proposals to provoke thought but always within a field of practice. That is the immanent part of the critique to remain "within the very field of practices that it is seeking to change.” Thus, she won’t accept claims that separate themselves from the actual practice, the actual becoming.

Constructivism is non-foundationist. That is, truth is a construction – so there is no primacy of truth. She’s against either-or propositions. It’s not the chicken or the egg, that’s a false choice; it is not a choice between objects being prior to relations or vice versa.  As Shaviro suggests: “What’s really real can be actual entities and actual occasions—not just the former.” (Shaviro, The Actual Volcano, 284).

Stengers argues for the minor stage (or minor literature) and against the major – because the “major” always appeals to Truth (with a capital ‘T’ – which by history’s lights must lead directly to freedom, as in: “the truth will set you free”). The minor resists this traditional form of “enlightenment” – i.e., this appeal to truth.

Working from examples in the sciences, Stengers is against universalization (i.e., against any world view or model) that would deny the validity of other theories and practices outside its own practice/discipline. Universalization usually denies the validity of all other theories.

She sees innovative scientific propositions as (in part) making fiction – & if the fiction is accepted, it modifies the scientific reality – in a sense it makes history.  David Graeber says somewhere – consistent with Latour probably – that if you convince enough people that you are king of France, you are king of France.

Track 4 – Must Be Some Way Outta Here

Stengers is very much with Latour & Whitehead & the Speculative Realists against the bifurcation of the world into two realms: the human (or culture) versus nature. One way to think about this is as a denial of the distinction between how we conventionally think about subject and object. They are, in fact, hopelessly intertwined.

Regarding OOO’s emphasis on “object”, one could argue for a similarly flat subject-oriented ontology based on Whitehead’s notion that all objects are also subjects, they have a mental pole, even if it’s relatively dormant.  Here’s Shaviro again: “If ontological equality means anything, it means that all entities in the universe, without exception, are sentient or experiential. In other words, where OOO claims that everything is an object, Whitehead rather claims that everything is a subject: “apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness” (PR 167). (PT, #1086)

The notion of Ecology of Practices is in synch with Tim Morton’s definition of ecopoetics as co-existence.  In fact, Stengers’ Introductory notes on an Ecology of Practices were written in response to Brian Massumi’s proposition that “a political ecology would be a social technology of belonging, assuming coexistence and co-becoming as the habitat of practices.” [Note that I don’t believe that the term ‘social technology of belonging’ is trying to conjure some argument for Facebook.  It can perhaps be understood as an application of belonging for practical use.]

In a political context, for example, Stengers argues for co-existence with the black bloc.  Their “so-called violence is nothing compared to that of the cops.”  She says that what matters “is not to demand a unifying principle which would be stronger than the divergence, but to learn how to work together not in spite of but through the divergence.” (CP interview)

Divergent poetics can be explained by singular modes of decision. Per Shaviro: “What keeps entities distinct from one another, despite their continual interpenetration, is precisely their disparate manners, or their singular modes of decision and selection. Novelty arises, not from some pre-existing reserve, but from an act of positive decision.” (Shaviro TAV, 287)

Morton argues that: “intimacy is what we need in ecological awareness, not feeling like we're part of something bigger...”  If ecopoetics is intimate co-existence with other entities, then I assume Morton would say that such intimacy forms a new entity, or else there would have to be a feeling of being part of something bigger.

Morton emphasizes the poem as an object, an autonomous entity that forces us to coexist with it, if & when we read it.  He studiously avoids talk of the present, which he explains away via the interactions of objects.

“...To write poetry is to force the reader [emphasis added] to coexist with fragile phrases, fragile ink, fragile paper: to experience the many physical levels of a poem's architecture... sheer co-existence... This coexistence happens not in some eternal now, or in a now-point, however expansive or constrained. The 'nowness' of a poem, its spaciousness, is the disquieting asymmetry between appearance and essence, past and future.” (Morton, ODOP, 222)

For Morton, it comes down to the rift within objects, their inconsistency with themselves.  This is the only way something new appears.  He wants to define away any “nowness” through the friction between essence and appearance.  For Morton, the presence of a habitat is like a presumed nature that implies a metaphysically "present" boundary, a bifurcation which he wants to reject. “OOO is precisely against metaphysics of presence.  Boundaries called ‘present’ or ‘nature’ are always totally arbitrary and metaphysical.”  (EWN, 4-23-12)

For Stengers, I don’t think co-existence is an event that happens at a “now-point.”  It is an assumption (see Massumi’s proposition above) of what is needed (along with co-becoming) for there to be a habitat of practices.

