The blog, and how the poet can save it from cynical communists

Jodi Dean, communist, political theorist & blogger, has written an interesting work entitled Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive  in which she critiques the dynamics of the blog as both a technology and, unfortunately, also a tool that's being unscrupulously used by techno-capitalists for the exploitation of unsuspecting Internet users. A view that's (in my view) too alarmist and too closely tied to the specialized terminology of both Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan to be of interest to the average, even computer-savvy reader. A far more convincing media theorist with roots in academe, Henry Jenkins, can be straightforward enough to claim in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture that he's trying to import his "ideas into new spaces beyond the university bookstore ghetto". (2) Dean has badly politicized a topic that deserves a more fair-minded & broader treatment, especially as it impacts on language and poetry. But it's a book worth reading and replying to. Its strengths lie in its delineation of the politics of technology and description of the concept, design and limitations of this one very prevalent type of networked media: the blog.

It's her conclusion of the techno-mastery of the owners of a digitalized means of production (Microsoft, Google, etc.) that makes it decidedly communistic; and it's the disparagement of language and authorial integrity in the age of Web 2.0 that makes it cynical. So gloomy is her prognosis for the media future that her only solution at the end is an overthrow of the means of Internet media: taking aim particularly at the neoliberal politics that brought it about in the first place, and even going so far as to encourage both "street-level activism" or a system of "communist hackers" to destroy exploitive technologies like the blog from within. (126) The argument that leads to this violent overthrow runs as follows.The potential for manipulation stems from both the nature of the technology and the way it plays on people's desires & drives. The blog becomes the occasion for a kind of psychoanalysis of the blogger him/herself, with blogger-activity as such read as symptoms of a deep-seated anxiety about self and self's relation to the world. Internet use in general, and blogging in particular, is of interest to Dean in terms of its propensity to reveal a psychoanalytic dynamics of technology and user: one in which the notion of 'self'' itself is deeply problematized, almost to the extent of a complete absorption of user in the black hole of computer networks.

The blogger (as her argument goes) is impelled to search primarily for a sense of an Other, other bloggers, gamers, friends, an audience of technical support groups ready to assist, subject-specialists with whom to converse on equal terms, etc., but only to be thwarted, of course, by the realization that the Other is an illusion. What's thought of as a stable "symbolic order" personified as an audience & the stability of a writerly persona on which the blogger relies turn out to be a "gap or excess", a sense of the blog's providing too little or too much, with the big Other (the ultimate ego ideal to which the blogger in search of an audience & sense of meaningful communication appeals) reduced to an objet petit a, terminology Dean takes entirely from Lacan. And having been punched down to size in this way and released into a cyberworld of endless identities, and modes of expression, the blogger is vulnerable to entrapment, manipulation & control by the purveyors of computer media. The Real becomes the imaginary (more Lacanese) and freedom from the big Other now means living in a world of radical instability, uncertainty and exposure to what Dean's termed the snares of "communicative capitalism":

In the terms of Lacanian theory, the decline of symbolic efficiency is accompanied by a convergence between the imaginary and the Real. Imaginary identities sustained by the promise and provision of enjoyment replace symbolic identities. The global information and financial networks of communicative capitalism offer new ways for us to imagine ourselves, immense varieties of lifestyles with which we can experiment. Each can and must be creative, different, unique. Each must develop a distinctive personal style. These unique identities, though, are extremely vulnerable. The frames of reference that give them meaning and value are constantly shifting...So while it may seem that the decline of symbolic efficiency ushers in a new era of freedom from rigid norms and expectations, the fluidity and adaptability of imaginary identities are accompanied by fragility and insecurity. (56) 

That initial "desire" to search for authorial integrity and a stable audience base for our writings (or artistic productions), a symbolic efficiency that gave us destabilizing "gaps or excesses" now becomes a repetitive "drive" to reenact an original desire for the fake wholeness of identity and acceptance. Except that the promise of communication technologies, through the proliferation of blogs & social networks, has been reduced to fragments among which the blogger's condemned to experience repeatedly the loss of those original desires from which a "techno-utopian" dream of self-expressivity began. What starts as need to communicate degenerates into a very real entrapment in the "circuit of drives" that is now the essence of blogging. In this radically fragmented 'space' the blogosphere (the "blogipelago", as Dean names it) can never be seen as a community where members are visible to themselves: the blog is a place of radical multiplicity, of "ever-accelerating circuits of images, impulses, fragments, and feelings" (73).

Encountering the endless possibilities of contemporary reflexivity, post-disciplinary subjects [in the age of globalization and communicative capitalism] are propelled to move through a variety of imaginary identities. We imagine ourselves one way, then another, never sure of how we appear because we don't know before whom we appear. (77)

 In this maelstrom of "imaginary identities" loosed into a world of endless sources of recreation, pleasure and play, the blog has been usurped as a profitable instrument of control. And with this last stage of her analysis, the overhaul & capture of desire in blogging, Dean's Marxist critique comes to a close.I'd like to suggest that language alone, and poetry in particular as language's most powerful form of "contemporary reflexivity", is a clear exception to Dean's cynical Marxist thesis. There's nothing she's said about "communicative capitalism" that can pose a real threat to a real communicative drive and the ways in which writers (in blogs or elsewhere) keep its circuits alive through meaningful exchange. There's no greater obstacle to this sort of cynical discourse than the figure of the poet him/herself: the word-dreamer.

