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.