The Experiment

I'm a poet, not a scientist.  Throughout my life, any task, chore, or method I've undergone that has had to do with the scientific method has been a failure.  Hence the experimental nature of electracy has made me trepadacious.  That said, through trial and error I've learned a lot this semester.  I've figured out how to do a Wordpress blog, a Google Blogger, how to post YouTube videos and vine videos, how to work an iPhone and many of its apps, and how to embed content onto a blog.  Hell, over the weekend I tried to invent a new electrate genre calle Prezi Poetry, but, alas, time wasn't on my side. 

Whether I've failed or passed, for me, an electrate experiment is as much about the process as it is the end product.  My poetics, because of the work I've had to do for Ulmer's course, have digitized to say the least.  So, though the semester ends, my experiment moves forward.  I'm going to keep blogging, and look out for Prezi Poetry!

Final Post Poem

Language  

I’m an egent of tender. 

I’m the poet Basho,

passing through the world.

Farewell, my love, you

who swung over the river with me 

to this place, exiting buoyantly. 

It is a great mystory, this history

between me and you,

a living text of death and dying.   

We’ve been alchemized,

smoked out of the factory in order

to tag the clouds.

"Light gives us the thread, yet the thread has no need for light."

-Lacan

Flipagram Montage: The Instant Cinematic

One night, during a wild and crazy dance party, I did a powerslide on a rug and ripped a hole in the knee of my 1969 jeans.  The next day I made jorts, and, through YouTube, I turned a private event into a public montage.

Post-Cinematic Metaphysics

To keep in the spirit of heuretics, for this post I've composed a poem, a poem written from the perspective of one who is not a hero but a mystic.  The speaker is both director and prophet, and my text, when posted on my blog, accompanied by visuals and soundtrack, hopefully serves as a close-to-final attempt at electracy—for, to quote Ulmer quoting Barthes, "The best response to a text is another text."  Probably the poem will be the final blog post for my section on The Cinematic.  I also included a bonus poem!

Post-Cinematic Metaphsyics

No words: in the future one  

will need a cam, the language

of action. Presence makes

no sense—really the only thing

it signifies is that heroes

willing to die for a principle

can be cut and edited out

like a Hollywood montage

of a horse galloping in vane

or a desperate dude warning kin

that the body-snatchers

have landed.  Unchecked desire

takes no dominion in this coming

attraction—only terror and trauma

and collision and a muffled voice-over

sequence directly oriented

to the past, where the privileged

posture for just a second: the fractional

stride-in-motion not unlike  

an ancient Chinese landscape

painting featuring a mountain girdled

in mist, some shadowy birds

floating about, a river flowing

boringly in circles. Maybe

in some fresh electric world

fruits will blossom as they do

in old garden myths.  It is written

that the best reply to a text

is another text—but how will we

respond to fire and ice?

Whether you dug my poem or not, play the audio track below--guaranteed dopeness, and, IMHO, a good instrumental for the vibe I'm trying to build with the poem.  Play it again and again, and, when you're jamming out, watch the video below it on mute.  

Lacanian Funk

"The geometral dimensions allows us to glimpse how the subject who concerns us is caught, manipulated, captured, in the field of vision."

"The correlative of the picture, situated outside the point of gaze, opaque, is the screen."



Now I'll make an attempt at praxis.  Below I've included a film I made last night with Victor Florence, a collaborator of mine.  This production is an attempt to depict the rebooted cyberflaneur.  Here the digital saunterer has fallen into internet's kailedoscopic streets, where he'll try to be the "perfect flaneur," who, according to Baudelaire, must receive "an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world." 


The sequence concludes with the cyberflaneur seeing himself seeing himself, I guess, and leaving the internet. 

Re-configuring the Flaneur in the Images of Baudelaire and Lacan

For our project, we'll have to figure out the particulars of this new cyberflaneur.  Here's Baudelaire's description of his original conception pasted from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur):

 The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.

