Has the Internet changed the way I read? You bet.

As I've argued in my previous post, reading of any type stands faced with a digital Other that doesn't mean the topic of technology is more popular than ever: it's, more significantly, a case of a complete absorption of traditional literacy into the history, context and rules of an emergent global capitalist system. And networked communication models seem to be the preferred way in which to read that new economic order. The old proprietary (elitist top-down) system is clearly disappearing in favour of a more interconnected model whose paradigm is a user-friendly Web 2.0 (and nowhere is this more evident than in the demise of bound books, print magazines, academic journals, etc.). The reader soon sees that hierarchized discourses of traditional literacy are giving way to a new filtering of the life world through a more radically open-sourced way to read.

The digital Other is not the negative term in a binary relationship. It's rather like the complex life-sustaining stuff of which ecosystems and entire planets are composed. The term 'cloud' seems to cover that all-pervading sense nicely enough. Cloud computing, in short, is today the new reading & writing paradigm sans pareil; as defined by  the National Institute of Standards and Technology, "Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." They are transnational, ubiquitous and global structures of understanding without which any emerging notion of literacy is impossible. It's to these network 'signifieds' that language users must necessarily refer in order to understand the nature of their reading. Far from escaping they must embrace them for the connections between user and a "shared pool of configurable computing resources" are tantalizingly inseparable.

What this means is that technology has given the reader a system of distribution and mobilization of configurable data rather than ideas in a Platonist sense, static eternal essences to be extracted from words. And even the term 'consciousness' goes by the wayside, with the traditional ""Cartesian Theatre" notion replaced by what philosopher Daniel Dennet refers to as the self's "semi-independent agencies" interacting at the same time. Conservative literacy models still stuck in Cartesian paradigms give way to 'clouds' of global data banks and an almost instantaneous deployment of the technological means to store, distribute and sell them: purely processual and pro tempore. Literacy and Information Technology go hand in hand. Truth is usable, vendible and flexible in ways that make traditional rhetorical views of reading look doubly archaic: first as being too rigidly book-dependent and then as comically prescriptive. Readers with their heads in the clouds will necessarily be conscious of the social and economic orders of the day: there's a profound symmetry (and irony), in fact, between language based on IT models and the fluid dynamics of life itself . Reading's become necessarily globalized, drawn to the more current realities of civil society dissension, coalitions and movements, as to its natural element since they form the newest literary tropes of a world always in crisis & change.

Literacy will be a way to channel incoming events of a very vibrant life world through personally assimilable orders of meaning and significance. The reader's become gargantuan devourers of information in a post-print world in which interaction & accessibility are the only criteria of success:  in which cloud computing, mobile technology, and social networking, among other new research tools, form the parameters of educated debate. Interpretive options can vary among data-users as widely as information technologies will allow, irrespective of subject qualifications and any scholarly vetting.The interpretation of a poem, for example, can range from a Marxian analysis of exploitive socio-economic conditions, the text as commoditized item, to a Formalist methodology where the same text is seen as a serenely self-enclosed carrier of literary meaning, undisturbed by outside social-political forces.And anything in between, from Freud, feminism to reader response, is fair game. Nothing's changed except that it can now be one or the other, or both simultaneously without contravening some cherished law of non-contradiction that's only served to create a category of excluded ideas: and the blog, wiki and YouTube can offer their own uniquely differing takes on the meaning of 'authorial intention' as valid as anything to be found in recent academic MLA Bibliography listings. There's no substantive sense in which one viewpoint serves up the poem better than another, not in this multimedia stew: just as there's no way of marking any qualitative differences between PDF file or email documents.