Co-existence is about sharing an interstice with others.  For Stengers, there is no habitat without co-existence and vice versa. It isn’t clear to me that her notion of a habitat is static or metaphysically bounded.

For Morton, the past is appearance, the future is essence.  We live in the era of sticky hyperobjects (objects massively distributed in time and space, e.g., global warming).  Like Levinas’s ethical turn, there’s no going back once we look into the face of The Hyperobject.

I’m leery of Morton’s attachment to essence, and to his insistence that there is no ecology of the present, no poetics of the present, which perhaps jibes with Buddhist emptiness or nothingness.  Somewhere Stengers says that “what the poets call presence is infection.”  I think there are actual occasions, not just actual entities; there are occasions or events that happen in “our” presence, that infect actual entities of all kinds.

Track 5 – The Bridge

What does a less anthropocentric poetics look like? Is it a poetry of affinities, a celebration of the democracy of all objects, along the lines of: “Sorry, Tree.”  What would a poetry look like that would not privilege (the human realm nor) its own language?

If poetics (as Donato Mancini suggests) is criticism at the site of writing, then I want it to be immanent critique, a critique that makes us think rather than recognize, that induces us to become other than who we are.

For poets and artists, the compulsion (or goal) might be: how to produce objects or poems that cohere in their own ways – that have lives of their own.  But this isn’t what activates thinking.

Looking at disputes within contemporary poetics – formal innovation typically trumps expression (though in book sales that’s probably the obverse).

For me, the notion of a poet’s obligation implies a real tension between ethics and aesthetics. Esthetic conscience and ideology seem more relevant to ethics since they stress how complicit we necessarily are, trapped in the circuits of Capital. I want to celebrate aesthetic contact with the outside, without losing sight of how easy it is to turn theory into a conquest.  I want to be able to read and write like a loser, not just for victory.

If one takes aesthetics as “a primordial form of relation and interaction,” in effect a first philosophy, then the obligation may be to struggle – to relate and interact, that is, to connect. And not just to words – but to all objects/entities that one meets in the world.

The quandary is how to convert oppositions into contrasts, how to find, as Shaviro suggests, “an aesthetic place for ethics; an immanent place for transcendence.”

Ecopoetics Brief on Aesthetic Decision

There is no time to be brief.  -Nancy Shaw & Catriona Strang

Before I withdraw to talk to myself about Stengers, a not-so-brief conclusion, borrowed as it may be:

I’m interested in an aesthetics of decision that takes innovation and change as primary processes rather than “adaptive reactions to environmental pressures.”  I don’t think we’re writing poetry (or at least I’m not) out of some need for self-preservation (or Spinozan conatus) or self-reproduction, in search of some homeostatic equilibrium.  That is, I’m interested less in continuity than in novelty (& I’d prefer a relevant, not blind novelty, please) – a kind of continual redefinition, “becoming other than I am.”  Perhaps as our private thoughts become public, we are arguably becoming other.

When I use “aesthetics” here I mean an affective aesthetics that is very much in synch with Tim Morton’s notion of aesthetics as causality, except I think aesthetics goes all the way down – there is no distinction between appearance and essence, no distinction between a surface sensual realm and a deep substantial one.  The truth of appearances is that there are only appearances.

Steve Shaviro relates this affective flavor of aesthetics to Kant’s description of feelings or aesthetic experience as “intuitions without concepts.” The cause of a decision can never be reduced to some human production.  Decisions are made but we’re not exactly their author.  This is aesthetics as a first philosophy – before ethics, before political economics.

