For Hoy's thesis to really work requires all the Flarfists (Kasey, Drew, Gary, Jordan, etc) and all the Flarf readers (myself, Thomas), as well as those pursuing techno-type projects (Brian Howe) to be unwiling or unable to consider the issues that Hoy centers. It's certainly interesting to focus on specific aspects of a poetics that has an over technological element, whether it's using Google or the F7 key or Babelfish; my specific angle has been on how the foregrounding of process/technology can influence the reading act. (I'm pretty certain I haven't tried to speak on the behalf of Flarfists, or F7ers, as to what their intentions are--I'm more into effects. )
Anyway, it would be interesting if Hoy's essay presented itself as an addition to Flarf's nascent critical reception, or a correction of specific interpretations (I'm thinking of Thomas' skepticism of my idea about the imagine ghost-presence of the original situations of the Googled language in a Google-sculpted poem) -- but instead, the essay aspires to be a totalizing correction of a utopian pandemic, and requires each of the people who enters the (stunningly quickly tedious) Flarf chatter to be untainted by skepticism of Flarf/Google/etc.
So, for instance, in my piece on Kasey Mohammad & Flarf in the first Fascicle, I discuss how using Google could be a challenge to notions of what 'mainstream' poetry or language use could be, and that a poem by Mary Oliver operates with a suspiciously high assumption of tranquility. My main point concerns the implied world in which the language of the poem operates, and while someone like Mary Oliver (or other easy targets) is often referred to as mainstream, the world their poems conjure is anything other than that.
Hoy counters this observation with his own:
"What could be more safe and comforting than the interface of a computer screen to those who have ‘ample time for both leisurely experiencing’ the Internet ‘and contemplating its importance’?"
Which of course catches me red-handed in my blind utopian fanboydom, but only if you ignore my footnote to my critique of Oliver's mainstream-ness in that Fascicle essay:
This observation about Oliver's poem is stated with the knowledge that it takes a certain degree of leisure and privilege to have the time to run Google searches and create Flarf poems.
So, anyway, this seems like a pretty consistent tactic of the essay, one that I can speak to concerning my presentation in the piece because I have a halfway decent memory of the pieces Hoy cherry-picks and conveniently skims off any language that might contradict his essay's main thesis.
Hoy also quotes a paragraph from a long post from this blog as another example of my utopian reading of technology:
imagine I also wrote a couple of paragraphs on why Flarf is interesting to me because: Andre Leroi-Gourhan argues that technics are externalization of internal processes, Bernard Stiegler revises him to say that the technical (external) and internal co-evolve, and that I think Flarf is one of the first instances I see of this possibility in the poetry world because Google-sculpting is not only a unique process (that while similar to earlier artistic processes, there is no real exact equivalent that I can think of) that is unique to the new medium, but: the act of Google-sculpting will likely become well known at least in the poetry world, and then will become a possible map or model for the writing process in general, or for the psyche/ imagination/ etc. in general, and will therefore cause unforeseen changes in the writing process/ poetic psyche/ imagination etc. in general.
This is at the end of a long post with a wide range of topics, from machinema (movies made from video game consoles) to online journals and a lot more, but let me include the couple sentences after this quoted paragraph:
Who knows, could happen.
Also imagine that I threw in a paragraph how this isn't technological determinism, but rather some kind of co-instrumentality between the technos and logos.
I can't believe I just wrote that above sentence. I blame Blogger.
Maybe that gives a little better gist of the tonal context of the paragraph -- it's not at the end of an unquestioningly positive view of technology (& I think that last sentence is pretty clever). For instance, I feel that my use of 'co-evolve' is pretty neutral, but for Hoy there is "‘advancement’ implicit in the term ‘evolve’" -- but that's for Hoy, not for me. But Hoy feels free to impose that coloring to 'evolve,' and then to criticize me for it (because it fits in well with his thesis). If I was a utopian, why would I feel the need to point out that I'm not talking about a technological determinism (that I don't think this new technology will in and of itself dictate certain results or effect)? I mean, wouldn't technological determinism be a major component of a utopian technological vision?