—Charles Baudelaire,

So the flaneur is the new poet of the emerging metropolis, impartial and incognito, coming of age at the dawn of Modernism, when visual and media technologies were fast making a dream society of magic become a reality.  And as the 19th Century became the 20th, conceptions of the flaneur got tied up with cinema. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin argues for the filmmaker to be considered as a flaneur (and the photographer as shaman).  Auteurs like Hitchcock and Truffaut seemed to take the cue and made films with this concept preordained.  But soon the 20th century flaneur lost popularity as a media figure in Western cinema.  What happened?

The figure of Kevin McCarthy at end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers demonstrates how the Cold War conquered the flaneur and why, for our experiment, our flaneur, like our poetics, must not be heroic:  

This scene perfectly illustrates the flaneur's demise. Furthermore it's comparable to what Morozov claims killed the cyberflanaur.  Frictionless sharing has turned the public, including the original, well-meaning flaneur, into a commonwealth of zombies; the once proud flaneur is now a failed hero, and not the cool debaucherous anti-hero Baudelaire conceived either--he is the hero fallen into hysteria.   From a conspiratorial perspective, aliens or communists or Mark Zuckerberg are to blame, but Lacan and his methods might help us get at something deeper and more constructive.

For Lacan, the subjects gets anxious (and maybe as paranoid as Miles Bennell in Invasion) when she/he reaches the point of "I saw myself seeing himself."

Reflecting on a previous recitation of Aragon poem, Lacan notes: "I did not realize at the time that I would be developing the subject of the gaze to such an extent."  Perhaps if we situate Lacan and Aragon's mad poet as either the original 19th century flaneur or the emerging cyberflaneur, we can can use the Gaze, and its manifestations enacted by mass media, as our diagnostic. Mass media (specifically but not limited to digital media) proliferated the Gaze's dimensions and hyper-linked them--that's for sure.  So maybe what happened to the flaneur is perfectly illustrated in the above photo, which, through an editing-effect, highlight the flaneur's upper figure with a kaleidoscopic ring.  Here, visual technology has highlighted the gaze and ousted the sauntering poet.

Resurrecting the Cyberflaneur

In his 1927 essay “Photography,” Siegfried Kracauer describes--in a writing style meant to mimic the cinematic experience--the new and improved 20^th century flaneur, the camera-friendly and filmic flaneur, belonging to the world of moving images, who strolls the kaleidoscopic streets, mingling “with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes.”  Unlike the original urban saunterer of 19^th Century Paris, whom Baudelaire, then later Benjamin & Co., established as the prototype of European Modernism, Kracauer’s movie-age loafer experiences his surroundings “as loose throngs of sketchy, completely indeterminate figures… An incessant flow casts its spell over the flaneur, or even creates him.  The flaneur is intoxicated with life in the street—life eternally dissolving the patterns which it is about to form.”  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeMT6TzHEGQ

Back in the early days of network culture--AKA the nineties--critics and commentators developed the idea of the cyberflaneur.  This digital version was no longer a stroller of boulevards, panoramic or otherwise; she/he was a surfer, an “explorer” and a “navigator, the connected roamer passively clicking and drifting through still-developing virtual geography. Now flash forward to 2012, the year the Twitter Era well and truly took dominion, and Evgeny Morozov, in his New York Times articles, declares “The Death of the Cyberflaneur.” He argues that the socially-networking subject doesn't just passively explore digital arcades of Geocities and EBay like she/he might have 15 years ago—she/he gets shit done: uploading, downloading, chatting, masturbating, and endlessly consuming. 

