| from Litteraria Pragensia 11.22 (2002): 3-9. LOUIS ARMAND INTRODUCTION: TRANSVERSIONS OF THE CONTEMPORARY From Mallarm�, and continuing to the present time, the poetics of the "contemporary" has been entangled in controversy by those who stake claims to its foundational moments. This phenomenon is highly paradoxical given that, as with avant-garde practice in general, the emergence of discourses of the "contemporary," as an outgrowth of Anglo-European modernism, was the result of a complicated process of appropriation, synthesis and rejection of antecedent forms and strategies beyond any straightforward temporal placement. Moreover, its relation to the "contemporary" as such, situates those discourses surrounding it in an uneasy relationship with the assertions of literary historicity and with the deconstruction of concepts of "presence" and the "present." Claims for the clarity and purity of the foundations of contemporary poetics, therefore, should be considered with scepticism, since they are by and large projective, generalised, and often explicitly constructed in order to promote a particular tradition or a particular legacy. A number of trajectories may nevertheless be identified as describing a "pre-history" of contemporary poetics in the 20th century. These would necessarily include the self-reflexivity of modernist writing, and of modernist art in general, which systematically problematised and sought to dismantle integral elements of the traditional structure of the literary work and of literary production. Consequently, one of the recurring characteristics of poetics that are referred to as contemporary has been a certain effect of simultaneity and the consideration of the constituting elements of a text as possessing equal semantic value. For this reason there has been an increasing emphasis on the materiality of language and a broad equivocality across signifying structures, irrespective of discursive or rhetorical categories (trope, schema; genre; paronomasia, parataxis, etc.). In the process, the valuation of particular technical skills associated with classical or renaissance poetics has been largely redefined and to a certain degree abandoned, along with prior notions of claritas, originality, cohesion, mimesis. In turn, serial and non-linear structures have come to predominate, placing existing formal orthodoxies under duress and at the same time realising other structural vocabularies, ranging from the calligrammes of Guillaume Apollinaire and cut-ups of Tristan Tzara, to John Cage's mesostics and the lipogrammes of Georges Perec, from Alan Turing's discursive "halting machines" to Theodor Nelson's "poetic" hypertext machines. A second trajectory might include the reduction of the literary work, as envisaged by Roland Barthes in 'From Work to Text' (1971), in which the conventional objecthood of the work is pushed towards a threshold of dematerialisation. While at the same time as expanding the textual field, this movement of "reduction" has been accompanied by a radical exploration of materiality itself, most clearly exemplified in the later works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Accompanying this movement has been a parallel reduction of the object-relation of signifying structures. Beginning with the work of Sigmund Freud, J.G. Frazer, Ferdinand de Saussure and the early cybernetics of Hermann von Helmholtz, there has arisen a series of discourses which have broadened the concept of language across all fields of knowledge, production and so on. One consequence of this has been a discrediting of utilitarian notions of language and the advent of what could be called a technological conceptualisation. This conceptualisation replaces the notion of language as a function or object of socio-historical evolution with the idea of language as the medium and ultimately condition of such evolution. Consequently, language is not seen to be technologised, but rather to be technological in a way which bears out the assertion of Martin Heidegger that "techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic."1 The critique and, to a large extent disposal, of "aesthetic" content suggests a third trajectory. This should immediately be qualified by noting that this itself has been an outgrowth of developments within aesthetic discourse, from Immanuel Kant to Benedetto Croce, and forms a subtext to the erosion of those boundaries which had been established between "literary" criticism and practice following the increased professionalisation of the former (after F.R. Leavis) as an academic discipline and its subsequent critique by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others. As a counter-institutional tendency, this has often been traced back to a series of meditations throughout the 20th century, beginning in the late 19th century with Mallarm�'s Crise de Vers and proceeding in one sense or another through the writings of Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Ezra Pound, Tristan Tzara, Wyndham Lewis, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Cage, Charles