This is cursory, and maybe easily answered somewhere in the Brathwaite research I’ve collected, but one thing I notice is that many scholars (including Brathwaite himself most of the time) consider the Sycorax Video-Style to be mostly about Brathwaite’s computer (the Mac SE/30). Many theorists make much of the interactive collaboration between Brathwaite and the computer, its code, fonts, etc. But nowhere yet have I found any mention of the printer, a crucial part of Brathwaite’s poetic apparatus, and the material instantiation of the poem that becomes the problem for publishing, or, as Brathwaite himself puts it, the disaster:
Dear Sycorax,
Whatever you may think, publishers are not willfully againts sycorax. No publisher, save for those of coffee table books, works in 8 1/2×11. You know that. We know that. Everyone knows that. So our scripts have to be reduced. You use a software programme that when transferred to others causes chaos. Don’t ask me to explain. I don’t have the computer wherewithal. I can only say that I’ve seen it in operation (and tried it myself), and it’s disaster. You think it’s a conspiracy. If it is, it’s in your own computer. Our printer guy lost (and I mean LOST). Three weeks trying to put “MR” into what’s necessary for publication. You perhaps forget that wherever it’s been successfull (your own *BP*–*Conversations* in the same format but unsellable in bookstores, in * Rennaissance Noire*) it’s been in your same 8 1/2 x 11 size, and how you’ve complained when others (Longmans) have sought to reproduce in other sizes. Unless you are going to publish everything yourself in that format, you’re going to have to compromise. You may want to change both immediately, which is fine if you’re willing to take the consequences. And some, quite simply, CAN’T be changed immediately. A matter of hardware, software and mindware. I have some sense of how much NO has lost financially already (around $20, 000. 00). One can only say that they’re not a charity organization. I hope they are willing to put up with this delay in what I understood was an absolute dead. line” (from, Asturias, a text I will return to).
(*Update: In Track Changes, Mathew Kirschenbaum does note that by 1989 Brathwaite was using the Mac SE/30 with a StyleWriter inkjet printer). That “publishers are not willfully againts [sic] sycorax,” is precisely why it is a point of what I will go on to call the “the technological sublime” — humans, finally, experience the technological sublime as what determines their behavior by a force that is not “willfully against” them, but is against their continued existence by design. My use of the “[sic]” above, I want to stress, is not as a snobbish critical commentary on Brathwaite’s notoriously resistant-to-transcribe orthography (many a critic has lamented not being able to show their readers the SxVx style in their quotations of poems written in it, thus SxVx’s “aggressive strategic medium translation” creates a special form of enforced critical silence that is the partial subject of my chapter), but because as of now I have only been able to access the text transcriptions of “Asturias” and I have not been able to view the “original” publication in Black Renaissance Noir. I don’t know whether that “againts” is a misspelling performed by the transcription, or exists in Brathwaite’s original. So my [sic] refers to either an indeterminate accident or a deliberate irruption performed by Brathwaite. The “indeterminate [sic]” might be a novel development as more visual texts are machinically transfered to the internet, an x[sic] meaning either computer mistake, human error, or human intention interpreted as human error. I don’t know if the transcriptions of “Asturias” that are available at several sources online (Gale Academic, etc.) are done by OCR or human “mindware,” but part of what I hope to do in my chapter is read the particular difficulty these transcriptions produce by accident as they attempt to represent Brathwaite’s work online. This is another way that Brathwaite’s work disrupts the ability of the critic to retain proper “critical distance.” The frequent lamentations of the critics writing on Brathwaite (I’m sorry! I cannot show you what I want to show you!) index that affectual co-becoming. The critic becomes frustrated and sad because they cannot do their job, and if they do try, they often fail. This necessary critical failure to properly represent the poems is part of the power of SxVx, a power that radiates into the social realm and into material production, as in the literal failure or absolute loss of $20,000. To write on Brathwaite, finally, one must succumb to the risk of the SxVx itself, a style that forces upon us the mandate to join the nexus of the poem, in part by admitting that there are essential uninterpretable realms of it that are never accessible to “meaning.” We can never stand comfortably outside it because these uninterpretable parts reign at the limit threshold of our entanglement with the style — that is, it is also where we become it, and it becomes us. Where “the poem reads us,” as a colleague of mine likes to say. It does this by, in advance, ensuring our work will be insufficient, and it is this critical insufficiency that guarantees the power of the SxVx’s opacity, thus its vitality. It’s ironic that such a visually driven poetry is some of the most difficult to access online, with major works like conVERsations not available from even the most resource-rich pirate libraries (something I hope to correct). I am presently waiting for my library’s Delivery+ service to try and obtain a scan of the PDF, and I will be traveling to NYC soon and hope to visit a library there to view “Asturias” as it was published. In any case, already, I find myself engaged in a labyrinth of forms, versions, iterations, and fields of critical disruption, and, in part, it is the purpose of this blog to insist that this is part of the poetic apparatus, or “infrastructuralist poem,” of the SxVx. So my writing, here, is a protracted energetic pattern becoming part of the SxVx.
