2 2 b 1 march 95 Passages = further projectory of descriptions of an imaginary univercity. Torque connecting poetry and technology directly, theoretically & / or practically "Mind comes into this language as if into an Abyss" provocation = Jay Schwartz's statement in PROLIFERATION 1 = "What are the consequences for artistic expression when continual excess of product is the material condition of production? ... we ... find ourselves writing from a conception of language as decentered and multiple, we find our writing searching. The textscape resembles this rough shapelessness, in the proliferation of poetry nodes and the distillation of the poetic into computer media, the worlds of zines, the institutionalization of the New American Poetry, and the interaction of critical and creative writing realms of discourse. The medium and message mix and connect through multiplicity, yet are particular in manifestation. Similarly the separation of reading and writing seems inadequate, overdetermined in the context of excess. An active textual field seems to frame the actions of readers and writers due to the overly transformative forms of technology for production and consumption of all information, and the literary more so. Struggle for the ontological and aesthetic status of various computer technologies, for example, and writing through them, requires collaboration between disciplines of cultural inquiry through poetry..." Many of us relate with at least some of Schwartz's concerns. Are we publicly, communally, exploring visions about writing, publishing, technological engagement in our "public" poetics discourse? We are at beginning stages of any discussion about poetry and technology. We are with it. There has not been enough discussion about the state of "small" press in the age of hypermedia. Not that such things need to be problematized to death, but it makes sense that given the shifting terrain, those interested and involved might expose concerns and curiosities. Our issues are not necessarily discussed with ease: in mid-January we organized a poetry/poetics weekend in Albany hoping, among other things, to talk about poetry and its future incarnations (particularly since we are working on a poetry cd-rom here). What happened before such a conversation could get off the ground was that the ideological concerns surrounding the issues of computer networks, computers, et. al. quickly seized the discussions. Not that this was unfortunate. Quite the opposite. Our conversations were quite generative. Transcripts from those discussions will be "published" soon in RIF/T for further exploration and discussion. There remains much to discuss, however, in this area. --Anybody? IMAGOLOGY AND POETRY IN THE WASH OF MEDIA PART I Doctor P. Semiconductor Department of Media Transition, DIU "It sounds like _Tales from Uncle Rebus_." --A. Fritz 1) _IMAGOLOGY_ _Imagology: Media Philosophy_ (Routledge, 1994) by Mark Taylor, who built his reputation as a decontructionist theologian, and Esa Saarinen, a philosopher and Finnish talk show guru, addresses the failure of the expert, the end of literacy, and the necessity of what they call "imagoscription." The occasion of the book was a seminar the authors conducted by satellite with students at Williams College and the University of Helsinki on real time, interactive video. The opening section of the book is about how they managed to cut deals with corporate sponsors to fund the project. In turn (despite a little green rhetoric that seems to be necessary intellectual icing in northern Europe), they are almost necessarily cheer-leaders for the mindless application of the technology. No doubt their political opinions are different from Newt Gingrich's, but their visions of future technology are much the same. It is obviously a middle-age crisis project for both of them. In the mix of the personal and theoretical, we are given an account of the death of Taylor's father and glimpses of Saarinen's life as a celeb. (Saarinen was the editor of _Synthese_, the very respected philosophic journal, when he published a book called _Punk Academy_ that pushed him into talk show status). But of course, they are right about the bankruptcy of the academy. It is hard to defend the professionalized jargons when they are used almost exclusively to cover up the lack of research, lack of thought, lack of seriousness beyond academic ladder-climbing. _Imagology_ has the jivey, pomo jitters and flash. All in all, however, it is quite a traditional book: the thesis is clearly announced up front and, buried in the pretty graphics, is a traditional beginning-middle-end arrangement. At a glance and, of course, the pomo reader never takes more than a glance it is a handsome book, but the slick Euro-design tends to muck up the presentation rather than make a definitive point. Despite its limitations, and they are serious, the book raises many of the important issues concerning the possibilities and uses of knowledge at this time. So, Taylor and Saarinen's diagnosis: "Expert language is a prison for knowledge and understanding. A prison for intellectually significant relationships. It is time to move beyond the institutional practices of trivilege, toward networks and surfaces, toward the play of superficiality, toward interstanding." And the thesis: "In simcult, the responsible writer must be an imagologist. Since image has displaced print as the primary medium for discourse, the public use of reason can no longer be limited to print culture. To be effective, writing must become imagoscription that is available to everyone." 