One of my main assumptions is that, over time, certain technologies, once introduced and accepted at a certain scale, become normalized and naturalized in the culture as part of the human experience, and become models or examples for how communication occurs.
Example: The telephone is invented, popularized. A certain number of years later, Frank O'Hara says he invents Personism when he discovered that he could just pick up the phone and talk to someone. At this point, picking up a telephone and talking to someone is such a 'natural' thing to do that it can stand as a kind of authentic communication, and can be wheeled in as a possible model for a poetics. A similar little sketch could be done with movies, or TV, or the typewriter. My point is that search engines (Google being shorthand for that) stand a good chance of being another example of this -- there's no utopian or naive gleefulness involved in an observation like that. It could be flawed for any number of reasons, but it's a pretty neutral observation, I think.
So that's my main beef, that the whole essay seems to rely on turning all participants (other than the author) into caricatures taking simplistic stances; a quick look at the original context of all the evidence brought into the essay shows just how much has to be ignored in order for the essay to keep up its conceits.
I mean, do you really think Brian Howe hasn't thought about the fact that the language suggestions brought up by the F7 key are a corporation's assertion of what normal or correct language use should be? Isn't it conceivable that that's a big part of the thrill and appeal of the F7 project, taking a technological tool that was intended for one normalizing purpose and hijacking it for a more disruptive, weird and incorrect purpose?
Just so many odd assumptions or jumps in the Hoy piece that are then presented as givens. Another bit jumped out, where he takes Kasey to task:
He’s not in the chat rooms or forums, he’s not engaging in the stutters and misspellings and expletives and non sequiturs in real-time — he’s not participating in the language as a living thing or process, but as an artifact, and with a lexical condescension as evidenced by his choice of the pejorative ‘drivel’ to describe chat room semantics when relating flarf’s genesis.[36] He’s ‘accessed’ nothing, as Tost claims; what the search engine does is survey, i.e. take ‘a scenic view’, so that the language has already been distanced and re-contextualized by the time it reaches him.
Isn't this a new twist on the classic, cliched argument against critics, sitting in their ivory towers taking potshots at heroic poets and artists down the mucky-muck? And wouldn't Hoy himself be especially prone to this cliched argument? I mean, it's not like all this Flarf talk is going on in some far off, distant country, or in an inaccessible vacuum. I've got comments on here at my blog, and so does Kasey, Thomas, Brian, Gary, etc. Why not jump in and argue your points in real time? Here I'm tempted to reformulate Hoy's sentence about Kasey, and alter it:
And isn’t Mohammad guilty of enacting his own criticism (quoted by Tost) of ‘the effete peripatetic poet safely above a scenic view of the countryside and its filthy horizon’ by surveying his materials from the Godlike perspective of Google.
into:
And isn’t Hoy guilty of enacting his own criticism (enacted by Mohammad) of ‘the effete peripatetic critic safely above a scenic view of the countryside and its filthy horizon’ by surveying his materials from the Godlike perspective of the critical essay?
But I don't actually buy that criticism -- there's plently of valid reasons to write a critical essay, or to make poems with sampled language -- it just takes a spectacularly ungenerous viewpoint to reduce an other's critical or aesthetic motivations as deriving from a lack of courage, or 'effeteness,' etc.
As of now, I'm as sick of Flarf talk as anyone, exhausted by it. I find Hoy's essay to be pretty eager to reduce many a complex, continually adapting human into a one-note zombie. But, this whole Flarf discussion has become kind of a psychic albatross to me, especially after my initial excitement in trying to make sense of an exciting tendency that seemed to be too easily dismissed, and then to read Thomas' very different but very exciting approach to the topic, but always insightful and generative (Flarf as, among other things, an occasion to discuss aspects of poetry writing and reading that I find myself stuck on) -- after this first excitement, it's kind of sucked. Thomas, as far as I can tell, has been the only person to argue against the actual points of my essay on Kasey; I was expecting criticism, and the more I've considered and re-considered, the more I lean towards Thomas' spin on things (and more away from my 'collaging of sources' thesis).