This critical frustration emerges from Brathwaite’s decision to print SxVx on 8.5×11 sheets, standard printer paper, a format that is incompatible with standard print sizes of the codex form “the poetry world” finally (still) privileges as the site of cultural capital. It looks like the Mac SE/30 is compatible with several different printers, and I don’t know what printer he used. Beyond the printer, we might think more of the ambient situation of the “scene of inscription” of the SxVx, a style that does not begin and end on Brathwaite’s screen, but emerges as a property of a larger, diffuse system. For all the writing on the SxVx’s complex relation to the graphemic, phonemic, and musical properties of language, I haven’t seen anyone mention that the SE/30 itself was, according to Ian Bogost, “loud as hell.” Perhaps part of the noisiness of Brathwaite’s scriptural disruption of reading, occasionally bringing the poems into the realm of illegibility, metaphorizes the strange sonic experience of using the computer itself, whose whirring fan would have been a regular ambient experience during Brathwaite’s writing (and printing). There is a lot of thinking out there about the way that the typewriter’s sound and its material constraints informed 20th century poetics. Certainly the tick tap tap tick ding and slam of the typewriter and the typerwriter’s relation to a particular kind of page informed the sonic and visual poetics of artists like Clark Coolidge and Hannah Weiner. On the visual front, works like Vito Acconci’s “Margins of this Page are Set,” Charles Bernstein’s “Veil,” and Rosmarie Waldrop’s “Camp Printing,” all self-reflexively, or recursively, interact with the standard forms of typewriting inscription. They become self-reflexive metonyms for the medial configuration they are part of, composed by, and emergent from (all while remaining absolutely immanent to the system itself).
There is a lot of work on how the software of the Mac SE/30 informed Brathwaite’s SxVx style, which might be sort of equivalent to the way the format of the typewriter influenced poetics. But I wonder how the sonic field of the computer and printer comes into the poems. Brathwaite’s poems are sometimes rigorously illegible and chaotic and I imagine this formal chaos in contradistinction to the regular ambient whirring of the computer (like a wind-system or crashing waves?), and the later mechanical print screeches of an 80s era printer. Importantly, between the typewriter and the computer the site of inscription becomes fractured from the unity of the physical letter arm swinging due to the press of the keyboard, transforming into an indeterminate virtuality and physicality in the spacetime between the typing and the printing. Even though the technology is “faster” the site of inscription becomes distended and diffused, remediated through multiple informational channels. This is a diachronic musical silence immanent but invisible in the poetry’s publication in codex form.
That kind of immanent silence is the kind Brian Kim Stefans’s “Star Wars One Letter At a Time” comically makes “visible” by offering a metaphorical trace of the process of scriptural production. But first, we will have to dig back into an earlier immanent silence. Previously, some of the major immanent silences of poetry were nature sounds: rivers, streams, the music of the spheres, etc. But especially birds, whose song is related to the development of the lyric poem in the troubadour tradition. Bird song is a social music (not that there is any other kind), like a Durkheimian ritual, that, when heard, locates a people in their time, place, and togetherness, not unlike poetry. In the 19th century, immigrant communities in the United States longed for their familiar morning symphonies left behind in Europe. To replace this silence, the eccentric Eugene Schieffelin attempted to import from Europe all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare. He also introduced collections of birds to areas with specific migrant populations in an attempt to bring them the songs of nature they missed, such as to German communities in Oregon. The result, finally, was utter failure, as well as the introduction of one of the most devastating and ubiquitous invasive species in North America: the common starling. The starling is mentioned precisely once in Henry IV, and it is significant that in reverse of the poet longing for their music to meet the ecstatic heights of birdsong (as was a common theme in Troubadour poetry, where Shakespeare inherited the sonnet form from), here Hotspur imagines instead a torture device, a speaking bird. From a BBC article on the subject:
“Hotspur is in rebellion against the King and is thinking of ways to torment him. In Act 1 Scene III he fantasizes about teaching a starling to say “Mortimer” – one of the king’s enemies.
“Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion,” Shakespeare wrote.”
The replacement of bird song with language, and specifically repetitive language consisting of the name of an enemy, produces a hellish mantra reminding the king of all he hates and all that hates him, “keeping his anger in motion.” The bird, here, becomes a magical technical device meant to ceaselessly threaten the king’s finitude, putting him in a constant state of agitation, and perhaps anxiety and danger. It also, therefore, signals the precarity of sovereignty itself, a sovereignty, in part, that is constituted by the threat of the outside, or its overtaking. Implicit here is that for sovereignty to persist there must be a challenge to its authority. Weirdly, of course, the death of the king does not abolish sovereignty, but in fact helps define its immortality, as the death of the king’s body never kills the sovereign — the sovereign is what passes between bodies of authority. Only democracy, finally, kills the king (i.e. a radically new social conception of power). The power of the enemy’s name here, Mortimer, is not “representative” or “metaphorical” here but metonymic, actual, as it contains something like the illocutionary force of maintaining the sovereign’s power, precisely in its threat to kill the particular king. It is worth thinking of this threat as a constant, necessary antithetical force for the constitution of any social whole, at least any social that is not an absolute universal. In every sovereign decision, such as a court ruling, there is the virtual possibility of the irruption and disruption of that power, a question answered by the pragmatic ruling of the judge. This ruling ignores differends, as Lyotard has put it, and must, because such aporias both threaten and constitute power.
We can turn to another literary monowording bird to see the shift from aristocratic sovereignty to democratic sovereignty. Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven, of course, also speaks only one word: “Nevermore.” Poe’s transformation of a bird into a torture device mirrors Shakespeare’s. Poe’s, though, is not a threat to sovereignty, but a reminder of the individual’s death. It is the absolute nevermore of death (of the beloved, that is also, finally, the death of the lover, too). We might track in these two torturous birds, one from the beginning of the end of royal sovereignty and another from the late beginning of the democratic experiment, the evolution from the Leviathan of royal sovereignty to the atomic ephemerality of the liberal democratic subject. From “Mortimer” to “Nevermore.” Nevermore: the name for the hollow liberal subject. The subject is never more than themselves, and this is its “freedom” and “bondage.” Popular sovereignty in the form of democracy (taken at its most capacious limit) means one votes until death, and then nevermore. Mortimer: the impossible threat of the sovereign’s assassination (etymology “dead sea” or “stagnant water,” indicating, perhaps, the end of sovereignty is stasis). The king decides on every movement, thus keeping the political body coherent and moving, i.e. living. The death of the king means the death of the polis, i.e. a stagnant sea.
In any case, this is the origin of the starling in North America, and it might be one of the most devastating and weird accidents of literary history that a poem caused such a peculiar ecological change, all emerging from the matrix of colonialism, the peculiarity of the detail, the love of song, the sadness at its absence, and the hubris of the human who wants to repair the essential forgetfulness of life by reinstalling an Edenic prior-to. On the flipside this movement demonstrates how Nature or Wilderness was a fundamental silence for the settler, a terra nullius of sound waiting to erase the substrate of indigenous North American life and culture, both human and nonhuman. There is an even more profound silence here, of course, a deeper, more intrinsic, immanent silence: the birds that were never brought from West Africa to comfort the indentured. “Nevermore,” Poe’s Raven laments, will there be the cohesive force of royal sovereignty, rather, we are left with our own individual losses and catastrophes that also means a constant forgetting of our social involvement with others, and the silences that involvement depends on and is born from. This portends the illusion of our independence in a contemporary world that is increasingly interdependent. Orpheus ever looking back, at nothing, as Eurydice is always of course always gone before he rears his head. The result: disaster.
