"Close writing': or some transcendental properties of the poetry blog

"La poésie est science, déconstruction des évidences mortes...celle du coeur, de l'âme de la patrie et de l'homme." ("Les Dix Propositions", La Presse 4 April 1970, cited in Caroline Bayard's The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism )

But communication would be impossible if it should have to begin in the ego, a free subject, to whom every other would be only a limitation that invites war, domination, precaution and information. To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition. It is complete not in opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him (sic). (Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence )

One of the most urgent tasks for contemporary thought is, without doubt, to redefine the concept of the transcendental in terms of its relation with language...[H]ere "transcendental" must instead indicate an experience which is undergone within language. (Giorgio Agamben, cited in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser)

Blogs? If it's neo-Formalist discourse you want, marked by very well-informed and astute commentary, there's Curtis Faville's Compass Rose, or if you'd like to see perhaps Canada's most prolific avant-gardist at work, Clifford Duffy, visit his radio deleuze, a singularly dadaist site with spectacular graphics & audio- and visual- montages for the works of a single author.

 Or if a more openly (& brazenly) non- or counter-or anti-syntactic visual poetry is your thing, see dbqp: visualizing poetics, both cutting-edge & multi-composite to the teeth, or if you subscribe rather to the grand ol' narratives of current LANGUAGE poetics, Ron Silliman's Blog and Charles Bernstein's WEB LOG are for you. A style for just about everyone. Serialist, collage or 'old school' representationalist; minimal, concretist or 'New Sentence'. But what have genres and poetic manifesto really amounted to these days? What have they really to do with the blog? And where's the room for development and responsible critique in the Internet's crowded synchrony?

 As if the bewildering array of styles weren't enough, there's the very important question of writing that goes on in (and for) them. I don't mean writing in the technical sense that servers, website and design & editing features act as its primary means of production. Search technology is not the same as academic research. And nor is it writing in the traditional chirographic sense for it's impossible to write for the blog; a deep abiding sense of whatever it is literacy means has been usurped by that grotesquerie of indelible Internet ink and e-readership, always radically mixed-mode, ethereal and impolitic. I'm looking at writing as the most critical project imaginable.

 It's sort of Lacan's point about the text writing the reader except that there's no real writing going on at all. With nothing to experiment on anymore, we're not the tabula rasa of old. Texts without borders cannot be useful analogues anymore for Lacanian or Kristevian subconscious undercurrents since 'digital only' takes up virtually no space or soul at all. Writing for the blog is as counter-intuitive a notion as driving for the road. So what exactly is it? 

The phonetic alphabet gives sounds a shape and textual 'look' on the page that are instantly transmissible: messages codified, stored and easy to be registered made writing about look unconfoundingly natural. Books, headings, table of contents, citations, etc are the traditional paraphernalia of intelligibility and loci for discussion. In phonetic writing the Word has a mind of its own, wound tight and ready to mean anything under the right conditions. But those typographical spaces (even in the best avant-garde work), the domain or extract of the roving "thinking eye" (as Silliman puts it) have been transgressed for good. Read good visual/concrete poetry today, such as you see in Geof Huth's dbqp: visualizing poetics, and try telling the artifact from the separate visual-syntactic& hypergraphical elements from which it arises. The poem is the "writing eye" that stares back at you, authorial intention and design reduced to subsets of its own easily reproducible technics.


The weblog's become the deconstructed site everyone's been hankering after for the past three decades: the Internet's delivered the goods, handily removing all the typographical, semantic, and authorial barriers that ever stood in the way between you and the signifiant. Not pre- or anti- but perhaps simulverbal communication; a simultaneity of act and product desperate enough for attention to pierce through the babble of multiple sites.The life-world, 'old school' aesthetics, and real author-reader symbiosis have been sacrificed to an impersonal but ubiquitous binary beast. As requested. It's not, in Iser's way of speaking, "an aesthetic object that will reveal the thought system of the social world" (The Act of Reading, 101): the Internet's too asocial, too voluptuously self-absorbed for that.

The problem is that to step beyond some threshold of minimal reading competency is to sense not a text (the d'hors text paradigm permanently displaced by a stiff-necked regimen of 'on/off' coding) but an ominous graphomania. The reader doesn't, in radio deleuze, for example, read poststructuralist deleuze at all; s/he wades rather into the intercellular deep of Clifford Duffy's dream, waging the same anti-Language war. It's interesting that in two of the blogs listed above (Duffy's and Bernstein's) reader comments are not allowed, perhaps as a way of averting the visitor to the very real danger of being trapped not in cyberspace but headspace where there's only room for one. Writing is the only enter- and exit- strategy we have and yet here it cannot really be about anything nor intended for any particular audience nor even designed to give a point of view. Cannot be a writing at all that's unconfoundingly tied (as it once hoped to be) to signs, referents or whatnot.

And so what's all the fuss about close 'reading', close 'listening' then? After a while Bernstein's Pennsound becomes a bore, poets droning on about reading; Silliman's "Alphabet", just downright self-mystifying. If Walter J. Ong's thesis about orality irretrievably assimilated to technical literacy (in Orality and Literacy) has any merit, it's because we sense that after writing there's no going back to a privileged preverbal place. Orality isn't an option (for all of the resemblances of e-reading to preliterate ages). Poetries that have been wound this tight can do nothing but put on displays of themselves, glaringly technical and scenographic: they are a sadly atrophied version of an old school artes virorum. 

