The Xenotext Experiment, So Far
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| Vydáno v: | Canadian Journal of Communication vol. 37, no. 1 (2012), p. 43-60 |
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University of Toronto Press
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| 520 | 3 | |a The major roadblock that prevents communication studies from paying more attention to media poetry and poetics is the general tendency to divide how we think about the world into what the hard sciences and social sciences are allowed to say with credibility, compared to what poetry (in its diminished capacity), along with the other arts and humanities, are allowed to say with credibility. Science, for example, can style its actions as "poetic" (Stengers, 1997), but it's much harder for a poet to claim that their work is "scientific." Christian Bök (2002) points out that science and poetry share a common history but an aparallel evolution: "Whenever science gains the anonymous power to speak the truth about things, poetry seeks an eponymous refuge in the space of its own words" (p. 15). Bruno Latour has written about this problem extensively, most directly in We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, 1993). His major point is that such "Great Divides" between the territories of disciplines means that all sorts of boundary objects fall through the cracks, and the processes that create those hybrids remain "invisible, unthinkable, unrepresentable" (p. 34). In contemporary society, such objects are precisely those that are the most interesting and controversial; however, scholars are ill equipped to assess their significance as a result of the limited toolsets of a particular discipline, even an inter-discipline. As McLuhan observed, "The problem with a cheap, specialized education is you never stop paying for it" (McLuhan & Carson, 2003, p. 531). In an era of skills-based, "practical" education, we desperately need interdisciplinary thinkers, people to think about what's NOT been taken into account. Along with each alphabet cipher, Bök keeps notes on the way that the creation of words works: "abased," for example, is also "iciest"; "binary" is also "caring," and "bin" is also "car." In another cipher called WOR-VTT 190, the imagist poem "tidal / words of life / copy song" corresponds to "roads / vital in song / pick life." These are, he emphasizes, starting points. After hundreds of experiments over several years, Bök has yet to find a cipher that produces more than 786 words, and most of those words are less than five letters long. As a result, he expects that the final poem wUl have to be less than 20 words long, whüe his initial estimate was 200. The division of knowledge Ui the academy between disciplines is not the only issue. As Star and [James R. Griesemer] (1989) imply, Uistitutions and funding bodies are also actively involved as gatekeepers Ui the constitution and maintenance of boundary objects. Bök started seeking funding for the Xenotext Experiment from SSHRC Ui 2005 but only received a SSHRC Research Creation grant Ui 2009. This long and frustrating process of suppUcation is documented Ui "Poemosapien: Christian Bök & His Quest To Write A Living Poem," a nonfiction comic which originally appeared Ui Unlimited magazine in 2008. In the last three frames, Bök dismisses the literary substance of various poems he's performed that were generated by various possible ciphers as "Pretty bad. These are just ways of showcasing this for grants or something." After being rejected by a periwigged arts council jury, who are banging a gavel and proclaiming "Won't Sell! Won't Finish! Science Fiction!", the author thinks to himself "idiots ... fucking idiots" (Johnson, 2008, p. 51). What is actually occurring, though, is not a failure, but the difficult negotiation of protocols between social worlds, which indicates that the boundary object is actually functioning as a kind of bridge. Star and Griesemer (1989) conclude that "protocols are not simply the imposition of one world's vision on the rest; if they are, they are sure to fail" (p. 414)· Because of the Xenotext Experiment, a poet can simultaneously inhabit the social worlds of public intellectuals, scientists doing postgraduate level biology and computer programming, celebrities, media theorists, and slightly rumpled, grumpy Tintin-like cartoon characters, as well as the more usual realms of artists and academics. But these worlds, and the people and objects that make the constitution of boundary objects like the Xenotext possible, also make demands that change what it means to be a poet, and what it means to write a poem. As Isabelle Stengers (1997) remarks in Power and Invention, accusations of "failure" are ideologically marked: | |
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| 773 | 0 | |t Canadian Journal of Communication |g vol. 37, no. 1 (2012), p. 43-60 | |
| 786 | 0 | |d ProQuest |t ABI/INFORM Global | |
| 856 | 4 | 1 | |3 Citation/Abstract |u https://www.proquest.com/docview/1012151379/abstract/embedded/7BTGNMKEMPT1V9Z2?source=fedsrch |
| 856 | 4 | 0 | |3 Full Text |u https://www.proquest.com/docview/1012151379/fulltext/embedded/7BTGNMKEMPT1V9Z2?source=fedsrch |
| 856 | 4 | 0 | |3 Full Text - PDF |u https://www.proquest.com/docview/1012151379/fulltextPDF/embedded/7BTGNMKEMPT1V9Z2?source=fedsrch |