Statement of Record

Context Collapse (continued)

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Context Collapse (continued)

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by Ryan Ruby

Context Collapse is a long, mock-academic, critical essay poem. Beginning in ancient Greece and continuing beyond the present, it examines how the increasingly wide gulf between poets and their audiences are mediated by new communications technologies and changes in publishing economies, and how this, in turn, significantly impacts poetic form. You are reading Context Collapse 5, which spans the second half of the 20th Century, and takes place largely in New York and San Francisco. In this period, the accelerated syntactic and typographic experiments of modernist poets like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein go into overdrive, thanks to the democratization of the printing press (via the mimeograph revolution, xerox machine, and small press distribution), the institutionalization of poetry (via the MFA system), and radical shocks to the global economy (via neoliberal financialization). By the dawn of the 21st century, cutting edge poetics have turned poetry into a decontextualized, authorless visual-conceptual art form, preparing the way, like so many other sectors of contemporary culture and the economy, for its algorithmic automation.

 

When the set of producers overlaps
The set of consumers in an Euler 
Diagram of the literary field,[1]
The centrifuges of innovation
Spin that much more quickly, actualizing
And exhausting the potential resources 
Of the medium, as the rapacious
Scramble to lay one’s claim to novelty
Comes to operate under conditions
Of informational saturation
Fostered by a common guild identity.[2]                               
    The fissile waste product of this process
Of accelerating modernism,
Viz., syntactic distortion,[3]is among                          
The many features of language writing
That prompted a sympathetic critic
To notice how, after two decades,
It had congealed, like every avant-garde
Before it, into a period style,[4]                                    
Though the influence of the academic                                
(And academy-adjacent) milieu                                          
Is more visible, she writes, in the way                    
The technical vocabularies of 
Philosophy, the social sciences,                   
And, above all, literary theory                                  
Were laundered[5]via English departments
Into poetic diction, where they served                               
To stimulate recursive discourses[6]
On what some in the movement liked to call 
Method,[7]which would come in handy when it came 
Time for them to engineer a reverse
Merger of poetry and poetics,[8]                                 
A friendly takeover ostensibly                                 
Undertaken in the name of a certain                                   
Oft-neglected external stakeholder                         
Some in the movement liked to call the reader.     

In “The Rejection of Closure,” for instance,
Hejinian rips a page out of Barthes’s                                   
Playbook to make a distinction between                
Two types of text, the closed and the open:
The work whose elements are all “directed […]Toward a single reading” and the one
Whose elements are all “maximally
Excited.” In a closed text, the writer
Retains “directive” “authority” over
The “passive” reader, while in an open text
The absence of control mechanisms
Like narrative, syntax, and formatting
Makes the reader an active participant
In constructing the meaning of the text,
Determining not only what it says,
But even in what order it might be read.
    Rejecting the writer’s authority 
Over the reader is analogous,
In Hejinian’s view, to the rejection                                                                     
Of “the authority implicit in
[O]ther (social, economic, cultural)
[H]ierarchies.” Less polemical than
Other language poets, however, she 
Acknowledges that closure and openness 
Lie on a continuum, and, furthermore,
That the totally closed text is something
Of a straw man. Even when an author                    
Directs a reader toward a single
Interpretation, it does not follow
That there is only one, nor would a text
Which everyone agreed could only be 
Interpreted in one way foreclose response.[9]
A contrario. All communication
Invites—but does not compel—further acts
Of communication.[10]But when one half                 
Of the circuit is removed (or doubled)
The writer-reader polarity is 
Destabilized,[11]and the latter is not                         
So much addressed by means of written signs,
As s/he is presented with instances                                    
Of script: with data, not information,                                  
Data which, to top it all off, does not flow                           
At a high signal-to-noise ratio,
But circulates (as if) autonomously.                        
    That is why radically open texts 
Are inevitably more resistant
To interpretation than closed texts are:
If there can be no consensus about                                     
The rules governing how a text should be read,
Meaning ceases to be operative.
Confronted with such texts, even the best
Close readers[12]find themselves reduced to typing                                   
Descriptions of their physical features,                              
Speculating about how to translate
Them into grammar-obeying phrases,[13]
Or attempting to reconstruct lexical
Shards that, however carefully arranged,                           
Are indistinguishable from random
Scatters of letters and spaces on the page.[14]                       
Considering that a text needn’t even                                   
Be written as an open text to be                                          
Read as one,[15]the reader’s apotheosis                                
Is but the prelude to her disappearance,
As the activity once known as reading
Is supplanted by the act of looking                         
At a text, whereupon the verbal art                                     
Surrenders at last to the visual[16]                                        
And poetry becomes post-poetry.[17]                                     

What happens next should come as no surprise.
The Epsilon “cut so rudely on that                                      
[O]ldest stone,” the mystery of whose sense 
Had so transfixed Olson, resurfaces,
Floating at the omphalos of one of
McCaffery’s cloudlike ciphers, where it stands                              
(Unfalsifiably) for the empty string,
The symbol for the absence of symbols
In various programming languages
For non-deterministic automata.    
    As another fin de siècle approached,
The time had come to wonder: why write at all?   
If language is a subjectless process
Rather than an intersubjective one,                        
counter-communicative flow of parts
Through decontextualized language zones,
Rather than a communicative relay
Informed by a discrete social context,
An algorithm[18]rather than a message,[19]                             
Wouldn’t it be better, now that the means
Were available, just to automate it?   