In the grooves of daily habit, we travel familiar paths without consciously thinking about what we’re doing. Wittgenstein quips somewhere that you “can pretend to be unconscious; but conscious?”  But LW wasn’t thinking about the predominance of what the brain registers, that is, the mass of data that never make it to conscious thought, i.e., consciousness is the rare exception not the norm.

Here is Shaviro on Whitehead: “Decision is what makes consciousness, cognition and public relationality possible in the first place. “Feelings” or movements of “appetition” are the basic elements of mentality (or “inwardness”…). Cognition, consciousness, and responsibility are consequences of this basic mentality, rather than preconditions for it. An aesthetic of decision precedes and grounds cognition and consciousness – rather than either of these being the grounds or preconditions for any process of decision. (PT, #763)

We need to think slime molds and bacteria here – they make their own decisions, or rather decisions happen to them, just like they happen to humans.

My idea is that poetic decision is an occasion for an actual aesthetic contact with the outside.  Poetic decision occurs at the threshold between inner feeling (or “movement of appetition”) and the outside (or public) realm.  We live with the results of decisions that happen to us. Stengers suggests “decisions take place in the presence of those who will bear their consequences.”

Decision is an act of selection.  Etymologically, a decision is a cutting off, it cuts off alternate possibilities.  But you can’t account for them, decisions are beyond that.

“We don’t make decisions because we are free and responsible; rather, we are free and responsible because – and precisely to the extent that – we make decisions.” (Shaviro WC, 94)

The decisions that happen to us, like the thoughts that happen to us, may be expressions of aesthetic causality.  While I think I agree with Tim Morton that poetry tampers directly with causality, I also want to emphasize that poetic process involves decision that takes place in our presence, in the present, and this matters to us.

For Whitehead decision is the culmination of private experience, an event that punctuates a process.  It is Stengers and Whitehead’s embrace of process and relationality – which implies a present – which is incompatible with OOO.  Morton argues that “presence is an optical illusion.”  It is OOO’s emphasis on essence that is incompatible with Stengers’s thought.  Perhaps my difference with Morton is that he seems to emphasize the poem as object, at the expense of poetic process, as if there were only entities or objects, no occasions.

I want to say that poetic decision* as an aesthetic contact provides political hope, i.e., if the goal is to change (rather than to merely interpret) the world.  To believe that another world is possible is important.  It helps that there is a ready source of contact outside the circuits of Capital, outside the commodification of everything in the human world. Aesthetic decision is an event (a very plural event) that is happening all the fucking time, all over the place, uncontrollably, outside the circuits of capital.  Unfortunately while this provides hope, it won’t get us home free, since the poetic decision instantly perishes – it is lost and/or commodified, immediately subsumed in the wake of its event.

Shaviro contrasts the optimism of aesthetic contact (in the form of Hardt/Negri’s living labor and general intellect) to Adorno’s pessimism of the impossibility of avoiding subsumption:

Hardt/Negri and Lazzarato are right, as against Adorno, in asserting the ontological priority of “living labor” or “general intellect” over capital’s recuperation or appropriation of this labor and intellect. But they are willfully naive to think that this ontologically primary process is accessible without passing through the circuits of capital – the necessity of this passage… is what Adorno’s pessimism correctly apprehends, and it is also what fuels Zizek’s criticism of Hardt/Negri. (Shaviro, Pinocchio Theory blog, post #499)

The fact that we can touch the outside should be celebrated; it is the basis of collective creation, the basis of hope for resistance and change.  But after publication (which is the consequence of decision, the culmination of private experience), these creations cannot be accessed outside the circuits of capital, where everything is subsumed and complicitous.

I can relate this antinomy or paradox to Stengers and Shaviro more easily than I can to Morton and Harman.  The point is to have contact with the outside as much as possible and to try to negotiate the political economic circuits as best we can, possibly by following Leibniz dictum 'dic cur hic' – to say why you chose to say this, or to do that, on this precise occasion.  It is to pay attention as best you can to who & where you are. To pay attention to the decisions that are happening to you, e.g., as you write.

