Toute pensée émet un Coup de Dés
(All Thought expresses a Throw of the Dice)

Malarmé (1897)[i]

This past week’s short comment-discussion about intuition as a source/precursor of conscious thought, idea-making, analysis, exegesis, mapping, walking, breathing etc. intrigued me. This probe tries to fold that interest across this week’s topic of media glitches (Menkman), reading backwards and deformation (Samuels and McGann) and deformed humanities (Sample).  In doing this the exemplary ‘objects’ seem to multiply out of control in my head, but two (maybe three) seem most compelling (and I’ll fully inflate one by Thursday).  They are: 1) John Cage’s Variation VII a composition or structured improvisation using static and electrical interference performed as part of  Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering, 1966; 2)  an odd web project I did a few years ago called Concordance Mumbler; 3) the translations of Fernando Pessoa by  Erin Mouré.

1: Variation VII (listen to the sound recording on the video):
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=611

2: Concordance Mumbler (click any word to start off):
http://www.reluctant.ca/rosetta/

3: an example of Erin Mouré translation (from Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person, 2001):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXVtVkyW7K8

Improvisation (in music, or dance, or walking, or writing or painting) seems to be analogous to intuition. What is improvisation? Perhaps it is a non-analytic or non-linguistic relation to knowledge or know-how. We know how to walk but we also know that if we think too much about it, it won’t work. We’ll trip over our feet and fall over. The best way to start to walk is to simply lean forward and let gravity force the issue. We have the know-how, we just have to enact it and go with the flow. Now in art there’s good improvisation and there’s really, really, really bad improvisation.  If you asked me for some good improvisation, something really worth witnessing, I’d say in music maybe the John Coltrane Quartet playing My  Favorite Things or any of  The Dagar Brother’s Dhrupad Alap improvisations (you see, the examples are multiplying). Or the haphazard instant of collision of brush, ink and paper, that initiates a procedure of calligraphy. Embracing such an intuitive instant does not guarantee in any way a pleasing or enlightening result.  And it certainly does not guarantee that we are not just ‘representing’ intuition as some kind of romantic symbol. In improvisation are we acting through a ‘procedure’ which might get us back to intuition as a source?  Is it consequently a ‘purer’, unmediated relationship to knowledge (be it information in memory, experience in the unconscious, or know-how in the body, to indicate a few conceivable kinds of knowledge)? Are such ‘procedures’ also tricks or ways around ‘rational’ imperatives and methods imposed as tools of organization (methods of science, social science, hermeneutics, meaning and all that)?

Such procedures permeate both traditional and avant-garde art forms. They are almost conventional, even hackneyed poetic strategies (Oulipo, Tristan Tzara’s DADA method). There is a distinction to be made between such methods of assembly or generators of free meaning and Malarmé’s coup de dés or Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages, which in the first case is a composition designed both in terms of sense (its words) and material (its typography) to engage the reader in a new (proto-hypertexty) way, and in the second, where Duchamp deploys chance as a polemic, poietic counter-argument to rational systems.

There is an analogy to the ink-blot. As a game or as a psychology tool, the ink-blot  sets the location of meaning (or the desire for meaning) in the imagination of the viewer. As such it is a trick to let us admit what we imagine by pretending that we see it ‘out there,’ by pretending that it is ‘out there’ housed in the form of the blot. This is a chance procedure at its simplest level. Like seeing a religious figure in the mildew on the wall, or animals in the clouds, it points to our desire to make something of things and crucially frees us to see desires and emergent patterns we would not otherwise (rationally) admit.  Moving on to Sample’s “deformed humanities” we ask what use are such procedures in an expository investigation.

We seem to be sorting multiple threads housed in the same idea of ‘deformance’ where we discover that, first, it is not the generated material or form (a poem, a painting, a text) that is significant or of value in itself but rather the rhetorical space that the object reconfigures. Secondly (deriving from Oulipo, Tzara and the ink-blots) we could ask a question of what meaning itself might be. In substituting a mechanical system of chance for intuition we turn the meaning envelope inside out. Thirdly, in these analytic deformations are we creating an ‘ink-blot’ which reveals a psychological or socio-cultural undertow (a humanist hermeneutic), or which reveals a politico-economic superstructure, or still again reveals some kind of post-human emergent pattern of forces. Or, or, or. Perhaps it is a trivial point but in sifting these threads it is clear that (as with improvisation in music) there is deformance that is compelling and generative and deformance that is flat or bland.