 

Notes:


[1]Hasn’t the epithet poet’s poet
 basically become a pleonasm?
[2]Though they consider themselves scientists,
 i.e., producers of measurable 
 knowledge, Humanities scholars are no
 strangers to the logics of fad and fashion,
 fostered, in their case, by the requirement
 that dissertations contain original
 research and in the ‘publish or perish’
 bellum omnium contra omnes that
 plays itself out in tenure committees,
 on the editorial boards of peer-
 reviewed journals and university
 presses, and among those who chose the themes
 and personnel for conference panels.
 New critical paradigms—the currency
 of the realm—would experience ever 
 shorter life spans as one academic ‘turn’
 is overturned by the next, until it,
 in turn, is turned aside by the turn whose turn
 has come, turning and turning, ad nauseum
[3]The description is Perloff’s, but as Steve
 McCaffery notes, this “specific feature” 
 went by many other names: formalist,
 structuralist, dereferentialist,
 minimalist, counter-communicative, 
 language-centered, cipheral, etc.
 See “The Death of the Subject,” “Language Writing.”
[4]In his attempt to challenge this description
 of language writing with a broader critique
 of “conventional art historical 
 periodization,” Watten fails to
 engage with the substance of Perloff’s point,
 which fundamentally has to do with 
 synchronic formal mannerisms.
      Despite seeming singular, idiolect,
 as critics as different as Stewart    
 and Frederic Jameson have also warned,
 should not be confused with personal style:         
 the closer a text comes to idiolect, 
 the harder it becomes to distinguish 
 from other such texts. Ironically, 
 syntactic distortion thus represents 
 the self-cancellation of linguistic                                       
 originality—in addition to 
 a decrease in complexity relative 
 to any number of putatively
 more conservative styles of poetry. 
      To turn William Carlos Williams’ quip
 on its head: all counter-communicative
 texts communicate the same thing of no
 importance, viz., communication is dead.
[5]From the U.S.S.R. (formalism),
 West Germany (critical theory),
 and, of course, France (post-structuralism).
[6]Someone at the Stanford Literary Lab
 ought to crunch the numbers to see whether—
 and, if so, by what factor—the poems 
 that take poetry—implicitly or
 explicitly—as their subject matter   
 have increased over the last hundred years.
 (Please include this one in the data set.)
[7]Esp. Bernstein (“Writing and Method”)                            
 and Bruce Andrews (Paradise and Method).
 Others preferred ‘process’ or ‘procedure’.
 In any event, while their counterparts                                          
 in official verse culture were rehashing
 the free verse vs. formalism debate,
 innovative writers were more concerned
 to explore the chance operations of Cage
 and Mac Low or, conversely, the constraint-
 based procedures of LeWitt and Queneau.
      From the perspective of a Marxian                               
 theory of literary production,
 this de-emphasis on the work had its
 prima facie salutary effects
 —it seemed, for one thing, to remove writing
 from the logic of commodity exchange—             
 but the turn to method / process is                                               
 just as easily explained as the flight
 of highly skilled labor from a resource-                              
depleted sector (artifactual
 production) to one where there was little
 competition (conceptual production).                              
      Yet again these innovative writers        
 found themselves marching in step with rather
 than bucking global trends, in this instance
 the shift from a manufacturing-based                               
 to an information-based economy.                                    
[8]The ensuing genre hybrid can be
 further subdivided, using Perloff’s
 terminology, into THEORYPO,
 a poem that propounds a poetics
 (e.g., Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption,”                         
 Watten’s “Under Erasure,” Perelman’s
 “The Marginalization of Poetry”)
 and POETHEORY, a poem that enacts one 
 (e.g., Hejinian’s “Writing is an Aid 
 to Memory,” Grenier’s “Sentences”)
 with Susan Howe’s work as a middle case.                       
     These pieces were produced alongside more
  familiar instances of discursive prose.                              
[9]The proof of this pudding is in the reading:         
 what is the history of poetry 
 if not a series of more or less closed texts                                    
 responding to other more or less closed texts?
 Nearly all of Empson’s illustrations
 of the seven types of ambiguity—
 which must surely be considered as techniques 
 for opening the poem—are taken
 from pre-20th-century poetry. 
[10]As Luhmann argues in Social Systems.
 The authority of writer over
 reader is therefore merely apparent.
 An alternative model of closure
 without hierarchy can be found in
 the notion of hermeneutic friendship,
 which is premised on the implicitly
 dialogical nature of all texts,
 even the ones that cannot, stricto sensu,
 be read. See Grossman, Summa Lyrica.     
[11]Around the same time, as Michel Foucault
 notes in The Birth of Biopolitics,
 the classical liberal opposition
 between producer and consumer dissolves 
 into a new, unified category: 
