> > Poetry at Stake in a Self/Technology Divide
What fascinates me about emerging media studies is that its lines of inquiry almost always cause cracks in the most foundational definitions, value systems, and assumptions that a vast majority of people accept uncritically. What we take for granted in the human world, technology calls into question and complicates. What was once transparent, media studies brings into opacity and demands critical attention. For example, considering artificial intelligence, we begin to wonder what it really means to be “human” and what (if anything) makes human consciousness so distinct from machine consciousness. Considering social media and how it complicates our privacy, cognition, identity, and supposedly our health, the definition of “self” obfuscates so that a fractured/incoherent online identity actually suggests a fractured/incoherent offline identity.
In Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (1999), Carrie Noland interrogates the identity of poetry as it collides with the alterity of technology. She studies the interplay between technology and lyric poetry and how technology challenges a lyric aesthetic dedicated to the expression of a private and interior self. In this case, Noland uses media studies to question a traditional definition that sets lyric poetry in opposition to technology, popular culture, and the “commodification of the human voice” (5). The genre of lyric poetry is associated with a single speaker or voice, and especially in the Romantic period the lyric was elevated to pure and unmediated expression. Noland references poetic and artistic approaches that have clouded that pure aura with uncomfortable liaisons of self and machine. In what is more like a collection of essays than a deliberately chaptered book, Noland explores poets who treat technology as an analogy (Char, Rimbaud) and poets who apply technology as a material condition (Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson).
Noland takes Guillaume Apollinaire as her starting point and agrees with his provocation that external forces (namely commodification and technology) would ultimately not threaten lyric poetry but actually would “play an instrumental role in the composition of the lyric text and […] in the construction of the autonomous (lyric) subject” (5). Apollinaire does not just seek a new poetic language, but more radically a new conception of how subjectivity is constituted through social interactions, discourse, and mechanical interventions. In her chapter on Adorno, titled “Confessing Philosophy,” Noland analyzes his atypically confessional philosophical work Negative Dialectics. One important conclusion that Noland makes in this chapter is that the concept of self-exposure and confession is a troubled one. In using a first-person pronoun to “confess philosophy,” Adorno highlights the fact the the “I” of lyric poetry has never represented the autonomous, transcendent, individual self. In fact, confession is “a highly public gesture, defining […] consciousness as a rhetorically and historically overdetermined form” (63). To understand how the self is determined by external conditions, Noland writes, Adorno focuses on “the technologies responsible for the production of what is commonly taken to be the self” (64), i.e. the lyric confession and the personal memoir. Like Apollinaire, Adorno worries about the myth of the individual, autonomous subject since it is too easy to forget that it has a source external to itself and that it is mediated. Noland concludes that Negative Dialectics is “the testament of the human subject as cyborg, a creature who must write through a distorting apparatus in order to achieve, paradoxically, an authentic voice” (88).
The tension between poetry and the distorting potential of technology is clear in the chapters following “Confessing Philosophy.” In her chapter on Blaise Cendrars, she finds that poetic language and popular commercial discourse make a tenuous opposition, since each category constitutes the other. We can only identify poetic language insofar as it is distinct from the mediated language of popular culture. In the chapter on René Char, Noland analyzes the paradoxical relation that Char has with technology in his poetry. On one hand, Char affirms Heidegger’s view that poetry (poiesis) is a privileged receptor that can channel a pure essence, whereas technology (enframing) only reduces and vanquishes nature. On the other hand, Char was a member of the Surrealist movement and at least partly endorsed “theories of the technological and its potential relationship to poetry that were decidedly not Heideggerian” (143). Also, Char was willing to host a technological Other in his poetry, since he integrated elements of encrypted radio code transmitted during World War II. As Noland points out, the presence of the technological language (code) in his poetry is complicated and reveals Char’s admission that poetry cannot remain totally removed from technological mediation. According to Noland, Char’s Feuillets d’Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos) demonstrates the question of “poetry’s relation to cryptography, and, therefore, of the poet’s relation to the radio-controlled, ideological actor in history” (159). In other words, by integrating radio code into his poetry, Char admitted that the language of poetry—like the language of communication technology—has an origin outside of itself.
In her chapter on contemporary performance artist Laurie Anderson, the relationship between the individual self and communication/reproduction technologies is at issue in a more explicit way than in her previous chapters. (Noland begins the chapter with a mention of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.”) Noland’s primary premise is that Anderson, similar to Apollinaire, “problematizes the distinction between what is intrinsic (internal to the self) and what is extrinsic (technology, institutions, politics, the media, etc.)” (189). In Anderson’s work, the self as an individual mind and body is penetrated by technologized messages and what we commonly consider nonhuman, self-destructive systems. Although it is a little unclear how Anderson fits into Noland’s expressed focus on lyric poetry, the analysis makes an important point that poetry should “strive to confess mediation [...] while simultaneously challenging mediation’s limits” (211).