The Marxist or Formalist thesis: which is the more convincing? Which one accords more closely to the nature of things? The questions are absurd. Neither alone can be adduced as the winner since the whole discussion has been made possible through the self-perpetuating algorithms of data searches (even if I'm reading from traditional books & scholarly articles). Meta-data, and the kind generated by Google searches has set the standard, are value-neutral and critically impotent. And more recently a move away from Web browsers to a post-HTML world of more serviceable Internet applications led by iPhone technology makes the transfer of data even more anti-traditional.The digital Other, rather than being seen as some transcendent force to be reckoned with, the arena of conflicts between subaltern & dominant discourses,  is simply a way of pitting individual viewpoints against those of other network users who read from the same technologized book of Nature. To read is the exact equivalent of "on-demand network access", and in this simultaneity of data exchange the winner is always the user of the system. Not just Marxist or Formalist alone or any one privileged position can be separated from the "networks, servers, storage, applications, and services" that make literary (and any type of discussion) possible.

Reading (and literacy in general )cannot be seen as the technological arm of a liberal-democratic capitalist regime that made it possible.There is, for example, no socialist alternative to the predominantly IT underpinnings of e-literacy. Literacy is not ideological but strictly technological: it always has been. It looks to me as though the only thing that can save the bound book from extinction is more of the digitized form in which it now appears & the only reading strategy than can make it appealing again, the current cloud-computing one. It's sort of reminiscent of the way the early capitalists did not so much make obsolete as profit by the new emerging business potential of scribal authors in the pre-print world, suiting print technology to literacy itself, killing the old unproductive technologies but keeping the spirit of the work very much alive. As Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin say in their The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800,

Living off and among books, in daily contact with men of letters, intellectuals and theologians, and also with students and the cultured public—in a word, with all who wrote and read—printers and booksellers naturally interested themselves in things of the mind as well as in commerce, if only to conduct their business more profitably.(143)

Has internet technology (of which cloud-computing seems to be its most etherealized and universal version) changed the way I read? Without a doubt. I'd like to end by outlining the characteristics of the 'new reader' consistent with the nature and direction of the new radically open network models of Internet communication. The 'new reader'

• insinuates himself into the text in a way that robs the traditional text/author of much of their top-down authority
• is a cultured member of a globalized world order attuned to its daily crises and changes 
• sees literacy as comprising of patterns of distribution & mobilization of technological means
• is cognizant of the absorption of inner into outer, the artist's subjective nature into the globalized conditions of every type of human expression imaginable
•  has the potential to make herself into a gargantuan devourer of cultural capital everywhere (thanks to the almost limitless resources of what Žižek's called "digital capitalism")
• can, in fact, change the digital Other into the I of a radical self-referentiality from which there's no escaping: perhaps to be best seen as a process moving in the opposite direction to the Lévinasian concept of the Face. In other words, the same reduction to Sameness but without the ethical angst

In my next post I'd like to give an example of how a 'new reader' can read a poem, and how I personally feel about it.

How the Internet has changed the way I read. Or has it?

It's not so much a case of the Internet giving different materials to read as of the same materials being read in a different medium: & actually not even read so much as skimmed for main points (as studies of typical Internet reading patterns have shown) and regarded primarily as a technologically updated version of the Illuminated page that's responsive more to software than human 'wet ware'. But I'm not interested in the question of the displacement of traditional literacy by an e-book environment of Kindle readers, e-ink and continual information distribution, with the likelihood that whole libraries with no bound books will one day appear. The growing demise of big-box bookstores  (like 'Borders', 'Barnes and Noble') is almost commonplace now. Nothing's really changed if just one type of book is being replaced by another: under these changing conditions nothing's really at stake for literacy at all. It's just a different type of hardware subject to the same rules of commodity exchange.

Even computer-generated texts must accommodate themselves to what I see as a daunting digital presence: actually an emerging Other with its own unique context, relatively recent history and rules of engagement. Something we've created out of a radically changed field of reading & writing, one to which media technologies & the Internet businesses (Google, Intel Corp, Apple Inc.etc) that exploit them have, of course, contributed greatly. A reading public, attuned to the allurements of a globalized  economy, also stands to profit greatly from a system in which to participate is to win the prize almost instantly . And the prize is access to network models of communication that have all but undermined traditional hierarchies of established viewpoints & the priesthood of 'experts' they keep in place. Network connections (usually of the social Facebook, Twitter types, etc) and the emergent Internet technologies that facilitate them have virtually effaced any qualitative differences between print and online communication.