What does our music, or immanent silence, mean today? In recent poetic history, our muted sonics of quick touch typing on quite quieter keys informed the informational turn of conceptual writing, an “ambient stylistics,” as Tan Lin would have it. This will be worth considering more another time. For now, I will say that Brian Kim Stefans’s Star Wars One Letter at a Time voices the shift from the embodiment of typewriter style, the “bop prosody” of Kerouac, for example, to the quiet drone of ambient stylistics, a catatonic repetition compulsion that takes over the schizorhythms of type. “Star Wars” bring together the ambience of informational repetition with the fetish for the typewriter by creating an ambient stylistics of forced sonic and graphic regularity, eliminating any kind of “bop prosody” from the poem’s sound, the sound, ostensibly, that would have been (was) produced by the “original” typing of the script of Star Wars. It atomizes language down to the letter and brings the logic of the database to the fore, graphically and sonically. What is lost in the music is the rhythms caused by the variations of speed when a human types. In the piece, it is replaced by groups of taps and ticks all carefully well-regular by the software written to evenly play each letter according to an evenly weighted repeated .mp3. The rhythms are more minimalistic than polyrhythmic, like hunks of bitstreams. We read one letter at a time (and therefore notice our foveal range’s retentional and protentional functioning) and we are accompanied by the artificial metaphoric sounds of an obsolete instrument of communication, all rigorously ordered into finite pieces and units, bits a pieces, arranged into various fragments. The space bar and enter sounds are the most conspicuous regularities, especially on the first page of the script, where we notice the weird uniform time space each space and enter sound are given. If this is the birdsong of today (well, 15 years ago), then our morning symphonies are not birdsongs, but the regularized sound of technological relics of the proliferation of print culture and earlier communication technologies. Today, this trial of typing and phone calls does not even occur in offices, but silently, across fiber optic cables, and within our own minds.
One of the great musical moments of the 20th century might be 850 typists typing in a huge exposition hall in Zagreb. Joseph K runs effortlessly, quickly, down an open space through an enormous grid of desks that from above would resemble an Agnes Martin painting or city grid. Two years earlier he was the psycho of Hitchcock’s Pyscho. Today, he is filled with an installed psychopathy and indignation over what he sees as his groundless arrest, oppressive surveillance, and constant pursuit by the authorities. The insanity he maintains is his innocence in the face of a system that has condemned him to guilt. Though the threat is ultimately against his life, it is more fundamental than that. The assumed innocence of his day-to-day liberal subjectivity has been mysteriously called into question. Every innocent subject is a virtual scapegoat waiting to become the law’s internal exception, the threat from within that will be purged to maintain its power. In the last century, history showed, it will not be the king’s decision, but the consent, however minimal, of the vast majority of the population silently voting for genocide that makes the eugenic ruling against Joseph K. And the typewriters will scream like a swarm of cicadas.
This century, our silences are more profound, more distended. Our keystrokes, mouse clicks, screen swipes and taps are quieter, subtly compulsive, nearer to catatonia. Their effects are both immediate and slow, thousands of miles away and precisely absolutely present (manufacturing amounting to slave labor, fueling climate change through the global maintenance of an energy system keeping the internet on). Our sounds of virtual, manufactured, or nonexistent, like the sound of “Star Wars One Letter at a Time.” This sound is a replacement that is a placeholder for attention, like the image above taken from Orson Welles’s The Trial that itself is an image of a novel, but it is a placeholder as the thing itself because it arrests us, fascinates us into immobility. “Star Wars” refers to the embodiment of typewriting by faking it on the screen and in the sound, reducing the variations and polyrhythms inherent in human typing to varying sets of repetitions. It creates a situation unique to the computer by bringing us into a perspective that is not that of the writer (maybe their fingers), but something like the perspective of the typewriter itself, the “actual” writer. More accurately, perhaps, it is an idealized version of the scene of inscription’s imagination. Finally, it is purely aesthetic, utterly virtual, nothing but itself even though it stimulates us by reminding us of a film we once saw. Even as it defamiliarizes language one letter at a time it accidentally forecasts apps that became popular in the mid-teens encouraging speedreading using this one letter at a time strategy. Can we watch it at 1.25x speed? 1.5x? When we use a typewriter we see a vacillation between the whole page, paragraph, sentence, letter, and while we might type one letter at a time, the bop prosodic rhythm is really part of the gestalt formulation of words and sentences and our body moving in relation to the instrument. By contrast, “Star Wars” abstracts the music of the typewriter, it types for us, showing us a picture of the typewriter reduced to an informational identity, a caricature of the machine mindlessly typing one letter at a time, like Hollywood franchises pushing out endlessly repetitive superhero movies. It is fun, and funny, and laced with a vicious undercurrent of passive enjoyment and productive pleasures. So the music of Star Wars One Letter at a Time is a simulacral symphony, an elegy to bop rhythm, and an ushering in of an epoch of ambient stylistics and stupid, but effective, machines: algorithms. See Stefans’s own Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos, 2003) for more the dangers and potentials of demonic algorithms.
It might not seem so, but I’m thinking of all this in relation to the sound of Brathwaite’s printer, and the critical void surrounding the printer resulting from the critical obsession with Sycorax (the computer). One of the achievements of the SxVx is the sounding of myriad opacities, beautiful and sublime silences, forgotten printers, forgotten means of production, forgotten entire people; as Brathwaite often writes, whether the world wants to admit it or not, the Caribbean exists, and his poetry insists on that existence, even as it conceals within its matrix an archipelagic hiddenness that is, perhaps, also, finally, invisible to the Caribbean itself, yet adhering it together nevertheless, a submarine unity (as all unities might finally be — immanent, rather than transcendent). Such is the SxVx’s ability to maintain the secret, in the sense meant by Mallarme regarding the secret of a closed book. If there is a secret in poetry today it might not be between the pages, but among the field of forces constituting the infrastructuralist poem.
One of the ways this secret refuses to manifest is in the literal difficulty of formatting the SxVx for print, as a kind of what Judith Goldman calls “strategic medium translation.”
https://muse-jhu-edu.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/article/481023
However, before returning to Brathwaite, I must take another detour. Given that this post goes on to speak of the peculiar difficulty of publishing Brathwaite, it is worth mentioning that we’re currently experiencing a startling break in the history of digital poetics because of Flash’s departure from the web. This explains that the link above to Star Wars One Letter at a Time plays two minutes of Stefans’s piece as clandestinely recorded and uploaded to Youtube. It was actually published in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1, but, as it informs me in a note added to the page in the form of a yellow sticky note (goofy media nostalgia), “The Electronic Literature Lab could not preserve this Flash work with Ruffle in February 2021. We do plan to preserve it with Conifer at a later date.” Today, some of the most aggressive media events, events that shape literary history (and more), result from broad-based agreements among behemoth corporations that together can all-at-once alter the course of literary history for reasons radically outside such an intention. Last year’s Lulu disaster, where many publishers lost scores of PDFs due to a bad update, was another such case of this new kind of sublime obliteration of archives, and yields to strange silences. Finding the broken PDF link or the incorrectly transcribed OCR’d articles offers an aesthetic experience we might call the technological sublime. This aesthetic experience does not happen “in an instant,” like the beautiful or the sublime may, but comes upon us slowly, as what at first appears to be a strange detail, a miniscule mistake, or odd uncanny moment unfolds itself as an actual metonym for our human-driven ongoing apocalype. This contemporary technological sublime is something I have tried to theorize elsewhere as a power that amounts to something like the power of nature as Kant imagined it, though specially inflected in our post-nature world. Kant sees the sublime as the experience of an external power, a radically formlessness, that inspires terror and fear in us that, finally, returns us to a rumination on our own mind’s ability to contemplate such magnitudes (however impossible). In the sublime we experience a negative pleasure in our subsumption of the “contra purposiveness” of the sublime into our own “higher purposiveness.” The immortality of reason witnesses the finitude of the individual that will always be crushed by nature. Such a crushing is the ecstatic resonance of inner experience, where deep inside experience we understand our erotic non-individual comportment relative to the cosmos as a whole (to inflect Kant with Bataille). For Kant, this crushing is recuperated by the mind toward sunnier ends. The technological sublime, by contrast, is a terrible sign of our technical world’s destructive, suicidal consistence, a force created by humankind that takes on what appears to be the power of nature in a world already “after the end of nature.” If Kant’s is an internal sublime caused by the pain of the mind’s rumination on nature’s power or infinity’s endlessness as it appears to the mind wrecking reason, a wrecking that reason subsumes into higher purposiveness, the technological sublime is humanity’s fundamental technicity mirrored back to us in the form of nature, but a nature, that, like art, reveals itself to be created by humanity, like an echoic reverberation of technicity as such, but a technicity designed to kill, and that has killed nature, the human, and might kill everything. In distinction to the chaos of formlessness or the power of the infinite (the natural/mathematical sublime), this vision of destruction is a hellish sign of a planetary demon, something more kin to evil than chaos. It is a vision of