Olson, Marshal McLuhan, and reaching something of an apotheosis in journals like Aspen and Tel Quel, and in the Art & Language, Oulipo (Ouvroir de litt�rature potentielle) and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movements of the 1970s and 1980s. The outcome of this is that avant-garde practice has come to be seen as increasingly placing the poetics of the contemporary at the threshold of "information technology," as exemplified in the work of writers like Steve McCaffery, Jeremy Prynne, Allen Fisher and PiO. A forth trajectory might be one that problematises placement. Here the "poetic subject" has become both a reflection on the conventions that frame it or situate it, and a self-questioning of how poetics is "communicated" or disseminated. Such questioning has often taken the form of a re-evaluation of generic distinctions about what it is that determines the literary or poetic as such. One of the outcomes of this has been to focus upon the "concrete" nature of language, as distinct from those otherwise arbitrary formal conventions which have sought to bind language to a system of mimetic ideality. Commencing with Mallarm�'s Un coup de d�s, this tendency extends by a transverse genealogy through the Merzbau of Kurt Schwitters, the readymades of Duchamp, the zaum texts of Velimir Khlebnikov, Hugo Ball's sound poems, Artaud's the�tre de cruaut�, the "combines" of Robert Rauschenberg and the chance-mediated assemblages of Cage, to the performative cybernetics of Stellarc. The consequences of this last trajectory have perhaps been most evident in the cross-over between poetics and visual or verbal media, underwriting the work of a broad range of now canonical artists, from the cubists and constructivists to the present, including more recently Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, Martha Rosler, Joseph Kosuth, Jean-Luc Godard, Fluxus, Bruce Neuman, Cy Twombly, Barbara Kruger, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer and among others. The advent of the world wide web in the early 1990s has similarly expanded the field of contemporary poetics as what could be called a a manifestly "technological" emplacement. Much of recent cyber art, like Douglas Davis's The World's First Collaborative Sentence or Andruid Kerne's Collage Machine, integrates mechanical and chance procedures in the production of "textual objects" in "real time." The advent of such "interface ecologies" radicalises, and simultaneously banalises, the machine aesthetics of successive avant-gardes while at the same time evidencing a poetics of the contemporary in its most literal and hence most "excessive" and "monstrous" formulations. This delimiting of textuality and its implications for contemporary poetics can again be traced, through Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, back to Mallarm�'s Le Livre and its conception of the ideal book. This was to be a type of Signatura Rerum, an "open totality" which would depend not on the relation of a divine logos, but upon the communication of material elements (the "meaning of format") posed against the "artificial unity that used to be based on the square measurements of the book." Necessarily, this presupposed a movement away from a symbolic function of language, towards a poetics of structure, in which the closed totality of the book would give way to "hesitation, disposition of parts, their alterations and relationships."2 Mallarm�'s early exploration of typographics and syntactical recombination anticipates in many ways the inventions of an avant-garde poetics whose vocabulary of the "contemporary" was, arguably, first given formal expression in Un coup de d�s (appropriately it was first published in the journal Cosmopolis in 1897). Cuban poet Octavio Armand sums this up in what could almost stand for a manifesto of contemporary poetics: The poem seems to evoke the theology and science of distant centuries and to anticipate twentieth-century physics. On the one hand it is impossible not to feel the ancient music of the spheres in the conjunction of musical score and star chart embodied in the poem. On the other hand, the idea of spacing reading so as to accelerate or diminish movement [...] links the notions of space and time so closely that it fuses them, creating a spacetime for poetry through the simultaneous vision of the page. Finally, Un coup de d�s places thought in an orbit very close to Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. Thought fits, or rather falls, in the cage of chance; it is impossible to escape chance, despite an heroic effort to place a limit on infinity. The fundamental phrase, which is the title, "A throw of dice will never abolish chance," continues until the very last line, "All thought is a roll of dice." Typography underscores the idea that in essence we are reading a single, irrevocable, interminable, abysmal phrase. Scattered throughout the poem-on its only page-and mounted in the largest type used, the title is foregrounded continuously. The last verse, in