Stengers’ difference with OOO is perhaps demonstrated by her insistence (viz Capitalist Sorcery especially) that we must resist all mobilization, all denunciation, and the temptation to turn a theory into a conquest. Force and/or weakness comes before truth and/or justice. Don't look into the distance. The metaphor Stengers uses is that: the job is to sound the depths – as if on a boat calling out the dangers that lurk below the surface.

But for OOO, it is impossible to sound the deepest depths of an object, the emphasis is on the primacy of how objects withdraw from access.

Stengers emphasizes that ‘another world is possible,’ Morton wants the notion of ecology without nature to infect us, to force us to live in the world more ethically.  Both find the current world intolerable.

One question for OOO might be to ask whether it is resisting mobilization - or disentangling itself from notions of ‘progress.’ Morton makes brilliant arguments, and is trying to make the most persuasive case, to make an OOO ecopoetic light come on for us.  Stengers on the other hand is doing immanent critique, trying to dream with us poet practitioners.

___________
*Note that I hope this notion of aesthetic decision is distinct from Laruelle’s notion of philosophical decision as some primordial or transhistorical syntax or structure underlying philosophical practice.  Syntax and structure can’t really precondition or apply to (aesthetic) intuitions without concepts.  Laruelle is claiming non-philosophy, or its syntax, is outside, or hierarchically above.  But I think aesthetics-all-the-way-down as a proposition is only claiming a contact with an outside.

Namedrops Keep Fallin On My Head

-the boobirds have come to eat me, it won't be long now

Daily paintings
There is gonna be a stabbing
in plein air
Lady Gaga's boyfriend
on an orange trike
Ozzy Osbourne's tv agent
Be gentle from now on
Charles Saatchi was supposed to come
I couldn't get there after the bombing
Maria Carey
Indiscriminate love
A videotape of how it really happened
Birth control
A fashion show
I love Marilyn Manson and everything
Angels on his balls
Anything you want
Friend who used to punch his horse
There are ways to do this psychologically
I cling to too much to be able to do this
I am inherited, a ghost
We are all disabled
I'm not saying shit

Dennis Hopper said it was a glazed donut
I guarded this other Hopper at the Walker Art Center
Arnold Schwarzenegger stayed at this hotel
And someone else it wasn't George Bush at the Sturgis Hilton
When you see your dog melting don't jump in
I'm done worrying about shit
The name of my show in LA
Keeping money from me
Paintallica my collective or occulted Venus
Someday you'll wake up and everything will be easy again
Staying at the hotel where Graham Parsons died
Scratched my eye stuck in Joshua Tree
You are full of magic
Wrestling with scorpions
Abducted on Oxycontin
Two little Mormon girls lost in the desert
Sun dancer with the black feet
Welcome to dumbdumb land
Yoko Ono, Richard Flood, all star cast
Hunter Thompson and the Hells Angels
Kanye West, Kim Kardasian
Larry Clark, New York gas stations
David Lynch, David Byrne
Chris Farley knocked on my door
the day he died
Perspective from the shining
Brain plague torn memories
Lost memories ancient history
Tattoo on my arm from shoot in GQ magazine
Obama, there's 50 cent
Black hole in the center
My large telescope
Goofball truth syrup
Charges against you
Sid Vicious family reunion
You have gifts
Albert fuckin Einstein
All the film crews at my house
Wrote that last year
Jonathan Borofsky's roommate at Yale
Tattooed on his ass
Barneys New York stayed up
And chainsawed all night
Pablo Picasso's granddaughter
Carhart all day modeling
Partied with David Blaine

[as thumbed 6/28/2012 at western bridge]

Notes from Jeffrey & Claudia

Drawing in space
Back door to picket fence
Used the clear then the gel
Survived a ten year moratorium on goth

Made a skull of myself
Felt the figment
skin played out over 7 floors
in a world of light
footcandles of bulbs and wonder
Friendship like a river
parenthetical
timing proportion to
celebration
cinema and standup

(The Maldives)

Let's make the box less black
Complete the gesture
how assessment of craft
her fear of flying
carries me

A coffin is placed in the household
portrait hung in its place
wooden shoes for water walking

Two slices, unexpected pleasure
in a wooden box
sandwich with too much bread
what is stacked first
I plied the trade
and overpaid

Life about art and death
Art about life and death
Death about life and art
Dreams about a lost word
lost words and love

"Step away from the car"
or symmetry will kill
homoerotic fashion
I'll show you
how plywood reeks

He proved
childhood never stops
timed to sing
to say it
say it
just sing

[from notes taken 11/8/2012 at henry gallery]

Ecology of Vispo – A Blindfold Test

This is my essay from The Last Vispo Anthology, edited by Nico Vassilakis & Crag Hill. You can buy it here or here.  Free sample of the book is here.