 human capital. “The man of consumption,
 insofar as he consumes,” writes Foucault,
 summarizing current neoliberal
 thinking on the subject, “is a producer. 
 What does he produce? […] [H]is own satisfaction.”  
      Thanks to the laborization of leisure
 and rapid improvements in surveillance
 technology and data collection,
 which made it possible for corporations
 to extract surplus value from the fact
 as well as the act of consuming goods,
 services, information, etc.,
 this is not the tautology it at first
 appears to be. But that is beside the point.
[12]e.g., Perloff and Peter Quartermain.
[13]That is to say the neo-avant-garde
 wound up arriving at the same dead end 
 as the arche-.
      If, as Michel Serres writes, the potential 
 for noise is the transcendental condition
 for the manifestation of signal,
 the converse is also true. Dialogue
 may fail to totally exclude the “demon” 
 Static (in French, Parasite) but even so,
 there can obviously be no “third man” 
 without the existence of the first two.
[14]Hence Jameson’s characterization
 of such open texts as schizophrenic.
[15]You could read a closed text vertically
 rather than horizontally, for instance,
 or backwards, or, best of all, translated
 into a language you don’t happen to speak.
[16]Mallarmé’s revolution was now complete, but poets still had 
 lots of catching up to do. Marrying
 Freytag-Loringhoven, Duchamp, and Warhol’s
 institutional critiques of the art
 object with the citational techniques
 of Pound, Eliot, and Walter Benjamin,
 the next step for the material text
 was to become a linguistic readymade.
      On this new understanding, ‘poetry’
 is analogous to the museum,
 a contextual frame that can transform
 any instance of language into art; 
 ‘poets’ are no longer generators 
 of language but curators of the vast
 quantities of already-existing text,
 which was proliferating, every
 nanosecond, by orders of magnitude;       
 and ‘curatorship,’ as Boris Groys writes, is 
     [an] extra-linguistic operation
      of inclusion or exclusion of certain
      words in certain contexts […] The curator
      is interested not in what […] texts ‘say’ 
      but rather in what words occur in these texts
      and what words do not. (Emphasis added.)
[17]Today the question—what is the social 
  function of poetry?—is almost always 
 answered subjectively, that is, in terms 
 of what persons who call themselves poets
 believe the impact of a poem on a real
 or extrapolated audience ought
 to be. It is almost never answered
 objectively, from the point of view of
 society itself, that is, in terms
 of a broad consensus about the role
 poets (unquestionably social actors)
 and their poetry actually play
 in the course of communal life. Thus, while 
 a subjective answer might range from some 
 micro-political project—measured,
 to be clear, not in terms of its import— 
 to ‘none whatsoever,’ the objective 
 answer is clearly none whatsoever.
 (See Craig Dworkin’s publishing stats below
 and compare how easy it is to answer
 the question in the case of teachers,
 doctors, or, yes, even politicians.)
      Now it is not entirely obvious
 to what extent this loss of social function
 is the cause or the effect of the fact
 that poetry has become whatever
 anyone says it is, but it can be said
 with confidence that the two phenomena
 are related. Always a little vague,
 definitions are nevertheless themselves
 matters of social consensus, such that
 the loss of definition goes hand in hand
 with the loss of function—and vice versa.
[18]What is an Oulipian constraint like
 Jean Lescure’s N+7 procedure 
 if not a mechanism by which to turn
 any instance of ordinary prose
 into a passably surrealist text?                                          
[19]To go back to the beginning. The notion
 that messages are necessarily
 rational statements and that a poem
 can therefore be said to have a meaning 
 if and only if it can be translated 
 (read: paraphrased) into a determinate
 series of truth-functional propositions
 is, quite frankly, confused. No one—except 
 apparently Plato, Yvor Winters,
 and legions of high school English teachers—
 denies that poetry, if it so chooses, 
 can operate according to different
 logics than logic, with criteria
 of success that are not reducible
 to truthfulness, e.g., the transference
 (read: communication) of energy,
 as theorized by the Projectivists,
 or openness (see above). The problem
 with such ‘quantized’ criteria, however,
 is that they are impossible to measure,
 and are thus not criteria of success,
 properly speaking. There is quite simply
 no reason to assume, as Olson does, 
 that difference-in-itself discharges
 more energy than repetition does;
 the preponderance of evidence suggests
 that the opposite is the case, as a quick
 comparison between the responses
 to poetry and pop music will show.

 

You can read an extensive interview with Ryan Ruby at Three Quarks Daily.

About the author

Ryan Ruby is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel (Twelve Books, 2017). He is the recipient of the 2019 Albert Einstein Fellowship from the Einstein Forum and has been an Affiliated Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry. His writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Dissent, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.

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