2) HOW THE EXPERT WAS LOST IN SPACE: A CARTOON In the beginning there was the ordinary language. Phrases were arranged by parataxis: this and this and this and this. This is the language of the Homeric epics. A better, more refined language was needed, but it was hard to understand how a new language would be any better if the meanings of the new words and the rules for the new grammar were still defined in the old language. It was necessary to re-build the space ship in mid-air. Socrates taught a hierarchical grammatical. Beyond this table is TABLE, beyond this man is MAN, and so forth. TABLE and MAN are the essences of the things--what all tables or men have in common that make them tables or men. The world was _deep_ with meaning. The essences connected in surprising and necessary ways. Syllogisms were possible. One thought _had to_ follow another thought. In the dialogues, Socrates leads his interlocutors through strings of necessary connections: "Yes, that must follow, Socrates," "that follows as night the day," etc. These meanings are so useful for organizing thought it seemed that they are REAL, while this table or this man are mere imitations of the deep Ideas. For particular kinds of content, however, even the philosophic language was not adequate. The physician, the lawyer, the mathematician, and many others who worked in specialized fields needed even still more refined language, and professional jargons were created again by helical process. Traditionally, it was assumed that expert language is translatable into ordinary language by way of a benign and even generous logos--the deep structure that connects all the surface manifestations. First Nietzsche and then other philosophers began to trace terms back to the logos and discovered uncrossable gaps, thus undermining the expertise of philosophy itself and the expertise or the disciplines that depended upon it. The specialized zones of textuality floated free, odd drifting satellites of the ordinary language that had escaped the gravity of general textuality. The legal attack on the medical profession, lawyer jokes, and the dismantling of the university underscore the disappearance of expert authority. It is now the personality that makes no claim to expert knowledge that has power (Oprah, Limbaugh, et. al.). Writing, especially print writing, is the manifestation of essence; it has no surface at all. When the metaphysics is eliminated there is nothing left. It is utterly lacking in sensuous appeal. Writing as text has all of the appeal of a video game in which the player supplies all of the animation and keeps the score herself. Reading and writing are extremely tedious skills to learn. To attain proficiency takes several years in sense deprivation, the entire world reduced to symbols that have nothing to recommend them but the efficiency with which they distinguish themselves from other very similar symbols, black and white, page after page, in perfectly ordered lines and blocks. In terms of sense excitement, a page of print is as boring as a blank wall. If it does not open on the realm of pure forms, no one reasonably would want to go to the trouble. Without metaphysics--or at least the possibility of a metaphysical pay off-- it is an unattractive gamble. 3) SIMCULT Consider the surface attractions of the electronic media. Motion, color, life-likeness of image. It gives itself to you. One thing after another, each lasting just long enough to be processed as sensation, no attention is required. (The internet as a medium dominated by ASCII is interesting almost exclusively for its speed and savings of trees--an evolutionary throw-back. It is no accident that it is dominated by people with university affiliations.) What is the connection between the O.J. Simpson case, the new Pearl Jam album, the baseball strike, and Newt Gingrich's Contract with (on?) America? The depth behind this and this and this is electronic circuitry. Silicon, deployed by transnational corporations, is the transcendental stuff, and it is utterly generous with its surfaces. It will mediate anything. It does not underwrite necessary connections. 4) THE PROBLEM The completely justifiable grounds for expert language in Kant and after is that special terminologies are used to 'gather' large quantities of attention into a convenient short-hand. ATTENTION is the issue. How much DEPTH can be generated? How long can it be sustained? The model for expert short-hand is the algebraic function. The surface fact of y=(f)x tells of a relationship that involves infinite roots. They were not as neat, but the expert languages that took their grammars from the natural language can also handily notated vast amounts of attention. If one moves to a medium in which this kind of attention becomes impossible, the loss in terms of quantity of what can be known is immense. The surface that appears is distraction. What does it mean to PAY ATTENTION? How is one not merely swallowed by the brilliant surface in which nothing allows time for scrutiny? How does one, in the new medium, compensate for the loss? The great questions now are not profound, not how this piece connects to the depths, but how the this surface connects with other regions of the surface. How does one pay attention to _that_? For the DEEP thinker, the surface is seen as distraction to be overcome or conceded to as a place of relaxation. It is not a matter of changing WHAT WE THINK, which is of course easy, but changing of HABITS OF THOUGHT that are hardly noticeable. This is hard to say: it is not FOCUS of attention. Focused attention is the attention of the expert. We must develop the techniques not of focus, centering, concentration, but of expansion across surfaces. What are the modes of this attention? What are the techniques and forms of breadth (rather than depth) of attention? 