 And by writing I don't mean écriture (or what Canadian theorist Caroline Bayard calls écouture in the case of radical performance): it's old hat by now and we've gone beyond that. I mean with all this promiscuous heterogeneity in the blogosphere, who needs to bother about codes and hidden discourses anymore? They're all around you. Most internet sites are pretty up-front about those sorts of things: ironic and playful, allegorical and irreverent to the teeth. So how useful will it be for writing to do duty for anything that's pretty much unraveled itself to this extent, bare textual presences audited, texted and 'tweeted' ad nauseum?

 I mean if poetry can be envisaged (as in Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment ) literally "subsist[ing], like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form", what's the point of it all?  I fear that poetry sites whose signature layouts, content and textual panache are signs of a blogging self really have nothing to say. With authorial comes scriptural death. But we write !And if authors & their sites become morose or stupidly overconfident (and surprisingly most of them do at times, as I've discovered), how can a reader be expected to fill in those empty "ciphers" robbed of aesthetic content, and avoid the fall at the same time into kitschy discourse? The blog is testimony, if ever there was one, to the hegelian "dark night in which all cows are black", the deadpan face of the Internet's empty Absolute. To communicate through the blog seems to me about as absurd as Bök's hope to encode poetry for posterity. Gone is the notion of an "implied reader"who as part of textual structure (Iser) engages in ongoing discussion about literary meaning,

Death of the author: no kidding!Everything's dead except the will to admit it's finally died & like concerned artists perhaps prevent cases of this kind of self-immolation from recurring. Adorno's point about the death of poetry post-Auschwitz is well taken. It's perhaps in that sense that Canada's bp Nichol and bill bissett talked about the logotherapy of poetry. Perhaps writing is essentially therapy but I think they got it the other way around: poetry causes the therapy. Its healing properties have evaporated; and if we allow the Word into our souls it won't hover above vocables like Spirit (as bill bissett & Ron Silliman hope it will) but just stare back at us (like an unblinking Masonic eye), incapable of changing anything, empty pre-emptive bluster at best. The concretists, dadaists, surrealists, etc wanted to smash language & scatter the bits over the white screen: well, they've got it now. "La désintegration du langage est accomplie." (Raoul Duguay)

The result is weblogs have also grown a curiously thick skin to compensate for this spirit deficit. How? When spelling changes into graphics, representation into hypertext, and linear thinking into 'clouds' ("ephemeral electromagnetic traces"), the type of traditional literacy the blog tried to rely on, scoping out the world for meaning, turns into a pod that's hard to penetrate. Far from the playful & ironic creatures we thought the Internet would make us, we've actually turned out to be ornery monads (not nomads)who live under retractable roofs, looking out at the world through a single glazed Eye. We prefer depth but like sea otters sleep tied to seaweed,  bobbing near the shoreline.Spending too much time in any one blog gives the living sensorium a distinctly oneiric rather than fleshy feel for the world, the other, self. Reader-response is what blogs do but only unintentionally, and only if the tides sway them close enough to dry land.

 Consequently I've never really encountered anything as 'unwriterly' as the poet's weblog: in fact, I've never encountered anything as 'unwriterly' as e-writing itself or the blogger. But the urge to write persists despite the poststructuralist gutting of language, with opinions stubbornly locked into place, countless counter-discourses on the ready. I can think of only one way out of this impasse (or  'aporia'), however. And that's through what I call 'close' writing, one modeled on the Levinasian conception of "responsibility for the other" ( in Otherwise Than Being ) but I will have to be content with only a general outline for now. There's a lot at stake.

I define 'close writing' as a type of  'close watching' (not reading) to avoid the fatal deflection off text (dévier de text) in which the glaring You switches place with content and observer and observed invariably collapse into each other's arms. Reflection is neither participatory nor autonomous enough a description for the type of essential role-reversal that must take place for e-communication to thrive. I suggest we use "transcendence" instead of reflection or authorial intention or referentiality. Preferring to drop the baggage of poststructuralist experimentation altogether & begin to view writing as rather an ontological leap into text, since without the linguistic innards to keep it going  it can be nothing but that. Communication with the other (that the weblog primarily showcases)  is transcendent and as such always inherently dangerous, risky (Levinas). We're ultimately responsible for the blog "spectacle" we've created.

Denuded poststructuralist language cannot read the labile, processual world fully without also unwittingly becoming the carrier of every type of intolerable dogmatism. Perhaps bissett and Silliman have been inching in their works, maybe without meaning to be, towards just this sense of the 'transcendental' to keep the reader from being swallowed whole. I think, for example, of Silliman's description of the prose poem in The New Sentence as a"discontinuous-but-eternal presentness" (180-81), a language of teleology in-laying phrases like "upward falling", "integrate up"into a discussion of contemporary literary theory . The blog as the site of the encapsulation of thought and creativity may have to come in for a virtual ethics, e-writers having to become linguistics watchdogs at the same time. In a future blog article I'd like to show how this innate self-regulating impulse of writers to become responsible for each other's writings actually works, using the weblogs cited at the beginning.