I'd like to return to the "loss is drive" presupposition, restoring to the discussion of the nature of writing a vital Bachelardian insight into the nature of imaginative (primarily poetic) activity. Reading Giorgio Agamben into her own theory, Dean makes the point that in the age of communicative capitalism language has undergone a kind of transformation itself: the prevalent contemporary world of "Networked whatever beings" (111) has gutted language, stripping it of significant content, and given primacy to the speech-act only. "Insofar as whatever beings experience their own linguistic being, they turn their attention from the content of language, from trying to communicate something, back to themselves as speaking." (85) A conclusion that follows, of course, from her characterization of blogging (Internet writing in general) as a repetitive drive grounded in the loss of the big Other that initiates communicative activity in the first place. It's as though (again, borrowing from Lacan) the writer were without a subjective personality, a soulless head-less freak in search of the impossible object of writing: the object petit a or the loss that is now the act of writing itself.

objet petit a

How different things are for the Bachelardian imagination and the poet where le rêve is the indispensable condition of writing. One victim of this "desubjectivization of the subject" is "fantasy" or dreams or poetic rêve: as Dean says, "There is also no space for fantasy (the formula for fantasy does not appear). " (88) I will only highlight the main tenets of my Bachelard discussion as I've described them in a previous post. The point I was trying to make (and that I'll repeat here) is that Bachelardian language anticipates that of cyberspace and introduces a view of  digital solipsism that's a convenient way to foreground the nature of online writing. Bachelard refers to the poetic immensity that resides in the poet working 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 (Bachelard's term for the poet compelled to "give back to us the situations of our dreams") is then a term for a lost imaginative ego- ideal that is fully actualizable in cyberspace. Far from the "stuckness and movement, rupture and creativity"(119) in Dean's account, the word-dreamer is all creativity, seeing in life the same dizzying multiplicities, frustrations and repetitive drives as the philosophers of the post-critical age but drawing out of them the very frameworks for artistic vision and form. It won't ever come as a shock to the word-dreamer that the world's been without a "sufficiency of the symbolic" for quite some time now: it's precisely in this very abyss (as French novelist, dramatist & essayist Jean Genet put it in his famous essay on Giacometti) that the very greatest artworks have always come into being.

Of the term 'word-dreamer', and its applications to an actual poetic practice, the following things may be said:

• the digital solipsism decried by Žižek as a form of harmful political escapism and, by extension, Dean's notion of "circuits of drive" are rather (in my view) a retreat into a pure imaginative freedom;
• 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;
• despite its oneirc properties, the work of the poet as word-dreamer is to be seen as the creation of new organic wholes gathered from the fragments of the "old harmonies";
• a new sublime ("immensity") opens to the imagination, magnificently imaged in the poet's essential aloneness in cyberspace. The word-dreamer sees (or rather feels) the angst of repetitive drives as the condition of artistic work in general. Terms like 'blog', 'web' and 'cloud' are its true horizons;
• 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.

Carol Malyon: poet without an email address



Poet Carol Malyon

MOON & COW

they exist for each other,
this moon, this cow

cow watches
bright dappled clouds
graze like cattle
in fields of sky

moon lightens
cow's white patches
until a cloud
lies on the ground

on a moonless night
there's no such thing as
cow (from Headstand, 19)

As I always do when I'm at the Artbar in Hamilton, I meet people known for their unstinting devotion to art, poetry & music. Whether poet, dramatist or musician, publisher or translator there's something remarkably unique about each of them I usually like to take away with me, & I do this either by purchasing their work or through the ritual of conversation and hopefully an exchange of email addresses at the end. The internet's an ideal way to carry on the discussion & keep in touch: to me, in fact. it's become something of a sine qua non of literary expression itself.

How surprised I was to discover that Carol Malyon, one of two featured poets reading at the Sunday, November 7th Artword Artbar reading series didn't have an email address to give me. As elegant, articulate and gracious a spokesperson for contemporary Canadian poetry as she is, publisher and editor, writer of novels, short stories, poetry and children's fiction, friend to many established literary figures and a very familiar presence herself in the poetry reading circuits: I seemed unable to connect this respected, well known literary figure to cyber anonymity. It was hard to imagine how the real Carol Malyon I had the pleasure to meet for the first time at Artword was all but virtually nonexistent online.

No email address. By cyber anonymity I don't mean that information about author, background and her works can't be easily accessed (of course, nothing could be easier). She does have an online presence in that sense. It's just that Web 2.0, with all its resources, tools and literary cyberfora, has been a way for me to write for a public of more than one and receive the sorts of  responses the writer looking for attention is likely to get. If nothing else, Internet writing is a fast, complex and omnivorous affair that keeps in its meta-data stores a distinct literary imprint of every writer & work that crosses its path. And when I knew I wouldn't be able to fix my own brief encounter with Malyon on the usual cyber coordinates, the effect was a little disorienting. The computer, far from being a benign influence, actually threatened to turn this meeting between us into a non-event. Malyon, sensing the imminent extinction of a vital moment, purposely slowed the pace & tempo of our talk, making it very difficult to converse on my own terms. I felt forced (but not against my will) to pause at the threshold of a real encounter.