Noticing the date of the Morozov article (it was published in early 2012), I can’t help but think about the major change in social media between then and now—namely the Instagram Revolution.  From an image-based/photographic standpoint—and if we’re using cinepoetics as an analogy in our experiment, we should probably come at it from here—Instagram helped reintroduce the simple image (as opposed to the more multimodal and intertextual Facebook photo apparatus) as an online communication device.  With this in mind, as we seek a metaphysic for electracy, and if we employ Lacanian psychoanalysis as our theory model, the concept of the flaneur is pivotal and can be used to describe the egent’s drive and desire as well as the digitized Gaze she/he suffers from.  Furthermore, if we take as contrast the aesthetics of the lyric poet of ancient China, we can further develop what makes our fresh flaneur both mystical and electrate. Here, my instructions will show how to resurrect the cyberflaneur, version 2.0.    

#castrationabyss: a warning

Here's a short film I produced--with the help of my associates, Victor Florence and Ezra Stewart-Silver:

"Analysis must avoid the castration abyss." -Lacan

Unconscious Vine Haiku Montage

In an attempt to get at how an individual subject's unconsciousness functions in electracy, I've turned to my own poetic works, as well as Vine. I've made Vine videos of poetry mashups, in which, scrolling through my open poetry manuscript document, I read out loud random lines from random poems. With the images and words in constant flux, maybe we can see how electracy--through image-sharing social media--remixes literary texts, into eight second haiku montages.

(Con)Figuring Lacan

"The reason we go for poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom."

                                    -Jacques Lacan

So, after my in-class failure last week (lol), I want to make another attempt at demonstrating how Lacan uses examples from art works to propel his overarching theory of psychoanalysis forward, so that, perhaps, we can successfully do the same in an attempt to develop some metaphysics of Electracy and an Digital Poetics. 

To preface Chapter 2 of his lecture, titled "The Freudian Unconscious and Ours," Lacan reads Aragon's poem "Contre-chant":

In vain your image comes to meet me

And does not enter me where I am who only shows it

Turning towards me you can find

On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors

That can reflect but cannot see

Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited

By your absence which makes them blind.

Though Lacan adds that the poem "has no relation to what I am about to say," I'm not sure he is being entirely honest.  For me, the first stanza perfectly encapsulates Lacan's notion of the Gaze, while the second, moreover, uncovers a bit of what it means—from a Lacanian perspective—to be an online Subject, thus providing a psychoanalytic conduit towards Electracy.    

When the "I" of Aragon's poem becomes aware of the "You," this you does not cross the threshold of the I-speaker—instead it projects a "dreamt-of shadow," which can be construed as what Lacan labels anamorphosis: "That which is of the mode of the image in the field of vision is therefore reducible to the simple schema that enables us to establish anamorphosis" (86).  This image mode, for Lacan, is represented by a point on a surface, which he calls the geometral point. 

Regarding the geometral dimension of the Gaze, Lacan maintains that the point "allows us to glimpse how the subject who concerns us is caught, manipulated, captured, in the field of vision" (92).  Therefore, it appears (pun intended), Aragon's speaker traces the Gaze ideally, which is, of course, severed from both the poem's eye and I. 

Perhaps, also, to provide the poem extra Lacanian baggage, the "You" and the "I" aren't organically-separated entities but instead constituting a split of the subject and therefore involving Lacan's description of Repetition: "It is necessary to ground this repetition first of all in the very split that occurs in the subject in relation to the encounter;" (69) and/or, with regards to his notion of the Drive, suggests a single mouth kissing itself, which, for both Freud and Lacan, is "the ideal model of auto-eroticism" (179).    

Speaking of auto-eroticism, I'd like to shift gears now to the internet—specifically to how Aragon's poem's second stanza might whisper, "Electracy, Electracy, Electracy." First off, I love that the speaker calls her/himself a "wretch," one "that can reflect but cannot see."  For me, psychoanalysis aside, this perfectly describes the lost subject of the digital age, of Generation Me. 

Since, for Ulmer's theory of Electracy, "Subjects formed in an electronic apparatus will not be constructed in terms of self" (Ulmer), we must locate a fresh form of subjectivity.  And because we don't want some selfless and/or selfish mega-conglomerate of wretches, arrested in the mirror-stage—at least I don't think we do—we must pierce through the digital gaze to find the sunny side of things (though I'm not sure we have such virtuous a telos, do we?).  