the end of the Anthropocene. It is a vision of Hell. After God, so goes Nature, the human soon following. There is reason not to consider this “sublime,” as it does not carry any of the positive connotations attached to the term such as the nobility attributed to the sublime by Longinus or the powerful meditation on the mind’s freedom in Kant, or even the “sublime of the instant,” as suggested by Lyotard, that “undoes the presumption of the mind with respect to time.” Truly, what I’m calling the technological sublime might be better terms a “negative sublime,” or a “non-sublime,” as it forecloses even that kind of positive privation of mind Lyotard finally identifies as the new task of the avant-garde. It is precisely the inability for the mind to wrest itself free from the logic of techno-capital, because it witnesses no present, only a future veiled in disaster. Shakespeare and Poe’s birds are early imaginings of this technical nature molded into assassins of consciousness’s freedom. The most terrifying part of this technological sublime, however, is not just that it is created by humankind, or that it kills, but that it knows not what it does, but does it nevertheless. This is true, too, of ‘nature’ for Kant (sans creation), where in the sublime we find a ‘contra purposiveness’ that we subsume into a “higher purposiveness” (our own mind’s attainment/purposiveness). But the force of the technological sublime is not ‘contra purposiveness,’ instead, it is the sign of a force running like an unstoppable collection of algorithms playing an apocalyptic program over the hardware of the world. If the Natural Sublime symbolizes a contra-purposive power absolutely indifferent to humanity’s mortality, the technological sublime symbolizes a hyper-purposive power created by humanity with the absolute telos of self-destruction; that is, it signifies the omnicidal power of humankind externalized as an actuality, and not just an origin myth. It is an abyssal reflection of instrumental, utilitarian reason run amok over the world, and it is accompanied not by a negative pleasure, but by a refractive negation of negation, a sinking immersion in a time without immanence, as we recognize not our mind’s subsumption of the contra-purposive into a “higher purposiveness,” but the hijacking of humanity’s highest ideals by the profanity of ruinous selfishness and the unenlightened ignorance of a system driven not by understanding and reason, but the machine of capital and self-interest. Instead of the instant of the sublime reminding humanity of their freedom despite the overwhelming power of Nature, this non-sublime eliminates the instant, drawing all of human Being into a predetermined schema of time that resembles a shorted stock or derivatives contract. The technological sublime is the sense of mankind’s failure to properly self-reflect. If Enlightenment, as Kant wrote, is “the courage to use your own understanding,” this technological sublime signifies the radical cowardice of a people in bondage to the idea that “others will take care of that disagreeable business for me.”
I suggest that this is an inverse negation of negation, insofar as it is the embarrassment of witnessing the spread of “capitalist realism,” so to speak, over the fabric of all ecological systems, and all futures, taking us out of time, and totalizing space. The first negation, for Marx, is the end of private ownership, and the second negation is a negation of that negation, where a form of property is reinstalled, but transformed into co-operative ownership. It is embarrassing because rather than signal our ability to subsume contra-purposiveness into higher-purposiveness, the technological sublime signifies that we can no longer do so. What we see is not nature that we must recuperate, but human activity that we cannot recuperate. We see humanity’s broad submission to base desires over the possible utopia of reason. It finally, by way of signifying the end of human being by the hand of human being, is the sense of foreclosing all utopia, subsumed as it is by disaster. The consequence of this is an embarrassing inversion of what Marx meant by the second negation. Instead of collective, co-operative ownership by choice, humanity has cooperatively, collectively (if, of course, radically asymmetrically) come to inhabit the “entire world,” “collectively possessing it,” if simply because our traces are now everywhere written upon it. We (considered as humanity and its technical consequences) literally inhabit the entire planet without even possessing it, we infect it without improving it, we destroy it, now, without even intending to, and that same “we” (the one that appears to be nauseatingly in this very writing diffusing culpability by totalizing all of humanity as the same) sees in this sublime, this technological sublime, its own murderous, genocidal hand. The embarrassing sense of helplessness in the face of humanity’s own devastating activity is like that of the child that has spilled their milk and there it lies, spoiled, wasted. So the child cries.