Colored by my own predisposition for the idea of the non-ocular, I’m afraid I’d prefer to unsee the visible in visual poetry.  That is, I’d prefer a blindfold test, where the audient can happily focus on the crisp turning of pages and other less obscure signals. 

The new sentience alive in its calling.  Time to unhook to see. 

But I’m afraid I’ll have to leave the affective mapping, or how visual poems consciously and unconsciously impact us, to others.  I cannot even bear witness, ala Charles Reznikoff, to things not seen.  The truth is that the impetus for this essay was to try to explain why I’m not a partisan of the form.

What intrigues me and what I want to think about here is the ecology of visual poetry, or the logic of its environment.  The point is to try to understand what makes visual poets matter in their own ways, rather than trying to generalize the divergent practices of visual poets.  That is, I want to avoid a general review that looks for potential unity, or that would illustrate what visual poetry is, or what this anthology represents.

In short, I have only questions, no answers: what makes visual poets think – rather than recognize?  And how are visual poets attached to their practice?  The point is not to find some consensus or commonality among visual poets, for these are intractably subjective questions.  How one is attached to a practice relates to how one belongs and belonging could be thought of as a condition of both owning and being owned by a social nexus or community.  How does that sense of belonging obligate us in an affirmative way, i.e., not in the sense of duty?  Maybe this relates to how practitioners are in debt to their habitat, i.e., not completely autonomous?  We’re not alone in the world.

After Mallarme used white space as silence, there’s a mise-en-page that can be endlessly explored.  But visual poetry continues to be impacted by new technologies:  from Gutenberg to the typewriter to early computers to new digital technologies -- which provide toolsets that build on the array of prior toolsets.  There is now easy access to virtually all known alphabets, as well as programs to construct and design (and deconstruct and redesign) new alphabets, which are themselves easily deployable via vectors that mathematically describe each point and curve of each letter form.

There is a “relationship of relevance between situation and tool.”  The “gesture of taking in hand” both produces and is produced by this relationship.  -Isabelle Stengers

Communion crowds the worker.  It crowns her.  Queen of finger painting.  After alpha blockage, manna stored and resold.

Anthems and Definitions

The Last Vispo Anthology as a spectrum of the current state of the art – “documenting the recent surge in visual poetry, ... [extending] the dialectic between art and literature that began with the concrete poetry movement fifty years ago.”

“Vispo” as a separate compact, an abbreviated entity?  Is this a mere Gitmo-ification that mobilizes a term for the digital era?  That's not clear.  But the provocative title ("Last...") suggests Vispo is all but in a crypt, or that the editors feel the practice is coming up against some kind of a pivotal limitation, perhaps on the verge of becoming other than itself, or in desperate need of a revitalized or new habitat.

It swallows the eye -- the all time best hits.  Chasing the non-human toolkits our future presents.  What's never excluded, aka the affect that escapes capture.  The emotion celebrates its lucre, oozing excess.  Book reports that report on the informer.

“Visual poetry is poetry against metaphor. Scram.  Metaphor is let's make dividends in the boom economy of our passion.  Against Metaphor.  Against Description…”   -Donato Mancini

Following Geof Huth’s definition, a visual poet is a poet irrepressibly drawn to the visual.  In an attempt to describe the discipline, Huth suggests that there are three competencies of the visual poet:

(1) printer’s palette -- or mastery of the visual, non-verbal;
(2) poet’s pen -- or mastery of the linguistic aspects; and
(3) printer’s fist -- or mastery of the emotive and intellectual value of letters/gramma, punctuation, typefaces, words, design.