In the poem, Aragon's speaker suffers from an empty eye and a fresh haunting, which is the absence of the "you."  Indeed the situation looks dire, but maybe Lacan can help.  Lacan recognizes that "the eye is endowed with a power to separate" (115), but, alluding directly to this reflective ailment Aragon describes, Lacan maintains that, at this vital point, "the subject must "find an opportunity for an essential integration" (159), for which a metaphysical model of Electracy should also be searching.  So, if "literacy and electracy in collaboration produce a civilizational left-brain right-brain integration" Ulmer), maybe it—and by it I mean, specifically for our project, the synthesis of psychoanalysis and electracy, using the CATTt—can provide a theoretical elixir for the severed digitized subject; or maybe not? 

Lacanian Dramatic Monologue

Lacan's take on excommunication is interesting, specifically his feeling that he himself has been excommunicated from some grand great old intellectual community, some Church, because his teaching method had been censured by the I.P.A.: "What it amounts to is something strictly comparable to what is elsewhere called major excommunication" (page 3).  Here he compares the psychoanalytic community to a religious bureaucracy, whilst comparing himself to that Flying Dutchman of Modern Thought, Spinoza, particularly correlating his (Lacan's) censure with the kherem Spinoza received from Amsterdam's bigwig rabbis in 1656. According to poor Jacques, his blacklisting "was precisely that which Spinoza was condemned to." 

Whenever a person of privilege is silenced or attacked—especially when that person is a white male who holds a powerfully erudite position in a capitalist, patriarchal, and intellectual subculture—history has been made.  Send for the scribes, we've got a goddamn dialectic to uncover!  Though I try not to love Lacan, I must admit I do sympathize with him in that, because of my own white-male privilege, I really don't deserve a poetic voice, just like he doesn't deserve a scholarly one, even though, like Lacan, I work hard and take that work, however praxis-less and self-centered it is, very seriously (I don't count Lacan as Scientist or Philosopher, but he is a groundbreaking lecturer with a fresh avant-garde spirit and some gnarly riffs on Freud).  And for me, someone who, like Lacan, thinks his industry--the Poetry Industry--doesn't welcome his style—regardless of whether the power's that be in said industry are aware of it or not—I feel ostracized and ineffective. 

Lately I've been working on a series of poems entitled "White Male Monologues."  This series explores, through the dramatic monologue form, public and/or private downfalls of infamous white men.  For my blog, and in the spirit of Lacan's lectures, I've composed a piece written from poor Jacques perspective, set at the time he started beefing with the I.P.A.  In my poem, I allude to the lives of Spinoza, Lacan, and myself, and, when it fits, I try to employ the language of psychoanalysis, with hints of Electracy peppered in for relevance.   I may also suggest the censor Lacan's received caused in him a total and complete mental, physical, and emotional breakdown, unlike what it really yielded: a long, lucrative career on the international lecture circuit.

  ​
Excommunication

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors

that can reflect but cannot see

—Louis Aragon

At 4 AM I gaze into the Marriot’s bathroom mirror,

practicing my lecture on the Essence of Comedy. 

In a sweat I’d awoken, after dreaming the worst dream

in which my penis disappeared, then reappeared,

then disappeared again. Per usual, Freud was in the dream, 

before me, looking coked.  He told me to desire, then I awoke. 

At the mirror, I recite: “Each of us at any moment or at any level

may be traded off.  Politics is a matter of trading.” 

Since the censoring, I haven’t slept well.  Sleep’s become a record  

of failure put on repeat, a record spun by some twisted synchrony.   

And it’s most twisted when I travel, in hotel rooms 

like this one, where dreams enter from the castration abyss, 

reeking like the unsolved funk of me.  Consider Spinoza,

the Dutchman whose public life ended at 23; I know how he feels.