5) KNOWLEDGE AND TIME Essences are timeless. One can imagine a time when there was no table but not a time when the essence of table was different; one can imagine a time when there were no triangles but not a time when the sum of the angles of a triangle did not equal 180. Socrates thought that knowledge of that which changes could not be knowledge. Surfaces however are temporal. Images are in time, as jumpy as a TV image when the satellite is slightly off beam. One can of course love the noise, sink into the chaos. Pay attention to the distraction. This is the new American way, the way of ignorance, the way of self-destruction: "In the 20 years (1972-92) between the U.N. Conference on the Environment in Stockholm and the one on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, a scientific consensus has gradually been established that the damage being inflicted by human activities on the natural environment render those activities unsustainable. It has become clear that the activities cannot be projected to continue into the future, either because they will have destroyed the environmental conditions necessary for that continuation, or because their environmental effects will cause massive, unacceptable damage to human health and disruption of human ways of life." ("World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," Union of Concerned Scientists, 1992) If there is beauty--order, mutual understanding, truth, and wisdom--on the temporal surfaces, it is metrical-- the province of the muses, the musician and the poet. The unit of its structure is not the sentence but the line or the riff--"a design cut in time" (Ezra Pound). The only reference consciousness has is its attention to itself: catching itself catching itself. Oscillating, countable: one, two, three, four; I could go on like this forever. Consciousness of course is not _deep_, but it is the only thing on the surface that persists; everything else is contingent flow. One way is to empty the count and turn to the practice of the free unfolding of generalized, mathematical forms. "This unfolding is not bound to the exterior world, and thereby to finiteness and responsibility; consequently its introspective harmonies can attain any degree of richness and clearness" (L.E.J. Brouwer). When these forms are used cunningly, to construct causal sequences in the physical world, the sequences are unlimited and ultimately exhaust the limited resources. The other way is the way of the muses. The muses, the daughters of Zeus and memory, Hesiod tells us, abide on the holy mountain of Helikon. From there they rise, and put a veiling of deep mist upon them, and walk in the night, singing in sweet voices, and celebrating.... And what they celebrate is the whole of the Creation. This way is to find beauty, order, mutual understanding, truth, and wisdom in the finite and responsible world. They celebrate their own temporal nature and the generations of gods and humans. The muses do not die, but, as the daughters of Zeus (the granddaughters of devious-devising Kronos) and memory, they are always dying, always on the way of death. The muses are of one mind not because they exceed time but precisely because they are time. They have different domains, they tell different stories, but they are in step. Although they may be doing utterly different kinds of things, they do not work against themselves or their sisters in producing their meaning. This does not mean that they present a unified logical structure. The muses are of one mind in their freedom from care and in their desire to express themselves in song. Their songs, each with their own content and disciplinary requirements, are "pleasing to the mind of Zeus" as a single song. In a world of surfaces without depth, the sustainable way to knowledge is the way of the muses. The way of sustainable life is the way of death. Learning to die, one allows resources for sustaining the generations--both the children and the works of art. They bring forgetfulness of sorrows, and rest from anxiety. * * America realize the value of jazz now. But unfortunately the masters that are really playing it are all gone. To bridge this generation gap they got a problem, I'm the only some- body that can do it. You might say I'm the spirit of jazz. I know all forms of jazz. I know how to take a band and to create that's cause of the experience I had as a child with a band. I wasn't out there in the combo thing. That's the reason it never interested me in solo piano and that. Somebody start out with combos and trios and solos. The bigger the band the better. I'm always talking to musicians, let's get a 2000 piece band and they can't conceive of that. Now that interests me. But you know if you go out and tell musicians that - strange enough they shake their heads astounded. I tell 'em you in the har- mony department, out of all the men on earth you should be delighted to get together to demonstrate harmony. If you demonstrate harmony, then the rest of the men in other sections of life can see that harmony can be demonstra- ted. I'm dealing with the truth. I know exactly how to color music in such a way I need maybe two or three thousand pieces to interest me. --SR * * * diu the logic of snowflakes cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet