deliberately interferes with close reading, a practice based on the principle that what is at stake in every textual encounter is a hidden or buried object, a concept of symbolic meaning that can be discovered by the reader only if she or he reads ‘deeply’ enough.
Says DB:
Concrete poetry momentarily rejects the idea of the readerly reward for close reading, the idea of the ‘hidden or buried object,’ interferes with signification & momentarily interrupts the capitalist structure of language.
Gomringer argues that concrete poetry is an essentially modernist gesture that “realize[s] the idea of a universal poetry” & can “unite the view of the world expressed in the mother tongue with physical reality” (see 'inarticulate mark' I suppose)
As Marjorie Perloff says, though, this
call for what Eugen Gomringer has characterized as ‘reduced language’ for ‘poems [...] as easily understood as signs in airports & traffic signs,’ runs the risk of producing poems ‘poems’ that are airport & traffic signs.
The concrete poetry which I endorse here — & which stylistically is of most
influence on my own work — is a poetic without direct one-to-one signification. It is rhizomatic in composition, pointing both to & away from multiple shifting clouds of meanings & construction, where writing “has nothing to do with signifying [...] it has to do with surveying [&] mapping”... Instead of a single, arborescent (think of branches forming around a monolithic centre) historical & critical framework, rhizomatic writing is “a map not a tracing”; & as a map it has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back to the ‘same’. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involved an alleged ‘competence’. (Deleuze & Guattari)
If “Capitalism begins when you / open the Dictionary” (McCaffery “Lyric’s Larnyx”), then concrete poetry is a means of political & economic critique upon both reading & writing practice & the Capitalist means of exchange.
...Any movement to refuse or oppose Capitalism in writing only serves to reify it as theother, reinforcing its grip on representational language. The best we can strive for are momentary eruptions of non-meaning which are then co-opted back into representation by the very act of identification, pointing & naming. These brief eruptions
disengage with the idea of transmission of meaning through heavily codified & linear language in favour of ambiguity [...] disrupt[ing] the possibility of a transferal of Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of Capitalist ideology through text as regulated by grammar & syntax. (Christie)
The matter of the restricted economy shifts from an investment in communication through the visual mark (the grapheme) to an investment in the mark itself, the grapheme & the container of communication.
These texts are the documentation of the waste & excess produced through non- prescribed use of business machines. The documentation of this libidinal excess, of this waste, categorizes “the letter not as phoneme but as ink, & further insist[s] on that materiality” (McCaffery “Bill Bissett”)
What radical concrete presents to the reader is a record of the waste produced by the consumption (reading) of a text by a machine. If “[t]o read [...] is a labour of language. To read is to find meanings” (Barthes), then the consumption & expulsion of texts by machines such as photocopies & shredders also finds meanings where meanings are not expected, fracturing the text at the level of the seme. In a text where “everything signifies ceaselessly & several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure” (Barthes) even waste becomes poetically charged.
The voicing of these texts [texts utilizing or produced by photocopier degeneration], like the texts themselves, is “pulled off the page even as [it] disintegrate[s], a double thrust of text into silence” (Nichol)
A poetic of disgust includes both the “the figure of the turn, or moment of exclusion [...t]he movement away from the object as if to shun it” & the “negative utterance” (Ngai)
I extend Ngai’s formulation of the “inarticulate sound” to print- based media as well as the ‘inarticulate mark’...Concrete poetry – the ‘inarticulate mark’ – treats language as “raw matter” without a reinforced referent as a means to briefly interrupt capitalist exchange-based signification byinsisting on the disappearance of the referent while at the same time refusing to defer to other terms. It won’t coagulate into a unitary meaning & it also won’t move; it can’t be displaced.
Concrete poetry as an ‘inarticulate mark’ is a formulation of a poetics of excess; an excess which is not one of desire, but instead one of revulsion & rejection. ...It actively attempts to interrupt language’s making of capitalist value through the dis-assembly & re-assembly of the mark & the grapheme. Concrete poetry as a momentarily non-signifying map is an always impossible system of inarticulation, caught in the double-bind of the creation of meaning.
No comments:
Post a Comment