Yes, we've become the competition, competitor and victor since networked selves follow the same exploitive global capital agenda. And the thought of losing in a competition of our own making is virtually impossible. It's ourselves we've embraced as the gargantuan devourer of information in a post-print world. And even if we're led by humanitarian gestures (as in the case of recent Humane Reader and One Laptop Per Child initiatives to spread the benefits of e-literacy to developing nations) the e-reader phenomenon can scarcely be seen as anything but a disguised techno-mastery distributing largesse to classes of e-illiterate poor it's helped to create. Reading, and it doesn't matter whether it's of the print or online type, is faced with a digitized 'alterity' comprised (in my view) of all the values of an unbounded capitalist mania for production, expropriation and domination.  Informed citizens are walking mirror-images of an unrelenting process of knowledge accumulation and distribution abetted by multimedia and a growing trend to make even democratic processes subserve a "communications and collaboration technology" model.

We've stepped out of ourselves (in the sense of having lost contact with a deep underlying aesthetic core to which we privately gain access), entrenched in a vicious self-referentiality from which there's no escaping. Because of (and not just in conjunction with) Internet technology we read primarily to set up our own little private cultural fiefdoms & become their chief interpreters & scribes: producers, consumers & editors all rolled into one. Robert Philbin in an online article entitled "Zizek, Poiesis, and Politics" makes a similar point about the cynicism of literary aesthetics in the age of "exhausted multi-media techno concepts":

Modern, Postmodern aesthetics appear redundant, insecure, self-annihilatingly cynical, while the art itself is largely passe, an accumulation of market-driven fetish models of commodities, collectables, and exhausted multi-media techno concepts, which momentarily delight or distract from the obvious mundane schizophrenic state of corporate global ideology.

The schizophrenia to which Philbin refers is precisely a condition caused by this radical intermixing of world & hyper-reader. Slavoj Žižek himself in his book First as Tragedy, then as Farce talks about a new global class of people with a penchant for privacy & exclusivity: "gated superrich" consumers who "are thus creating a life-world of their own to solve their anguishing hermeneutic problem" .(4) I'm sure he would have said the same about their reading habits. We seemed to have created a similar type of radical privacy for the act of reading and built barbed-wire fences around contents of consciousness themselves, reserving the right to exclude everyone but ourselves from straying beyond the borders of the page. In fact, we've kept firmly locked in our own heads the whole universe of discourse. The pains of interpreting the world aright (Žižek's "hermeneutic problem") can be alleviated considerably, of course, if the range of competitive viewpoints is reduced to a single globalized 'Other' whose interests and ours coalesce completely.

I've found in Jodi Dean's Thursday, 23 September I cite blog post entitled "Communicative capitalism and the commons" a very compelling list of the ways in which "networked communications" can turn into tools of exploitation & appropriation vis-à-vis a discussion of the views of Italian Marxist philosopher Cesare Casarino. I'd agree with most of it except that the enemy is not the traditional "owners of the means of production" but rather the workers themselves. The presence of the digital other has almost made the Marxist critique outdated. I think the network-user, rather than Internet corporate villain (such as the ones identified in Casarino's analysis) is the sole cause of the "self-reproducing excess" of the capitalist system, not the other way around: communication networks comprising of software, cell phones, laptops, etc cannot be seen as the generators of "surplus value" and those who use them as dupes.

I'm interested in this topic of Internet reading because I wonder if it applies to me at all. Is there, in other words, a sense in which I can consciously absent myself from the unbounded egoism spurred on by e-book literacy? Am I exempted because I understand it? Am I an exceptional reader in that sense or is the phenomenon too menacingly ubiquitous to avoid? Questions I'd like to address in my next blog post.