But other than that, all the criticism I get wind of, overt or more subtle, from Flarf practicioners or non, usually has to do with my motivations to even write about Flarf, and not my assertions or arguments concerning it: either I'm trying to colonize Flarf and domesticize it, trying to cash in on other people's work, trying to take over its discourse for professional reasons (flarfy tenure?), or I'm not discussing it from its social context (which is still a puzzle, as I have absolutely no access to its social context, and it has very little bearing I think in the terms I've been discussing reading Flarf), or I'm blatantly working on the behalf of canon-formation (singling out Kasey so everything else can be dismissed).
(Maybe I should've written something on why people shouldn't read Flarf, or why people should dismiss it, instead of writing about what I found interesting and exciting about it? From some flarfy points of view, you'd think I wrote a hatchet job or something. I really loved Deer Head Nation and Hanging Out With Pablo & Jennifer -- how could I write about them and not write about Flarf? And it'd be a different thing if it was Kasey complaining about my essay, but it's not! I still can't tell what the real beef is: that Thomas and I are writing about it in the wrong terms? at the wrong time?)
(That's a little whiny, but it kind of makes me sad.)
(So, yeah, the last thing in the world I want to write critically about right now is motherfucking Flarf. There's literally hundred of other good topics to write about, and I'm optimistic that, when writing about Abraham Lincoln Gillespie or Ronald Johnson or Hannah Weiner or Chris Vitiello, that I can get poked and prodded for the actual critical thinking in the piece, and not about bizarre ulterior motives.)
I think Hoy's piece could've been really interesting if it could've managed to assume some degree of complexity and subtlety in thought for the agents involved, and dealt with the actual arguments made and not a strawman version of them. As it stands now, I find it difficult to engage Hoy's thesis, simply because the stance of his essay necessitates contorting complex, evolving (!) arguments into a single, static zombie state.
Pooped now. Just got back from visiting Bowling Green State University, giving a reading, and hanging out with some of the friendlist, generous folks I've been around for awhile. So that was a great antidote to some of my current angst. I piped up a couple times early on in the Great Lucipo Flarf Debate, so to summarize a couple of my ideas, if just to counter any notion that I'm blindly following FLARF INTO FREEDOM: (bold added in now for emphasis and skimming)
Certainly any claims for a kind of pure language accessed via Google would have to assume a pretty static and reduced view of the kind of language-use that can be accessed; even the most stereotypically unaware or "flarfable" uses of language (like in chatrooms, listservs and blogs) are certainly often products of deliberate persona-creating; access to performances on certain stages, language-performances that don't often seem to occur in poems. I think that was part of the thrill of reading Flarf poems for me: to suddenly see in a literary setting the kinds of inventions, threats, outbursts and other forms of artifice that seemed to be kept out of many of the poems I had read. It was similar to the excitement I had as an undergrad when I first read Ashbery [. . . ] a kind of willful misinformation that came as a sudden relief to the unceasing wisdom-making that a lot of the poets I was most into at that time (Merwin, J. Wright, Ch. Wright) seemed to stick to pretty exclusively. So I think that's a small part of the usefulness of Google, not as access to a more common language, but access to possibly underutilized applications of language (not to mention Flarf's interest to me as presenting, whether intentionally or not, alternative models for thinking about reading poems, or critiquing poems [Thomas is the go-to guy on this topic]).
And:
I don't see Flarf, OuLiPo, or even Mac Low/Cage type works as authorless, non-personal or utopian experiments at all, but rather as exciting reconsiderations of authorship/readership.