This power, further, is without intention or agency, beyond the agency we might grant a complex technical system. It is this fact that is the most horrible aspect of the technological sublime. Not that it doesn’t care, but that it is programmed to destroy, and cannot care about that. In other words, it reveals the radical destruction of humanity’s own capacity to care, for purpose, because no matter how much you might “care about the environment,” what you see in the technological sublime is humankind’s internal capacity for hate spread across the outside everywhere you look, when you notice in every crack the glowing insidious poisons that we’ve secreted, everywhere like microplastics, undead like styrofoam. It throws our entire notion of species identity and species care into question, it upsets the possibility of Enlightenment in total, continuing the unfortunate culmination of stupid utilitarian reason (something like understanding without reason, or what Adorno and Horkheimer more often call instrumental rationality). From this perspective, of course, the technological sublime is tightly bound to eugenic racism. The technological sublime, as Alexander Wyeheliye might have it, is, finally, the ultimate racializing assemblage, because it commits genocide for us, whether we like it or not, mapping over the world the horrible ends of the overrepresentation of man, to reference Sylvia Wynter. Even our AI is racist.
Toward a Conclusion
What we see in “Star Wars One Letter at a Time” and in Brathwaite’s Sycorax Video-Style is the fundamental imbrication of aesthetic experience and global industrial poetics, a poetics determined by, in part, the rapid increase in the speed of computational technology capable of driving the profit motive’s logic ever closer to the speed of light. What we witness in the technological sublime are glimpses of the inevitable consequences of this necropolitics, as well as its present inescapability. The “Star Wars” of today is the war of dis-aster, a humanity disoriented from the stars, having lost all bearing, and any foresight for higher purposiveness. In the technological sublime we witness our disasterous and ruinous engagement in an abyssal war of attrition with ourselves and our own monstrous creations.
What I am asking, finally, is: what do we do when aesthetic experience becomes so tightly bound to this technical disaster that it subsumes every particular? If the free play of the imagination encouraged by the beautiful, and even inversely by the sublime, is the ground of aesthetic experience, where novel configurations of mind, reason, and imagination come into being because from aesthetic experience there irrupts a judgment “without criteria,” then how is aesthetic judgment possible at all when every particular of the present is infected with the technological sublime, already subsumed by a material reality with the telos of our “lowest purposiveness”? In effect, the possibility of the free play of the imagination is destroyed. This, I think, is the loss of aesthetics, replaced by a cruel poetics. It is no longer, therefore, in aesthetics that freedom lies, but in a new poetics.
The experience of the technological sublime is one that destroys any subject object relation (and thus experience) because it makes indistinguishable nature and human being; just at the moment that nature seems to appear in its beauty or power, we recognize it flicker into being as Being infected by the negative purposiveness of the inverse negation of the negation, where Being no longer becomes, so is not. Indeed, it is Being become blacked out by correctness, arrogance, profanation, Being unable to unfold into truth because captured in advance by terrible machines. There is no object to regard and nothing to contemplate. Our objects of regard, to the extent that they were ever capable of catalyzing aesthetic experience, have become sites for the reification and storage of capital. To lose objects is to lose aesthetic experience. The only possible out is here, where there is no out, on the out of the outside. Here, aesthetics shifts to poetics. Here, the desire for the object becomes an objection to thingness. Here we agree to the loss of the object and all things because we have shown we don’t deserve them (or worse, don’t care to love them), until we realize we don’t need them. Here, we are in favor of a sensus communus that attempts univocity.
There is no opening to judgment and the imagination in the experience of the technological sublime, but a radical foreclosure of possibility. The ground of the technological sublime is not the religious fear of God or Nature or of a cold, dark cosmos indifferent to human being that reminds us of our finitude (and extraordinary powers of mind), the ground of the technological sublime is science witnessing its imposter having destroyed the world. It is the technoscientific ethos of the 19th and 20th centuries witnessing its insufficiency and failure, its ignorance of art, and its devaluation of poetry. The consequences are a radical ontological, epistemological, and social shift that entails not death and/or mortality/finitude, but the end of life as such — a horizon properly After Finitude. The sensus communus that underwrites aesthetic experience has become what we understand to be under threat by the same power of reason that was meant to free us. The technological sublime is the encounter with a sociogenic necropolitical technics, and its painful stuplimity redoubles the horrors of modernity. We don’t get a “painful pleasure” from the technological sublime, but a dull continuous thudding against the interior of our skulls lulling us into a passive state of awful wonder at the enormous executioner machine our every action feeds. We are embarrassed by it. It is not an event that opens an indeterminate space of possibility, but a disaster that obliterates the imagination. Perhaps it is A Feeling Called Heaven. Its most profound aesthetic effect is the manifestation of what Bernard Stiegler calls, “the epoch of no epoch,” where we have lost the ability to dream, where we have lost aesthetics altogether.