Some observations on a first book of poetry, Jean Genet & the nature of writing as "wound"

When I decided it was now time to assemble (for a first book of poetry) some fifty or sixty poems culled from hundreds written over the past eight to ten years, I don't think anything could have prepared me for what was to come: in particular, the degree of engagement in poetry itself (and language) and the vital necessity for honest self-assessment it entails.And, come to think of it, I've never been more acutely aware of my age either. I still can't shake the feeling that the better a poet is, the earlier the writing must have started so that late-bloomers like me are also condemned to suffer from bouts of self-denigration. I always seem to be looking over my shoulder rather than at the poem in front of me, conscious of all the writers who'd started much earlier, foolishly plotting writing proficiency on some sort of age-rated scale that has, of course, little to do with the nature of things. I wonder where this instinct to kill the artist in a work barely begun comes from. Why the insecurities now?

Meticulous editing & careful (and, at times, excruciatingly slow) sifting through hundreds of poems, combined with questions of literary style & suitability, are unpleasant aspects of the publishing game. Not to mention the question of the best publication route (mainstream, small press, chapbook, etc.), over which there is endless debate these days, and the printing costs & the horrendous expenditure of emotional & psychic energy involved in moving a literary product. I enjoy sending out the odd poem to print or ezine magazines; and I enjoy poetry readings even more. Poetry as performance has always appealed to me as does its usual theatre and tone and variable pacing: & nothing can quite hold the audience's attention more than the vital difference between personality and poem. But to turn inspired writing, almost a poem for every significantly lived moment, into a final 'codex', bound for posterity or oblivion, seems to me a bit unnerving, not to mention crassly egotistical. And to read out of that same bound book of poems (as all too many poets do) to an ever diminishing market is to reduce it to a pure spectacle: one which has, in fact, lately turned the performance into a technological 'theatre of cruelty'.

And, of course, the critics, from Internet hack to the more academic (usually 'grad school') type, hover over every verse line: my experiences with them have been so unfavourable that I also seem to have formed this 'literary committee' in my head on whose final deliberation the success of every poem depends. A committee that's every bit as Kafkaesque as it sounds. I'm embarrassed to admit how often a critic's unkind remark about a single misplaced word or unintelligible line has set me back. Eliot's famous injunction to regard the critic's role as being solely an elucidatory one leaves me cold:— it's never occurred to the great man to consider that criticism can disclose a literary intention as easily as a weapon. At least, it's felt that way to me at times. The art of critique can be predatory and it's not something to which I've become fully accustomed yet.

So why write, & why publish? And how to get over the impediments of age, endless revision, diminishing self-confidence & fear of the critic's blade? Well, I'd prefer to change a question into a statement and make the writing a reason for the knife itself. It's small (or no) comfort at all but it's the way it is. Let the imminent negatives of writing open into a wound! Writing precisely because of the gashes it's bound to inflict and because slashing is, after all, what the critics & readers are there for. French novelist, dramatist & poet Jean Genet, in his famous essay on sculptor Alberto Giacometti, said that "Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound,different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself,” (from "The Studio of Alberto Giacometti" in The Selected Writings of Jean Genet, ed. Edmund White, p. 310) and it's from him I derive this central insight into the nature of artistic creation in general. It's perhaps from this that a good deal of my own gnawing self-doubts necessarily arises (I can't claim to having attributed it to anything but a decision to publish & acquaintance with the writings of this remarkable author).

I say without reservation that writing is a wound because nothing exposes more the wound of human frailty &weakness & the essential fissure in the ground of art itself. It can almost be stated as a tautology. Writing isn't designed for dogmatism or critical posturing: the frail scaffolding of ineffective imaginations and ineffective writers who equate singularity (in the uniquely insightful sense used by critic Derek Attridge) with the boredom of a single artistic style or viewpoint. Nothing is as stultifying & unsatisfactory (to me) than awards-friendly work since a very large part of what constitutes artistic genuineness—namely, the violence of alienation and rejection resulting in injury—is always denied to these few acclaimed winners who've been too sheltered too soon from the knife. To the few who are always too few to matter, of course, precisely because they never seem to miss the mark.