In following this last point, the final impression I have is that subjective expression in poetry has traditionally assumed a concept of the individual, autonomous, and transcendent self, and that this concept functions in lyric poetry only as it is placed in opposition to technology, popular culture, or some other external entity. Thus, only by excluding technological mediation as “not poetry,” the identity of “poetry” emerges. To interrogate this binary means that more than poetry is at stake, since we must also “place ‘natural’ images of selfhood at stake [and] recognize them as objectifications and yet continue probing their traumatic content” (Noland 216). At the point where media studies and poetry analysis begin to elucidate each other and blend, a chaotic and radical line of inquiry emerges.
Filed under: commentary | Tags: lyric, noland, poetry, posthuman, self, technology
What fascinates me about emerging media studies is that its lines of inquiry almost always cause cracks in the most foundational definitions, value systems, and assumptions that a vast majority of people accept uncritically. What we take for granted in the human world, technology calls into question and complicates. What was once transparent, media studies brings into opacity and demands critical attention. For example, considering artificial intelligence, we begin to wonder what it really means to be “human” and what (if anything) makes human consciousness so distinct from machine consciousness. Considering social media and how it complicates our privacy, cognition, identity, and supposedly our health, the definition of “self” obfuscates so that a fractured/incoherent online identity actually suggests a fractured/incoherent offline identity.
Noland takes Guillaume Apollinaire as her starting point and agrees with his provocation that external forces (namely commodification and technology) would ultimately not threaten lyric poetry but actually would “play an instrumental role in the composition of the lyric text and […] in the construction of the autonomous (lyric) subject” (5). Apollinaire does not just seek a new poetic language, but more radically a new conception of how subjectivity is constituted through social interactions, discourse, and mechanical interventions. In her chapter on Adorno, titled “Confessing Philosophy,” Noland analyzes his atypically confessional philosophical work Negative Dialectics. One important conclusion that Noland makes in this chapter is that the concept of self-exposure and confession is a troubled one. In using a first-person pronoun to “confess philosophy,” Adorno highlights the fact the the “I” of lyric poetry has never represented the autonomous, transcendent, individual self. In fact, confession is “a highly public gesture, defining […] consciousness as a rhetorically and historically overdetermined form” (63). To understand how the self is determined by external conditions, Noland writes, Adorno focuses on “the technologies responsible for the production of what is commonly taken to be the self” (64), i.e. the lyric confession and the personal memoir. Like Apollinaire, Adorno worries about the myth of the individual, autonomous subject since it is too easy to forget that it has a source external to itself and that it is mediated. Noland concludes that Negative Dialectics is “the testament of the human subject as cyborg, a creature who must write through a distorting apparatus in order to achieve, paradoxically, an authentic voice” (88).
The tension between poetry and the distorting potential of technology is clear in the chapters following “Confessing Philosophy.” In her chapter on Blaise Cendrars, she finds that poetic language and popular commercial discourse make a tenuous opposition, since each category constitutes the other. We can only identify poetic language insofar as it is distinct from the mediated language of popular culture. In the chapter on René Char, Noland analyzes the paradoxical relation that Char has with technology in his poetry. On one hand, Char affirms Heidegger’s view that poetry (poiesis) is a privileged receptor that can channel a pure essence, whereas technology (enframing) only reduces and vanquishes nature. On the other hand, Char was a member of the Surrealist movement and at least partly endorsed “theories of the technological and its potential relationship to poetry that were decidedly not Heideggerian” (143). Also, Char was willing to host a technological Other in his poetry, since he integrated elements of encrypted radio code transmitted during World War II. As Noland points out, the presence of the technological language (code) in his poetry is complicated and reveals Char’s admission that poetry cannot remain totally removed from technological mediation. According to Noland, Char’s Feuillets d’Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos) demonstrates the question of “poetry’s relation to cryptography, and, therefore, of the poet’s relation to the radio-controlled, ideological actor in history” (159). In other words, by integrating radio code into his poetry, Char admitted that the language of poetry—like the language of communication technology—has an origin outside of itself.
In her chapter on contemporary performance artist Laurie Anderson, the relationship between the individual self and communication/reproduction technologies is at issue in a more explicit way than in her previous chapters. (Noland begins the chapter with a mention of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.”) Noland’s primary premise is that Anderson, similar to Apollinaire, “problematizes the distinction between what is intrinsic (internal to the self) and what is extrinsic (technology, institutions, politics, the media, etc.)” (189). In Anderson’s work, the self as an individual mind and body is penetrated by technologized messages and what we commonly consider nonhuman, self-destructive systems. Although it is a little unclear how Anderson fits into Noland’s expressed focus on lyric poetry, the analysis makes an important point that poetry should “strive to confess mediation [...] while simultaneously challenging mediation’s limits” (211).
In following this last point, the final impression I have is that subjective expression in poetry has traditionally assumed a concept of the individual, autonomous, and transcendent self, and that this concept functions in lyric poetry only as it is placed in opposition to technology, popular culture, or some other external entity. Thus, only by excluding technological mediation as “not poetry,” the identity of “poetry” emerges. To interrogate this binary means that more than poetry is at stake, since we must also “place ‘natural’ images of selfhood at stake [and] recognize them as objectifications and yet continue probing their traumatic content” (Noland 216). At the point where media studies and poetry analysis begin to elucidate each other and blend, a chaotic and radical line of inquiry emerges.