I use the word “mastery” here, though Huth does not, because of the slippery slope inherent to the model he sets forth.  While Huth may be merely describing what he believes the qualities of a competent visual poet are, rather than necessarily ascribing to them, any such model sets up canonical qualities or categories upon which to judge works of visual poetry.

“Visual poetry, unhooked from the instrumentality of design or the discursive histories of contemporary art.  Most visual poets aren't making images, they're making visually over-coded texts that push the Poetry Master back into pre-school.”  -Donato Mancini

Proposition: the visual poem as a record of the decisions that happen to the visual poet.  But this proposition only makes sense if you understand “decision” in the way that Whitehead uses it, where decisions are what happen to enduring entities or subjects. 

“Decision precedes consciousness and it precedes cognition.”  That is, “decisions make cognition possible, not the other way around…  We don’t make decisions because we are free and responsible; rather we are free and responsible because – and precisely to the extent that – we make decisions.” 
-Steve Shaviro

Dick Higgins suggests that both concrete poetry and pattern poetry tell “the story of an ongoing human wish to combine the visual and literary impulses, to tie together the experience of these two areas into an aesthetic whole… To those who attempt this synthesis, something of the picture of the whole seems crucially important.”

Higgins goes on to say that pattern/concrete poetry has no single origin.  And it is easy to speculate that the reflexive act of making marks led to a foregrounding the visual elements of the grapheme in its unfolding or recording.  Calling attention to itself and aware of its own motion – the record of the grapheme in motion becomes a sort of proprioceptive trace/gesture, a constructive practice and extension of the body.

Vispo’s Dog Ate My Homework

1. This convergence of literary and visual impulses has something to do with the problems in the reception of pattern poetry.  Rather than creating singularities that diverge and are somehow beyond comprehension, the image unified with its content was dismissed as a visual pun – a naïve version of reality, simply not complex or serious enough to tackle enlightened notions of the “truth” that art was supposed to express.

2. As Higgins writes of pattern poetry: “it was never the predominant mode and… there were violent attacks upon it in each age in which it occurred; since the history of any poetry is always to some extent the history of responses to it, the antagonism which it aroused continued great during the colonial era, so that it fell into disrepute in one literature after another, eventually, by the 19th century, surviving only in comic, folk, or popular verse.”

3. Ben Jonson dismissed it as “a pair of scissors and a combe in verse.”  Montaigne claimed the pattern poem’s means of composition displayed subtleties which are “frivolous and vain.”  Perhaps Montaigne's objection was that it seems to turn poetry into a mere parlor game.  Divorced from the pursuit of truth, he disparages it as novelty, a mere amusement.  Visual puns generate mere iconic effects that don’t obligate us to think, and that violate the ideals of platonic form.

4. Another explanation for the poor reception is that visual and/or pattern poetry is non-modern and violates a sense of decorum or the tradition that privileges the purity of art forms.

5. “Thus the visual poem claims to abolish playfully the oldest oppositions of our alphabetic civilization: showing and naming; representing and telling; reproducing and articulating; imitating and signifying; looking and reading.”  -Michel Foucault 

6. Visual poetry is a constructive practice, it both shows and names, both represents and tells, etc.  Visual poetry stands outside these oppositions – they are irrelevant to its concerns.

7. In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour describes a world full of hybrid combinations of social and natural objects & subjects.  Humans were never divorced from nature.  Modernity attempts to purify the human and the natural realms, privileging the human realm, including language.  “The proliferation of quasi-objects [viz. the industrial revolution] was… greeted by three different strategies:” first, the ever-increasing separation between the poles of nature and that of society; second, the autonomization of language or meaning; third, the deconstruction of metaphysics.  [my paraphrase]

8. Elias Canetti on the dangers of mixing mediums: “the separate arts should live in the most chaste co-habitation.”  It’s as if the non-platonic intercourse between the word and the image would close up the space in which the reader can breathe.  Welcome to the Kama Sutra school of interconnection.

9. As Whitehead said: “life lurks in the interstices…”   The reader constitutes herself in the gaps.  But there's no reason to think that visual poems necessarily clog these interstices – even when they do aim at unity.  The reader’s faculties are not harmonized by an encounter with a visual poem.

