poetics

Subject-making is profoundly aesthetic. In the current moment, of data-intensive cultures and identity wars, the subjects that are made stem from machine learning techniques that engage aesthetics differently, nonetheless profoundly. My talk will focus on subjects of data abstractions, poetics of idealisation and aesthetic recognition. 

It is time to liberate the forest from the anthropocentric metaphor. Donna Haraway, endorsing Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), says this clearly: “A thinking forest is not a metaphor.” Recent work by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers on “Gaia,” along with Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” demands that we reevaluate our tendency toward metaphor when dealing with trees.

Kohn’s work, along with Michael Marder’s and Peter Wohlleben’s, suggests that we emphasize the cognitive life of trees, rather than harnessing the image of trees as metaphors for human cognition. We must view the forest as a thinking entity in its own right.

In this paper, I examine Henry David Thoreau’s writing as a model for an encounter with trees that moves beyond mere metaphor. Thoreau draws on his position as an American Transcendentalist and an empirical naturalist to approach trees both philosophically and scientifically. As a poet, he does not make poetry out of trees, but instead sees the poetry that trees themselves create.

For Thoreau, writing about trees is not a matter of generating something new out of the raw arboreal material; it is about tuning one’s sensitivity toward the meaning already present in the twisting roots, the stretching branches, and the kinship within the forest. I call Thoreau’s philosophical and literary style his “radicle empiricism,” punning on Branka Arsić’s characterization of Thoreau’s empirical method as “radical” while also alluding to Thoreau’s reference in Walden (1854) to a plant’s radicle, or taproot, digging into the earth so that the plant may sprout.

While Arsić and others have persuasively contrasted Thoreau’s scientific method to the more idealistic holism of writers like Goethe and Emerson, scholars have yet to adequately examine the role of the forest—as a non-conscious, albeit cognitive, entity—in Thoreau’s empiricism. Thoreau recognizes the effects of one’s grounding belief in the environment, one that is primed to see the forest as either a self-determined entity or as a collection of timber ready for human utilization. Practicing his radicle empiricism, Thoreau approaches the trees like he would a conversation among humans, hoping as he does in “Autumnal Tints” (1862) that “perchance amid these groves might, arise at last a new school of philosophy or poetry.”

I argue that Thoreau’s writing, being so heavily influenced by his daily encounters with trees, models a posthuman translation of arboreal poetic philosophy. Trees for Thoreau, as Richard Higgins notes, exist as writing and as poems. They are hieroglyphic, demanding attention and observation, but also speculation and experimentation.

Thus, Thoreau’s empirical method begins by recording his arboreal encounters, but it progresses toward philosophical speculation and poetic engagement, just as the radicle allows the plant to sprout. Yet this speculative forest thinking is an ambiguous endeavor by both the trees and Thoreau: this is thinking on and about the forest, but also the forest itself thinking. Thoreau therefore thinks with the forest, modeling a more sustainable speculative practice for posthuman radical thinking in—and after—the Anthropocene.

The notion of entanglement is central to critical posthumanist thought. It might be said to have replaced the ubiquitous network metaphor or even the paradigm of the global in a number of contexts; at the very least, it stands in a tense relationship to them. While the figure of the globe is undeniably linked to human(ist) construction practices and the European colonial project, and a network-like connectedness implies links between objects that are ultimately thought of as separate, the topos of entanglement entails a fundamentally different, relational form of (intra)connectedness with other ethical implications. When fctional texts generate connectivity, e.g. by linking storylines that are separated in terms of their geographies, literary studies often habitually refer to these texts as "global novels" or "network narratives".

The implications of these tropes of connectivity themselves - as briefy outlined above - are rarely given much thought; and as labels, they cannot account for more complex and meshwork-like formations. In this talk, I will be thinking about the poetics and aesthetics of entanglement.

Comparative literature's changing conceptions of world literature have largely been informed by humanist thinking and the global paradigm, but as the climate crisis exposes the inextricable interconnectedness of globalisation and the anthropocene, 'natural' and 'cultural' histories, and species thinking and historical thinking (Chakrabarty 2009), wouldn't it be time to let theories of world literature and critical posthumanism converge? One route into this might be to extend Édouard Glissants poetics of relation to non-human actors, and to put Glissant into a conversation with Karen Barad's concept of agential realism. Working with texts by J.M. Coetzee, Olga Tokarczuk, and Richard Powers, I will show how they destabilise the binaries and demarcations targeted by a critical posthumanist agenda, how literature ultimately test the limits of object-oriented ontology and its anti-relational stance, and how geography still matters in all of this.