Art (poetry, in my case) that's afraid of "infirmity" (318) isn't worth the bother: without the limp the work can never be known. Even the tragic shamefacedness of artists who've been all but eliminated reveals an essential space of pure beauty reserved only for them. As American poet Jack Spicer says, "You only have the right to piss in the fountain/If you are beautiful." The marginalized always stand out easily in a crowd of the self-congratulatory: at least I can spot them. On the other hand, fêted authors in a system of literacy by bureaucracy (such as we have in Canada) walk too brazenly in the open for their own good because that vital "elimination of the viewer" (320) is denied them, the invisibility they fear more than non-recognition. It's in this "total solitude" (328) the beauty of work, and of the worker, resides. Genet's estimation of Giacometti's sculptures and drawings applies to art, and the artist above all, and is worth quoting in full:

Giacometti's art, then, is not a social art that would establish a social link between objects—man and his secretions—but rather an art of superior beggars and bums, so pure that they could be united by a recognition of the solitude of every being and of every object. 'I am alone,' the object seems to say, 'hence caught within a necessity against which you are powerless. If I am only what I am, I am indestructible. Being what I am, and unconditionally, my solitude knows yours.'" (328-29)

But small comfort this is, the growing mistrust of ability & scope never having been driven home so hard. After all, Giacometti is Giacometti & and the artistic record speaks for itself; in fact, it's even likely that Genet's essay was written only as a sort of homage to the man who'd sculpted his own face. And if that's the case, Genet himself can be accused of a sort of sycophantism. But that's missing the point, obviously. The piece is autobiographical, as is my own account of the terrible inner-demons that the act of self-promotion (that is publishing) calls forth: demons from whom writers of any ability and means must receive that distinguishing mark of the damned. Derek Attridge says, "The text remains a writing as long as it is read" (The Singularity of Literature, 105): I say, respecting the same "act-event" of creativity, the poem widens into a wound even as it's being written, one that's felt long after it's been solidified into book form. Now perhaps a haunting memory.

A translation of the opening 20 lines of Lucretius' epic poem"De Rerum Natura"

                          LIBER PRIMUS

Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas,
alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis
concelebras, per te quoniam genus omne animantum
concipitur visitque exortum lumina solis:
te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila caeli
adventumque tuum, tibi suavis daedala tellus
summittit flores, tibi rident aequora ponti
placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum.

nam simul ac species patefactast verna diei
et reserata viget genitabilis aura favoni,
aeriae primum volucres te, diva, tuumque
significant initum perculsae corda tua vi.

inde ferae pecudes persultant pabula laeta
et rapidos tranant amnis: ita capta lepore
te sequitur cupide quo quamque inducere pergis.

denique per maria ac montis fluviosque rapaces
frondiferasque domos avium camposque virentis
omnibus incutiens blandum per pectora amorem
efficis ut cupide generatim saecla propagent.
_________________________

                            Book I

Mother of Aeneas, delight of gods and men,
fruitful Venus, you who celebrate under heaven's
gliding signs the ship-bearing seas & fruitful shores,
since through you every kind of living being
is conceived & coming forth visits the land
of light:—
                you, goddess, from whom the winds flee,
(even clouds of heaven shun your arrival),
& for whom the cunning earth lets sweet buds grow,
& the sea's smooth surfaces laugh and happy skies
shine in celestial light.

                               For as soon as the spring-like face
of day appears,with its strong & life-giving west-wind,
birds are first, goddess, to make your presence known,
all their resistance beaten down.

                                                 Then the wild beasts
scour the joyous fields and pass through rapids: so en-
thralling is your charm that all living things ardently go
wherever you hasten to take them.