10. The argument may really be about maximizing intensity and affect.  That a unified or closed hybrid object lacks allure.  To unify is a kind of destruction of possibility.

11. Since the world isn’t pure chaos, then there must be some pre-established harmony, even if that’s just a common ground for disagreement. 

12. Friction is an adventure.  The autobiography of a stone.  But there are no marriageable metaphors in a world of physical comedy.

13. “There is no science of the beautiful, but only critique.”  -Kant

14. The divorce of art and science, where science becomes fixated on efficient causes.  But don’t art and science need each other?  Tools with which to think and make marks. 

15. Poetry and other art forms are attached to human interests – they’re attempts to make alluring artifacts.  On the other hand, science demands answers that can be detached from human interest; science wants to eliminate artifacts of subjectivity (i.e., all traces of subjectivity) from the experimental apparatus.  Science wants to find reliable facts, to discover or explain mysteries of nature.

16. This said, art and poetry have always deployed technology or tools – much like science, e.g., the alphabet, the hand.  And science can never completely purify itself of the human artifact.  The experimental apparatus also attempts to uncover alluring facts, which might be precisely those facts that seem to have an alluring lack of human artifact.

17. The real source of this apparent contradiction may be the notion of human interest.  The hybrid objects or assemblages produced by visual poets are facts, regardless of how alluring they are to others.  Perhaps it's a question of what’s reliable (recognition, emotion) versus what allures (or what generates thinking, affect)?

18. “...tools for thinking are then the ones that address and actualize this power of the situation, that make it a matter of concern, in other words, make us think and not recognize.  When we deal with practices, recognition would lead to the question-- why should we take practices seriously as we know very well that they are in the process of being destroyed by Capitalism?  This is their 'sameness', indeed, the only difference being between the already destroyed one and the still-surviving ones.  The ecology of practices is a non-neutral tool as it entails the decisions never to accept Capitalist destruction as freeing the ground for anything but Capitalism itself.”   -Isabelle Stengers

Thoughts On Other Words (an erasure)

These anti-ocular repetitions become us 

I must have been referring to pills 

push-ups jacked to abstract length

Punched out moguls on our pale slope

Dumb bells by the dozens 

Your elegance a delirious lump of restored fat 

We’re rendered invisible

a quietude of pixilated transmission

where the point is to get from zero 

Sharp elbows and table salt

That’s nothing new – a sort of unlettered corpse

drumming a petition for difference

I got sideways – off the scheduled pulse.  Derailed

movement for those who refuse to move

or truncation for those in trunks 

Delicious life is thrown or imbued still

diced down

with this ring a turn of flowers anoints me

its circle becomes arabesque

Just think of the fact

wink their winks

divide the beasts that divide.  Injured and

edged out

the steady hand, the wavering tone

I hear monotheisms are all alike.  Big ears and sandals 

We ate their heros and lived to tell.  Do not forget to change

the subject

reduced to the simplest forms

I removed myself

one foot at a time.  Equal to 160 square rods by the acre 

To divulge a promissory, drag cash across a surface

sniffing air for something new.

Pricked with jellies

an exercise of teeth

dark with times impasse, emptied of curves

rhe better to simulate spin

Unrequited

spheres and tubes

parked in their boats

Rotations without mechanical parts

entice reaction

pellets in the eye

A traumatic exit closed the body to new investment

The wound reveals initiation or closure.  A classic carousel

She rides The Whip or The Deacon of Night

A sine wave

immanent poetic with no entrance

projectile arced or curved

We enclose work and let no light in 

The craven tune erased – forgetting time

the million daggers falling false from the sky 

image diluted

in search of a tree.  The desert plants

Each pleat an affirming push

Relief is as relief was.  The forgotten morsels

all feel

A tightrope on the appointed land

coming together to swim laps in

the sultan's soup.  His lips famished and unnaturally droll

Beyond leather bound – folded in time that stops

for no attack.  Time that gives the people what they want.

Birds until the night swallows their song.

Lost in the borough, no bridge to brook the flow, no sea to settle

The stoop birds approach.  The marvelous perch dispersed.