At the same time, the framework of posthumanist entanglement helps questioning the popular conception of literature as simply 'playing through' or modelling fctionalised versions of human experience, and to think about literature as an experiential space and as a relational ethics in its own right.

Earlier this year, poet-scholar John Cayley proposed that scholars and makers of electronic literature attend to the “delivery media for ‘literature’ that are, historically, taking the place of physical, codex-bound books” (John Cayley, 2017, “Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature,” electronic book review). Among those emerging delivery media are so-called Virtual Digital Assistants (VDA) like Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri. Capable of interpreting and producing human language, these domestic robots speak in pleasant female voices, offering access to information, music, social media, telephony, and other services. Their terms and conditions inform the consumer that once the device is activated, it records everything that is being said. The proliferation of VDA bears wide-reaching ethical and aesthetic ramifications that scholars in digital media should attend to.

On the one hand, “we are willingly installing and paying for the last mile of the infrastructure needed for the ultimate surveillance society” (Robert Dale, 2017, “Industry watch: The pros and cons of listening devices,” Natural Language Engineering 23.6, 973). On the other hand, “the arrival of speaking and, especially, listening networked programmable devices…has, I believe, important consequences for literature and for literary — linguistic aesthetic — practices of all kinds” (Cayley 2017). Cayley’s digital aural performance The Listeners (2016) offers a lens to examine the poetics and ethics of VDA. The Listeners is housed in an Amazon Echo, a smart speaker system controlled via the Artificial Intelligence Alexa. An instance of what Cayley has called ‘aurature’ (a composite of aurality and literature), The Listeners complicates our understanding of audio performance art, as text is delivered by a synthetic voice. By aesthetically engaging the slight – yet noticeable – robotic monotony of Alexa’s speech, The Listeners challenges audiences to think about the nature of transactive synthetic language and the meaning of human / AI subjectivity.

At the same time, as the title The Listeners suggests, Alexa’s ability to ‘hear’ is a key feature in Cayley’s piece. In installations of The Listeners, Alexa’s ‘recording’ feature is active, which means that all transactions between speakers and The Listeners are “sent to the artist's Alexa app and the alexa.amazon.com website” (Cayley 2016). Along with the piece’s title, the recording function of The Listeners hints at the forms of social control enabled by technologies like Alexa. Alexander Galloway uses the term “reverse Panopticon” for a society which is characterized by “a multiplicity, nay an infinity, of points of view flanking and flooding the world viewed” (Galloway, Alexander, 2014, Laruelle: Against the Digital. University of Minnesota Press, 68). Alexa records not only her owners’ transactions, but also sends what she hears from guests and visitors to the owners’ account, allowing consumers to spy on each other. Like online practices such as “following” or “stalking” others on social media, Alexa constitutes a prime example of surveillance in a reverse panoptic society. In aesthetically engaging these ‘hearing’ abilities via Alexa’s transactive synthetic language, The Listeners brings computer ethics into conversation with new media poetics, offering trajectories for scholarly inquire into the ethical and aesthetic implications of VDA technologies.

Electronic literature is a rapidly growing area of creative production and scholarly interest. It is inherently multimedial and multimodal, and thus demands multiple critical methods of interpretation. Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} is a collaboration between three scholars combining different interpretive methods of digital literature and poetics in order to think through how critical reading is changing—and, indeed, must change—to keep up with the emergence of digital poetics and practices. It weaves together radically different methodological approaches—close reading of onscreen textual and visual aesthetics, Critical Code Studies, and cultural analytics (big data)—into a collaborative interpretation of a single work of digital literature.

Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} is a work of electronic literature that presents a high-speed, one-word-at-a-time animation synchronized to visual and aural effects. It tells the tale of a mysterious pit and its impact on the surrounding community. Programmed in Flash and published online, its fast-flashing aesthetic of information overload bombards the reader with images, text, and sound in ways that challenge the ability to read carefully, closely, and analytically in traditional ways. The work’s multiple layers of poetics and programming can be most effectively read and analyzed through collaborative efforts at computational criticism such as is modeled in this book. The result is a unique and trailblazing book that presents the authors’ collaborative efforts and interpretations as a case study for performing digital humanities literary criticism of born-digital poetics.

(Source: University of Iowa Press catalog copy)