A Brief Response Regarding Digital Poetics and New Media Poetics
This blog will, once a week, turn into a call and response to a class I am currently taking: conducted and taught by Dr. Lori Emerson, “"Digital Poetry and the Limits of Interpretation” is an exploration in what Adalaide Morris has aptly entitled ‘New Media Poetics.’ I hope these entries will be seen not as a finished argument or entrenched opinion; rather, I hope these entries record my orienting myself toward a 'newer' system of poetics.
For my first entry I would like to address one small aspect of the first text we are engaging, Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Digital Poetics. Glazier addresses the lyrical “I” in one of the early chapters of the book. In a brief section he quickly asserts how, in digital poetics, the lyrical “I” is dismissed, rejected. This is an extension of a particular conception of innovative poetics; Marjorie Perloff explores this idea wonderfully in her essay “LANGUAGE POETRY AND THE LYRIC SUBJECT:
RON SILLIMAN'S ALBANY, SUSAN HOWE'S BUFFALO.”
The deconstruction of the lyric “voice” in innovative writing is a problematic one; in the realm of digital poetics and new media poetics it is even more so: the ability to problematize the ‘voicing’ of identity to the extent that it is proclaimed ‘dead,’ in whatever aesthetic medium, is an ability that is a result of occupying a socially privileged position. Jordan Windholz and I analyze this more thoroughly in “A Poetics of Suspicion: Chicano/a Poetry and the New (a dialogue),” an essay forthcoming in Puerto Del Sol. As we state in that essay:
“On a more basic level, one must have a politically and economically viable identity in order to willingly lose it, to throw it to the wind. Those that say for aesthetic reasons that identity is dead, fragmented, or passé, often have a viable identity they do not need to worry about. Being invisible or visible as a white male is quite different than being invisible or visible as a Chicano.”
In the realm of digital poetics, the technological ability to dismiss identity is a direct articulation of class privilege. This is not to dismiss out of the hand aesthetics that problematize identity in such a manner; rather, it is to posit, again, that identity is stated in the very medium one employs to articulate oneself. In this case, the knowledge of coding, the ownership of a personal computer, access to the internet, and the knowledge of etiquette on the web are symptoms of one’s social position in a particular nation-state.
To bring this home, there are some in my family (Latinos of the 'lower' and 'middle' class) whose knowledge of the web is limited by the fact that they cannot afford a personal computer, some don’t have email, others wouldn’t think of paying bills online or using an I-phone to deposit a check into their checking or savings account, if they even have an account. This is not a matter of ignorance nor naïvete, rather, it is a systemic extension of class difference; this class difference and its systemic structure is analyzed in communities employing the Bridges Out of Poverty framework.
I have to say, I am not asserting that Latina/o and Chicana/o (or other ethnic) writers must employ the lyrical 'voice.' On the contrary, I love the employment of those aesthetic devices that deconstruct static conceptions of 'self' and I myself employ them in my poetry. What I am saying is that the employment and deployment of those aesthetic devices (fragmentation, collage, etc.) that threaten or deconstruct static 'voicings' are themselves articulations of self.
I will blog more on this subject and develop it (as is the nature of blogs, more questions are raised than answered--and I fully acknowledge that I may be incorrect in my assertions--please call me out); however, what further interests me is how one’s location in the nation-state influences how one articulates oneself via new media poetics: the employment of twitter and the consequent mobilization in the Iran elections is vastly different than the use of the medium in the USA—this is a small example; however, what it speaks toward is that one’s location in a nation-state will posit possible frames of action, in both the digital and ‘real’ world, that will fundamentally differ than those in another nation-state. Thus, the practice of new media poetics, however Utopian its visioning of world politics, is vastly influenced by the social (class, ethnic and racialized) status of its practitioners.
3 comments:
1. I like the Iran example. I thought of that as well because I was blown away by the use of Twitter for very real and very serious political action.
2. I also like the question of privilege--one of the things I tend to think about when scholars say things like OH, THE LYRICAL "I" IS SO PASSE (I wish I could get the accent in there--damn codes!) is how important it has been for marginalized groups to possess a lyrical "I" in a culture that doesn't think of any of them as "I"s
Does that make sense?
3. Quit making me look bad.
-Lacy
Hallelujah. The demonized "I". What the hell? What about persona? What about the multiple "I"? What about the invented "I"? But most importantly, what about the "I" of the person whose voice we rarely, if ever, hear?
Though I wonder, just to cut Glazier some slack, if what he is trying to say is that the digital space is an inclusive community, one where the "I" is part of a synergy, part of something greater than "i"tself (even if it is something as freaky as a cyborg). However, you're right in stating that a very limited type of "I" is accessing digital poetry, and the digital community may not be as inclusive as it thinks.
Michele
I had the same thoughts about the "I" and privilege when I read that section of Glazier.
Mark and I were just talking about how strange it is that every digital poet that we will be publishing in the next issue of SpringGun except for Jason Nelson (I think that's his real name) has a net identity, artist name, alter ego or pen name.
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