the smallest type, occupies the background. This is doubly true in both instances: because of the order of reading and because of the spatial expansion or contraction implicit in working with different types. The throw of dice ends in another throw of dice that is the same one and the same as always. Dice, words, ideas, types run across the page until they are lost in the mind. Poem of blank spaces, music of silences. We see, read, hear the forms of absence. Verbal phrase and musical phrase tend towards extreme purity: they expand in silence and they express it. [...] The idea empties in an abyss of infinite possibilities, as does the poem. Poem? Drawing? Score? The poem seems to embody the uncertainty of the throw of dice. It is a genre of genres. Un coup de d�s that combines and generates genres.3 In their joint statement, 'Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,' the Noigandres group (Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari and Haraldo de Campos) made the claim in 1958 that "Assuming that the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmical unit) is closed, concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as a structural agent." The 'Pilot Plan' points to Mallarm�'s concept of "subdivisions prismatiques de l'id�e" and the radical use of typographical devices as the first qualitative jump in the development of a poetics of the "concrete." A second jump is identified in the work of Apollinaire: "Il faut que notre intelligence s'habitue a comprendre synth�tico-id�ographiquement au lieu de anylitico-discursivement." Concretion for Augusto de Campos, as outlined in his 1956 manifesto, extends beyond mere typographics to a broadly material foundation of semantic systems, encompassing the "verbivocovisual" syntax of Joyce, the neo-plasticism of Mondrian, and the tonal compositions of Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen. This almost inevitably leads to an identification with the developments of cybernetics, and towards the end of the 'Pilot Plan' concrete poetry is explained as "a mechanism regulating itself: feed-back. Faster communication (problems of functionality and structure implied) endows the poem with a positive value and guides its own making. Concrete poetry: total responsibility before language."4 In 'After Language Poetry: Innovation and its Theoretical Discontents,' Marjorie Perloff discusses how this "visualisation of poetic text" and the development of a "differential poetics" of nominalised, virtual media, came to impact on contemporary poetry from the seventies onwards. Perloff cites McCaffery, a prominent figure of the Language movement, who wrote in 1977 that "There is a group of writers today united in the feeling that literature has entered a crisis of the sign [...] and that the foremost task at hand-a more linguistic and philosophic than 'poetic' task-is to demystify the referential fallacy of language." As a synthesis of Olson's "field composition," the simultan�isme of Apollinaire and Cendrars, and various "poststructuralist" and "postmodernist" theories, Language poetry in the late 70s and early 80s stood in direct communication both with the ideas of de Campos and the Noigandres group, and with those of Cage, McLuhan and the "primary structures" of Morris, Judd and Carl Andre. And while Perloff is critical of the inflated assumptions inherent to discourses of the new, both as an avant-gardist stock in trade and as revisionist hype, her analysis of Language poetry's legacy not only establishes a strong claim to the enduring significance of the concretist experiment, but delineates a contemporary poetics of intermedia as its necessary consequence: "the one revolution which really has occurred in our own time-namely, the habitation of cyberspace." McKenzie Wark's essay, 'From Hypertext to Codework,' pursues this line of argument further, radicalising Theodor Nelson's definition of hypertext in the 1960s as "non-sequential writing" beyond the reductivist application of this term to forms of electronic scripting. Likewise Darren Tofts, in 'Ulysses and the Poetics of Hypertextuality,' explores the ways in which hypertext emerges as an outgrowth of a particular "technological" concept of poetics which antecedes its reduction as a term within contemporary media theory or as a set of computing protocols. Tofts cites Joyce's Ulysses as exemplary of hypertextuality in this sense, as an "extension" of the logic of the book, similar to Mallarm�'s conception of le Livre. Wark's notion of "codework," on the other hand, crosses directly into the field of programmatics, exploring ideas of permutation and feedback in linguistic and semantic relations, resembling in certain ways the differential poetics of Finnegans Wake. In 'Discontinued Meditations' Steve McCaffery explores "letters in dysfunctional relation" within a material poetics of ellipsis and deletion ("a fault line across congruence"). Returning again to Mallarm�, McCaffery's meditation explores a certain objecthood of signification, the "white spaces" of "a vast overdetermination of the blank." Kevin Nolan's essay 'Getting Past Odradek' similarly investigates the object mechanisms of base signification, reading through the "tropic" figures of Kafka's odradek and Freud's fort/da game. For Nolan, these "fault lines across congruence" can be read as a chiasmus between the animate and inanimate. "For the modern epoch," Nolan argues, "the formal autonomy of literature was secured by a theory of language which decoupled the contingency of thinghood and language, replacing causal heterology with arbitrariness." As with McCaffery and Wark, Nolan's mechanisms of replacement suggest "a line that follows the discontinuous ends of all 'tropological' incorporation" as a type of interface technology, or cybernetic apparatus, between "arbitrary signs" and "arbitrary bodies." Echoing the later work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, D.J. Huppatz's essay on Kathey Acker elaborates a poetics of the body as both topos and tropic apparatus, a "surface of inscription" defined by zones of semantic intensity. Repetition, chance procedures, narrative recursion, the absence of the original-each situates the "body" of Acker's writing as what Derrida, echoing Kristeva and Irigaray, elsewhere terms �criture au corps. Like the fort/da game of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle,' Acker's writing commits its bodies to an abyss of writing which in turn is made to produce them, or reproduce them, as spectres of the unassimilable. In V�ronique Vassiliou's notes on the body "pol�tique," writing describes a present "here and now" of the contemporary as hybrid, transg�nique, in media res. Vassiliou explores the radical materiality of typogenetics, in which the genre of poetry is situated between bio-informatics and forensics, or between what textual geneticists call avant-textes and the open totality of the textual apparatus. Contemporary poetics is consequently seen to be situated between the unassimilable and the synthetic-recursive, trans-genred, "future anterior" of a writing in advance of itself. Through the concretist experiments of the 1950s and 60s, and the linguistic poetics of the 1970s and 80s, the "demystification of the referential fallacy of language," as McCaffery says, has followed a path of reduction and permutation, minimalism and expansive discursus. The technological placement that language has "attained" might indeed be thought of as a turning between these seemingly divergent tendencies-a tropic apparatus or "techno-poetics," whose articulation as spatio-temporal difference can be seen to describe an "essence" of the contemporary. In so doing, it assigns to it a certain materiality and material expression-of which the habitation of cyberspace is not only the most recent and ubiquitous manifestation, but also the most attenuated, reduced to a (mere) interval of light. Accordingly, "the contemporary writer," as Stephen Muecke proposes, "tends not to just add to existing views of the world, but to trace a path showing how we got to this position, and what is at stake." At the same time, "contemporary" writing accelerates the production of traces to a point, as McLuhan might say, of light speed data processing, verging upon a collapse into instantaneousness and a metaphysics of the sign (information as Platonic truth or aletheia)-a hypermenesiac machine which, to reverse the usual formula, remembers by forgetting everything. Which is to say, a technics of archival inscription as prosthesis of memory, ex tempore. As in the photography of Marc Atkins, the mimetic "present" of representation is simultaneously collapsed and dilated, an aperture effect of reflexivity which takes the place of the subject-illusion of "seeing oneself seeing oneself" as topology of the image placed en abyme, as it were, where to learn of the truth (ek tes aletheias, as Plato says) is to learn of the image (ek tes eikonos). In the poetics of the contemporary, what is "at stake," then, is not so much the unpresentability of the present, but rather those recursive forms which stand in place of it-no longer, perhaps, in terms of the Benjaminian notion of mechanical reproduction as an erosion or displacement of "aura," but rather of the Heideggerean concept of the essence of technology as emplacement. Those "critical inventions" which belong to the contemporary while deforming its limits. As Mallarm� says, "here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present."5 Prague, January 2002 NOTES 1 Martin Heidegger. 'The Question Concerning Technology,' Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell; revised edition (London: Routledge, 1993): 308. 2 Le "Livre" de Mallarm�, ed. Jacques Scherer (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). 3 Octavio Armand. Refractions, trans. Carol Maier (New York: Lumen, 1994): 187. 4 Augusto de Campos, D�cio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos. Teoria da Poesia Concreta: Textos Cr�ticos e Manifestos 1950-1960 (Sao Paulo: Edi�aoes Inven�ao, 1965). 5 Le "Livre" de Mallarm�, 41. |