                                                And in the midst of seas,
 mountains and violent floods, the birds' leafy nests and
 verdant plains, you entice them with an alluring love,
 the kind that keeps the species going.

The art of Bogdan Luca: reflections on the Niagara Peninsula

I'd like to thank poet Irina Moga for introducing me to the work of Bogdan Luca, a young artist living in the Toronto region of Ontario. In fact, Irina has created a site entitled "Artist’s Studio: Bogdan Luca & The Genesis of A Work of Art" dedicated to exploring the genesis of artistic production as exemplified in Luca's recent Niagara Peninsula paintings. As Irina says, "The intent of this event is to provide a view into the creative process, on how a work of art emerges from the chaos of every day life and of the themes and artistic influences at play in such an endeavor." I very much like that as a mission statement.

I feel particularly privileged to have been asked to write a guest post on Luca's work, which I shall certainly do in the near future. In the meantime I will enjoy the incredible work of Bogdan Luca, visiting Irina's site daily and posting comments. As Irina has said to me in a recent email, it is her intention to bring together a wide body of interested observers, artists & writers in this exploration of the "genesis of a work of art".

This is the idea of artistic community at its best.

A translation of two prose poems by Pierre Reverdy

TRAITS ET FIGURES

     Une éclaircie avec du bleu dans le ciel; dans la forêt des
clairières toutes vertes; mais dans la ville où le dessin nous
emprisonne, l'arc de cercle du porche, les carrés de fenêtres, les
losanges des toits.
     Des lignes, rien que des lignes, pour la commodité des
bâtisses humaines.
     Dans ma têtes des lignes, rien que des lignes; si je pouvais y
mettre un peu d'ordre seulement.


OUTLINES AND FIGURES

     A blue sky opening; a sweep of forest green; but in the town
 (a model prison!) the portal's arch, square windows,
& diamond-shaped roofs.
     The garish city comforts of lines, and more lines.
     In my head, lines and nothing but lines. Oh, to put
them in some kind of order.
    
     

L'AIR MEURTRI

     Il fait si chaud que l'air vibre et que tout bruit devient
assourdissant. Des meutes de chiens féroces aboient. Par les
fenêtres ouvertes, les cris des femmes rivalisent avec cette fanfare
barbare.
     Le froid a de la peine à geler ces paroles. Si les oiseaux se
taisaient, si les femmes se taisaient, si les chiens étaient mors
. . .Un moment les jardins sont calmes et tout s'endort; mais
bientôt le terrible bruit recommence. Ce sont les appels du soleil
et chacun y répond avec exubérance. Quelques êtres muets qu'on
accable ne peuvent protester ni se venger. Le bruit souverain les
opprime.
     Dans les fumées, par-dessus les toits qui s'en préservent
seuls, j'aurais fait tournoyer ma tête comme un grelot sans pois
au bout d'une ficelle. La vitesse ouatée jusqu'aux nuages et
permettre au ruisseau de murmurer tout seul!
     Le ciel est descendu, on a refermé les fenêtres et les bouches
sont closes. Après la chute des feuilles les oiseaux même n'osent
plus gazouiller. Il fait si froid.
     L'hiver c'est l'intervalle du silence.

DEADLY AIR

     The air vibrates, it's so hot and any noise wears you down.
Packs of ferocious dogs are barking. Through the open windows,
cries of women to rival the inhuman clamour outside.
     The cold can scarcely freeze my words.
If only the birds and women kept quiet, and the dogs were dead. . .
Gardens are still only momentarily and everything's asleep; but again
the noises start up, terrible. . . Day summons & everyone responds
with exuberance. It'd depress you to see how helpless some mute
beings are to protest or take revenge. The deadly reign of
noise.
     In the smoke above the sheltered rooftops, I'd have let my head spin
like a silent bell still tied to its string—quiet swiftness to the clouds—
and the streams murmur alone!
     The heavens descended with the silencing of windows and voices.
After the leaves fall even the birds won't prattle anymore. It's so cold.
     Winter comes before the silence.