The response to the technological sublime must be a negentropic infrastructuralist poetics. This is something I am trying to draw out in Brathwaite’s SxVx. Brathwaite’s SxVx and the critical difficulties it creates eventuate a catalytic model of poetic transformation that eliminates critical distance in favor of an infrastructuralist syncretism, a beautiful creolizing mongrelization, where the difference between poem and criticism is rendered obsolete. This is the significance of its strategic medium translation. In contrast to conceptual writing, this strategic medium translation is internal to the poem itself, not a simple transfer between contexts. While it does not activate “antithetical versions” of readymade texts, it might activate antithetical texts within the text itself, or as the poem itself — i.e., it reveals the non-identical in it activated by the unity of reading, writing, and poetry. Put another way, the style makes itself the readymade text it “recontextualizes,” thus to a certain degree, it “weaponizes” the previous identity of the poem (and erases that previousness), in the sense that it injects an anomalous element into it (or discovers that anomalous element as already immanent to the poem, if “virtual,” occasionally as the reader, occasionally as OCR, occasionally as publishing difficulties, etc.) that is aggressively non-translatable into the conventional print norms where the poems were “originally” deployed. (See Agon, by Judith Goldman for a profound meditation on weaponization and the discursive contexts of art and appropriation in a racialized, racist, fundamentally enthymemic society.) In this sense, it is a profound poetics, and, possibly, an anti-aesthetics capable of assuming the responsibility of the (a) poetics-without-aesthetics demanded by the emergence of the technological sublime. One major difference between my technological sublime and Kant’s is that unlike Kant’s sublime that was meant as a description of a universal experience of imagination’s encounter with chaos, formlessness, and the infinite, mine, finally, is a contingent description of a contingent poetic process immanent to “the contemporary,” and, hopefully, not actually teleological, eschatological, or final, even if seeming so.
What kind of poetics is sufficient to this unfortunate state? My argument, in short, is that no such notion of sufficiency can ever institute such a shift in poetics as required by the technological sublime. Instead, a poetics of radical insufficiency is necessary, and a criticism committed to the same. I am suggesting that Brathwaite’s SxVx begins to create a system characterized by such powerful insufficiency, opacity, and futility. It does this by inserting a protective noisiness like a static carapace into an otherwise “transparently” communicative medium at precisely the time that it becomes wrapped up in the cybernetic Anthropocene emergent in the 80s and 90s. That medium, here, is itself, including its previous iteration, and my reading of it, and the social authorization of it as poetry. Being poetry, it is communicative only relatively speaking. That protective carapace of noisiness persists today as non-aesthetic anomalous content. This is fundamentally non-conceptualizable content, so, in Kantian terms, content inassimilable to any kind of aesthetic judgment whatsoever. It is also non-formal, as it can never be reduced to formalism, even as extension of content. Hence this content is neither form nor content but a ghostly poetics. It is not aesthetic because it is never apprehended by the senses, and, as I previous argued, today aesthetic experience is impossible. It is only partially discoverable, if such a thing can be said, in precisely the kind of work undertaken in this blog (a kind of work that it must be stated fundamentally has no method, and so is not work). And even then, it is never discovered, but effects the poetics of insufficiency nevertheless, as an infrastructuralist poetics that denies the adequacy of any given structure in favor of structure’s ongoing transformation. This is precisely what structuralism argues for. The infra element of infrastructuralism is that anamolous non-conceptualizable content, the ghostly poetics, that subtly shifts the invariant conditions of a structure suggested as they are by the ongoing measurement and determination of criteria for judgment. Hence, the identity of the poem is always relative to the insufficiency of the poetics. “I” writer do not make a claim to “discovery” of this content. It precedes and exceeds “me,” because it is the poem. Any such discovery in fact coextensively discovers less, opening an even larger world of privation inaccessible to my critical endeavor. This is its mysterious power and why it can never be instrumentalized. The element that is non-translatable is the poetic element in absentia, an aesthetic experience denied by the formal approach of apocalypse, an imagined future that would foreclose the persistence of any aesthetic phenomena. Here, finally, computation and printing become identical, and the poem persists identical with itself across space in time as a distribution of a set of points ever-reverberating along the spectral substance of the present. The way that it comes into the present, in other words, the way that it is discriminated from the past and future, is more important than any fundamental notion of identity or objecthood that something like “a poem” otherwise denotes. Poetics, now, is not a choice, but an absolute.