Sample cites his own deformation of Cohen’s and Scheinfeldt’s introduction to  Hacking the Academy:

Can an allegiance edit a joyride? Can a lick exist without bookmarks? Can stunts build and manage their own lecture mandrake playgrounds? Can a configuration be held without a prohibition? Can Twitter replace a scholarly sofa? (Sample)

This deformation tells us about the syntax or writing style of the author by rendering absurd the specific signifiers.  It is ‘good’ language but it fails to ‘mean’ in a conventional way. It is identical to Chomsky’s ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ deployed to illuminate a grammatical / syntactical correctness  in the context of semantic non-sense by way of proving an innate human generative grammar (Chomsky’s project). Or is it?  The slight semantic displacement which results in “Can Twitter replace a scholarly sofa?” is actually generating a good question in the context of the digital humanities (or at least a typical, therefore revealing one, much as the ink blot lets us blurt out the unintentional).  So maybe this deformation puts us at a more interesting semantic disadvantage than Chomsky’s phrase.  A proviso (that will come up later in reference to my objects) is that in this process we have already decided or pre-ordained the semantic unit, whether we let it make sense, make sense differently or not at all, so our ‘procedure’ already assumes this rational structure and pre-determine to some extent the results.

Reading backwards is an extraordinarily ordered procedure that has nothing to do with atemporality. It is obsessively temporal, a reinforcement of temporality.  So here I disagree with McGann and Samuels’ hyperbole. Yet reading backwards is a temporal deformation or trick that certainly helps us see a poem as an “interactive medium… [where] we expose its reciprocal inertias in performative and often startling ways” (Samuels and McGann 28). They go on to state that this backwards reading “short circuits the sign of prose transparency and reinstalls the text… as a performative event, a made thing” (29).  A performative event is a perceptual event, it happens between us and the object, between all of us and all the objects. It is not information or data transmission (33).  If you were in art school your painting teacher might come over and turn your painting upside down and ask you to look again or continue painting. In doing so she is restoring or resetting your intuition, your sense of event, your sense that this is happening right here, right now. The resulting atemporality of event may be one key component of improvisation.

John Cage’s Variation VII, illustrates a sophisticated and implicitly critical relationship to technology without being technophobic. Variation VII gathered sound signals from many sources: through phone lines to microphones offsite, radios, fans, blenders, and all kinds of analogue electronics. These feeds and feedbacks were then manipulated and layered into a dense soundscape. As one participant put it, Cage wanted to make a piece using all the sound there is. His piece was predicated on a kind of failure. Not only would the utopian conjecture of using ‘all sound’ simply cancel itself out if it eventually succeeded but in this case the electronic assembly itself produced most of the signal, though interference, line hum, short circuits, etc. Interference was the piece. Noise was the piece. Variation VII was a map of its own interference or line-noise. Here we have a procedure designed decidedly not to be revealing of any psychological or semantic ‘undertow’ (its not that kind of ink blot). What it is revealing of is the emergence of patterns generated by electrical interference, which are accentuated by the ‘players’ choices. This was Cage’s critical gesture, a deformation of the idea of sound (or rather of signal translated into sound) which engaged the ideological baggage of technology.

Concordance Mumbler, is a piece in which a data base of poem fragments is accessed through a drifting text interface. If you click on a word, the procedure returns poem lines which contain the same word. And on and on.  Like Samples’ deformation above, the pre-determined semantic unit limits the result. My ‘procedure’ already assumes this rational structure and pre-determines to some extent the outcome. Though I do find it fascinating to drift though what is essentially a dictionary of word occurrence, I find the fact that one’s head, metaphorically speaking, is always hitting the ceiling a little frustrating. In this sense it is a thing that is not as generative as I would like it to be. This comes from a desire to build a procedure that one then stands back from to ‘let it run’.  On does not re-engage or re-enter the procedure in the way that Mouré’s translation gambit does. Perhaps this is analogous to the limitations of some of the critical procedures discussed in this week’s readings. Perhaps (very tentatively drawing us back to the top) they do not let intuition fully out of the bag.