These images I sleep with, like his wild theorems, are bubbles

of enigmatic gas, and I can feel them in my stomach.  

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lacan

Shi Wrap-Up, #cranelife

"Shi structures all space, skeletal structures, a spinal columns." 

It's safe to say that, over the semester, our on-going electracy project has influenced my lifestyle. Specifically, with regards to the contrasting text of our CATTt, Jullien's text has forced me to re-imagine my identity and existence as an artist.  I've always been interested in ancient Chinese poetry, but now, while manifesting myself as an egent for an electracy experiment, I want to think of myself as an Ancient Chinese Poet.  Included in this post is a gallery of filtered and re-filtered selfies, portraying me as a poet in flux, in touch with his brushstrokes. 

Also this semester I got my first tattoo, a crane over my heart.  Though this body art is first and foremost a friendship tat, I'd like to think that Jullien's text--and my aesthetic reaction to it--was a major factor.  What better way to live like a mystic!  

"There is no need to forge a morality of sublimation.  Between joy and fear, there is no need to invent salvation.  It is enough to go along with change, change that is also forever regulation, change that helps to create harmony" 

Same Old Shi

White Mountain, Yellow Dragon: Same Old Shi

Wine-drunk, stoned, funky, I'm on top of Poetry Mountain, clicking

screen wall art, searching through the meaningless heaven of a browser,

framed, open, displaying quick tufts of pine and flashing cedar sweeps.

Listening to jazz flute, I crisscrossed a haunted battlefield, twice,

Those dead soldiers don't scare me, and neither do the boatmen's ghosts

or that big yellow dragon, uncoiled—right fucking there!—brush-stroking

through cyber-clouds of marijuana mist. Oh how my mountain floats,

like a signal smoked from tower to tower along the Great Wall.

It floats and sinks and I come down: I become a white sandhill crane,

singing in the wet swamp below, then a dumb duck winging his way

back to some bros down the chain, and next I'm the clouds' pimp (the wind),

sending clouds around and around my white mountain, circulating

in a digital cluster, until that yellow dragon emerges,

and at this instant I feel that maybe I am actually scared,

terrified of my innermost propensities and tensions.

Wow, now my emotional life hits the landscape like a firebird,

a red phoenix, or, hell, a dragon.  My dragon humps the yellow one,

dragon-on-dragon action. Our sex smells like a burnt peach waffle.

Willows wash our crevices. The new moon dries us. The horizon—

Western, pink, overweight, so goddamn Beyond—won't notice our sex. 

When I wrote this poem, I wrote it under-the-influence of the song I posted below.  When you think about it, shi is that "Funk Underneath," sisters and brothers!  This is what I mean in my poem by "jazz flute." 

Propensity

 Regarding The Propensity of Things by Francois Jullien, I dig the poetics stuff, specifically the portion portion of the text that focuses on poetry and the poet's hierarchical position in ancient Chinese Culture,  Also, Jullien lists composition strategies for achieving shi in verse, with dope examples (especially Strategy 9 on pg. 120 and Strategy 17 on pg. 122).  He explains that, in a poem, a surplus of shi moves a text forward. Like feathering an oar while rowing, man. With these motifs in mind, I want to use part of this blog space, a space set up in search for a poetics for electracyto compose and post "Ancient Chinese Internet Poems."

And though, of course, a poems shouldn't be flowery regurgitation of theory (a vomiting of pretty verse from a sick donkey), I've taken Jullien's text to heart while writing and editing these. With electracy in mind, the poems take place in an over-orientalized cyber-reality, a world of pixelated pines and light-emitting mist, constantly in flux, much like--at least through aesthetic depictions--an ancient Chinese landscape.  These poems are ABOUT the Propensity of Identity in an Online Culture, the Poet and Poem as Inevitable Failure plus Waste of Transcendence, the tragic character of a digital landscape, the Death of History, and looming hot-hot-hot Dragon Sex!