Digital solipsism and poetry: some reflections on the "word-dreamer"

“The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.”
                                                                         (Gaston Bachelard)

My favourite contemporary thinker, Slavoj Žižek, has got me wondering lately about cyberspace: particularly the question of my own status as reader & writer in relation to a medium that's threatening to replace print literacy itself. In his book In Defense of Lost Causes he has coined the phrase "digital solipsism" to describe a type of social atomism to which the Internet's reduced us. A reveling in private space where any Master-signifiers ("grand narratives") cannot intrude without being instantly trivialized and, more significantly, dematerialized through the most rigorous deconstruction. The poet in me saw something significant in what was intended by Žižek to be a philosophical sidebar to a wider discussion about the politics of space, & the ideological abuses to which it can be put by unscrupulous political ideologies. The poet saw the rebirth of the poem.

The question I ask myself is: can a radically privatized medium like cyberspace serve as the most profound metaphor yet for poetry itself? Privatized in the sense that for the user (e-reader, gamer, tweeter, etc.) to write is essentially to dream since the ship of Absolutes has run aground, and that only imaginative artifacts can be properly made online. The thinking mind's been shattered, with the pieces to be gathered up into new unities. Žižek's claim is that cyberspace is a place distanced so far from reality that to live in it is necessarily to be self-absorbed, almost to the point where we live in a world of pure multiplicities (31), each of us affixed to our own language, truth & reality. The world's most renowned public intellectual understandably worries about the effects of this human and technology disconnect on the notion of participatory democracy. I see in it, rather, a poetry on the wing. The farther away poetry is from the world, the better it is.

We can say language and language-user are virtually the same so that the user deals in only language-dreams (signs or images torn irreparably from their stable referents in reality) rather than indubitable things. Everything's reducible to a new universe of One: and the person most likely to use a language of pure imagery, the poet, necessarily becomes the word-dreamer. It's only in relation to the sources of dream that anything has being, including the poem. Has poetry found its Mount Parnassus here? Does the Internet have the potential for revealing the conditions for a pure Mallarméan interiority and subjectivity without having to anchor the poem, at last, to the usual poetic externals of 'form'', 'affect', 'trope', terms that are as necessarily problematical as things in the world?

It's an intriguing idea worth pursuing. We seem to have rid ourselves of those old confining either-or's; a little criticism, in fact, is all it takes to reduce the Idols of old-school modernism (such as the nation-state, family, community) to the unstable language games they really are. After Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty, nothing is easier to do these days. The old harmonies have turned into what French philosopher Alain Badiou has termed the "atonal world" of choice and liberal-secular tolerance for all viewpoints. Without "the big Other" looking over your shoulder, a pure unfettered reign of expression may finally be possible at last. And what has done more to restrict creativity itself than the 'big Other' of  rhyme, metre, genre, etc. Timothy Steele, whose plea in his book Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter is for precisely a return to these traditional poetic accoutrements, certainly figures among those who've lost their voice in this new digitized era. But the poor disenfranchised Formalist poet & critic can take comfort in the return of a true poesis.

If any new digitized poetry is to arise out of this literary utopia, created without the old restrictions, inequalities and frustrating editorial fiats, (a type of the "multiculturalist different-lifestyles paradise"Žižek critiques in his work) it'll have to be a work of pure imagination. Sensory appeals only will lead us only to chimeras anyways, the very stuff of poetic imagery. There are no textual exemplars against which to make absolute comparisons in a world that's had the ground virtually pulled out from under it. Can the processes be described? Of course, books on multimedia, media-technology & digital poetry devoted to them are already legion. Can the products be named? I can certainly cite the poets who've exploited cyberspace resources and identify types of Internet-based literary artwork dependent on them, such as Robert Kendall's "Word Circuits", Bob Grumman's mathemaku, Geof Huth's pwoermd, video poems, Flarf, etc. But the word-dreamer is not the name of a techné, a blueprint for a future poetics, and the poet not an employee who works at the sign of the Microsoft logo.

The word-dreamer's a person whose language must now be that of a pure rêve as if s/he lives in a disembodied state answerable to nobody, being his/her own reader, editor and publisher, radically free to set his/her own artistic coordinates and agendas. As if the poet can do nothing but continually write his/her own dream in an environment of pure unfettered choices. It's French literary critic Gaston Bachelard who coined the phrase and who says the following about the true freedom found in contemporary poetry:

Time was when the poetic arts codified the licenses to be permitted. Contemporary poetry, however, has introduced freedom in the very body of the language. As a result, poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom. (The Poetics of Space, xxvii)

Bachelard refers to the scope of imaginative activity in the daydream state as an "intimate immensity" (183), a type of imaginative activity that experiences the feeling of "elsewhere"while working in its own "natural surroundings"; and it's here he comes closest to our sense of the nature of the artist's solipsism in cyberspace. What the artist working alone online does is give expression to a "phenomenology without phenomena" (184): to experience the immensity and almost dizzying dimensions of poetic activity and yet remain bound, at the same time, to life's purely processual pro tempore framework. The process is a self-referential one: as Bachelard says, the impression of immensity the poem conveys relies on nothing but the pure imaginative activity of the individual isolated in his own daydream. Cyberspace and daydream mean the same thing here. If we want to get a sense of type of poetry only the self-absorbed produces, we must (retracing Bachelard's journey to the "imagining being")

enter into a region of the purest sort of phenomenology—a phenomenology without phenomena; or, stated less paradoxically, one that, in order to know the productive flow of images, need not wait for the phenomena of the imagination to take form and become stabilized in completed images. In other words, since immense is not an object, a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analyzing images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. (184)

And in language that anticipates cyberspace and digital solipsism, Bachelard refers to the poetic immensity that resides in the poet alone as a "quiet daydreaming":

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man [sic]. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming. (184)

The word-dreamer is then a term for a literary ideal that is fully actualizable in cyberspace. Of the term itself, and of its applications to an actual poetic practice, the following things may be said:

1. the digital solipsism decried by Žižek as a form of harmful political escapism is rather (in my view) a retreat into a pure imaginative freedom;
2. cyberspace can be taken to be not a substitute for but rather the very condition of the essential daydream quality of artistic creation in general;
3. despite its oneirc properties, the work of the poet as word- dreamer is to be seen as creation of new organic wholes gathered from the fragments of the "old harmonies";
4. a new sublime ("immensity") opens to the imagination, magnificently imaged in the poet's essential aloneness in cyberspace. Terms like 'web' and 'cloud' are its true horizons;
5. to write the dream is a continual search for the image of the poet's restful self-absorption: poetry and the poet subserve the Image.