She made me feel, perhaps for the first time, the palpable tensions that do exist between two very different media that frame our lives: a live and a digitized one.Talking to her reminded me, in other words, of the more significant cadences & pauses of conversation with a live poet, unfiltered & unconstrained by digital technologies. It wasn't in anything she said to me for the entire discussion lasted just minutes, centered around general pleasantries of a first meeting and the purchase of two books of hers. Perhaps she sensed in my own rather busy (perhaps intrusive) presentation a typical privileging of the cyber over the real world of face-to-face dialogue that's all too fashionable these days & that must have struck her as unacceptable. As if she was trying to say to me, plus ça change plus ça reste la même chose! There's is to be no hurrying with her, and if the conditions are right, conversation with Carol Malyon can very well last for hours. Perhaps months & years: perhaps throughout an entire lifetime.

How lucky bill bissett is to have co-authored with Carol Malyon a book of recorded conversation entitled griddle talk: a yeer uv bill n carol dewing brunch, a work that seems to have offered a view of human communication as antidote to the highly impersonalized Facebook & Twitter varieties. How lucky we all are. I understand what inspired the great Canadian avant-gardist to record (as only bill bissett can!) conversations with this remarkable individual. If ever there was a case of human interaction that purposely transcends language, idiom and two very different poetic sensibilities, this is it. But I feel now as if Carol Malyon's included me in the same human community of poetry, language and compassion for the writer's calling: as if I'd been included in the same griddle talk.

Not only did I walk away with a sense of a potential friendship and a conversation to continue into the years ahead, I also felt inspired to read Malyon's Headstand (Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 1990). The presence of the poet I met at Artbar is particularly strong (and profound) in the poem "Iris" (49) to which I've written my own response poem (dedicated to Carol Malyon, of course). Eager for a reply, I will have to call Malyon by phone and announce my blog article and response poem directly to a real person, dialoguing with a live voice. And if the call happens to last for hours, I can't say I haven't been prepared for it already.

"Hollyhocks and a rose"

A poet's hollyhocks, a rose real as the vase,

  stem in water:

one's in a Malyon poem

 the other exfoliates in front of me

 Like a Malyon poem

in which a daughter & elderly mother

 at sunday dinner,

can't bear to look into each other—

  the hollyhocks (in my eye)

and a real late autumn rose set in a vase,

  don't sit together anymore,

at my table

"Sister"

("Wish upon a star if that might help" ABC)

(for RD)

 So, dialectically
is the One there a browning star,
 rough-edged,
 or just Two

falling through each other?

Can I still want the One as sad as
  it looks,
crossed & chaotic,
 too?

I saw a star, she and I did, probably
   One in the pines
—the wings set for flight—
   & a sky

 that really wasn't

Best advice yet to poets

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (Samuel Beckett)

How language changes around here: speculations and a poem

You wish to make a good friend?
Look at the pine and cypress trees.
Amidst the frost, they do not fall to earth.
When winter comes, they do not leave.
               Po Chu-yi (Bai Juyi) (9th century)

As I approach my outdoor classroom I look for at least one star between the two pines ahead. And wonder how often the crow's beaten me to it. Not to the star so much as the poem that usually follows. It's not a competition & I'm more interested in the poem that may appear between the spaces than the crow itself, though he's sometimes the reason I look and sometimes the reason I don't. It strikes me that the star is very cordially indifferent to our looking.

But today I did manage a bit of speculation on the development of language. I didn't need a prompt from a book this time but a visible example outside of the way a pine drawn against the sky (and particularly the space between a crow and star) can open like a vowel & even discard its branches like so many useless median letters. It seemed to poke at rather enunciate the first word . And I imagined how that evolving lingo must have looked to one Simon of Rome sitting in his limestone tower, at the most northerly edge of the bay.

As it turns out, I beat the crow to the poem (which follows below)


Simon of Rome says,

Between 2 pines, there's at least 1 star
The whims and sins of a
a few stay the same
Conventions of the crow are hard to change,
way up there

Works are now to be written in the oracular!

Simon, in his luminous attic,
editions of Luther, Du Bellay beside him,
held his ground
and foretold a change in language

(a change towards the oracular, as he said!)

the needle to supersede the leaf,
stem's gothic stiffness,

as memorable an event as when the sturgeon's
                                                              fair
replaced the zebra's

Under his care
the High bay dialect will be shown to triumph over
a cold cold lake,

mobilizing the scattered eel,
replacing the silent 'o's of the ancient gulls

Consider the long-necked 'fork' in the Pine,
revered—
it's not just a cross
but a letter,
while the plentiful cedar-gin, & the hummer's
beak,
are the book


He who reads, says Simon, reads the sand in a star,
& the moon below
& the lakes above, for once

As easy to do as
swooshing the pesky bugs off an ol' maple scroll

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.