Something like a working hypothesis:
Brathwaite’s Sycorax-Video-Style posits an invariant structure. At first this structure is defined as a poem that traverses in simultaneity two iterations of a given poem, such as in his practice of “remediation,” where Brathwaite recreates his own previously published, conventionally typeset poems, newly setting them in his Sycorax-Video-Style. Discussion of this “remediation” has dominated discourse about the Sycorax-Video-Style. Less discussed is Brathwaite’s continued use of the Sycorax-Video-Style in his writing of poetics without the referential support of an “original poem.” conVERsations with Nathaniel Mackey is the most sustained version of this kind of use of the Sycorax-Video-Style. If an invariant structure, a topological poem that exists as the homologous relation holding together the original poem and the remediated poem, emerges from the Sycorax-Video-Style in the case of the first use of the Sycorax-Video-Style, what is the ‘invariant structure’ of the poem when there is no clear “original” to remediate? My assumption, of course, is that there is one, and that invariance is at the heart of poetics, even as that invariance is processual in essence. Brathwaite stages this dialectic between invariance and process by introducing technical interference in the form of the computer and its own structural and aesthetic limitations, as well as its metonymic relation to the industrial necropolitical complex of late-capitalism at the dawn of barbaric neoliberal practice. In the 1970s-1990s, “word processing” takes hold of language. This processing allows the massive proliferation of literature and poetry around the world at unprecedented velocity. At the same time, this processing submits language to the disposition of the informational, neoliberal logic of the database. Here, a novel poetics emerges, one that in the early part of the 21st century has been embodied by movements such as conceptual writing, documentary poetics, and ecopoetics, among others, and cultural/theoretical movements like afropessimism and radical queer/trans studies. Brathwaite’s poetics offers an entangled line in the late 20th and early 21st century’s focus on materiality, one that demands that we read the invisible opacities of this “writing of the disaster,” to quote Maurice Blanchot, if only so that we might create a dream sufficient to our catastrophe, even as that dream risks being devoured by the ever-churning recuperative apparatus of the Capitolocene, whose maw seems like an infinite screen.
My claim is that these two kinds of poems, the “remediated” kind and the Sycorax-Video-Style-Without-Original, produce a new invariant structure, inclusive of the first kind’s topological figure, that should be considered as a novel object of poetic study. This poem, or poetic object, or process, includes all that which has been conventionally considered within the domain of poetics, especially over the course of the 20th century’s emergent theorization of “the materiality of the signifier.” This includes all those features of poetics that have been defined over the course of millennia such as the mode (epic, lyric), theme, meter, rhyme, rhythm, metaphor, form, figuration, language, defining the general purpose of poetry, etc. The structure posited by the ‘Sycorax-Video-Style’ is both more and less than these conventional poetic features. It also includes many emergent features of 20th century poetics, like concrete poetry and sound poetry, while stepping a toe into the uncertain waters of the 21st, whose theoretical eddy is a Charybdis and Scylla of “post-critical” wars, dreams of decolonization, “distant reading,” speculative/new materialisms, and other attempts at reconfiguring criticism. SxVx’s relation to the specific history of late-capitalism and coloniality during the rise of the information age, what Deleuze has called “control society,” makes the Sycorax-Video-Style a significant hinge across a millennial caesura, with Brathwaite and Nathaniel Mackey’s conVERsations, published in 1999, all the more interesting given that it marks the cusp of 2,000 years of the Western (in this use meaning Christ-centric) measure of time.
When we try to relate Sycorax-Video-Style to other developments in the 20th century, for example concrete poetry as practiced by the Noigandres group including Haroldo and Augusto De Campos, a development that tends to begin with Mallarme’s Un Coup de Des and passes through Modernism and its various avant-gardes (the powerful typographic experiments of futurism, dada, surrealism — see Drucker, Hilder, Perloff, etc.), what becomes clear is that Brathwaite’s hypostatization of his own negotiated, opaque gesture of mediation differs starkly from the “perfect, utopic communication” desired by concrete poetry. To point to one example, if we take Jamie Hilder’s argument that Concrete Poetry in part attempted to perform a universal communication transcending the particularity of any particular language, a communication beyond nations, languages, and peoples, and the utopic spirit this gambit attempts to enact, we can see that one of the apertures Brathwaite’s Video-Sycorax-Style offers (decidedly not concrete poetry) is the training of a video recorder on that project of Universality, mentioning in negative that project’s failure to accommodate certain worlds. SxVx simultaneously suggests any universal’s similar failure, just as what is called for by our planetary crisis might be a renewed universal that I might prefer to refer to as a univocity.
Brathwaite replaces that imagined and hoped for transparency with the invisible opacities introduced by his infratextual / intratextual gesture of the Sycorax-Video-Style, where in the difference between the two iterations of the poem, an “internal difference / where the meaning lies,” to quote Emily Dickinson, another sage of the opaque, becomes that difference that no universal can accommodate with any knowledge of what that universal isn’t. But this can only accomodate the first use of the Sycorax-Video-Style, i.e. the remediation of “original” poems, a remediation that creates a topological zone. Beyond this theorization of the significance of Brathwaite’s topological poems, the secondary Sycorax-Video-Style work, that work with no referent or “origin poem,” poses an even more delinked, processual, hauntological, simultaneous poetics, where opacity becomes the only possible writing of the disaster. We might relate this to Sha Xin Wei’s notion of a “topological media,” where the poem evolves into an ever-shifting “open-set topology” whose terms of relation are meant to change as it encounters the world, and as we, critics, readers, and poets, encounter it.
I argue that the invariant structure emergent from these two uses of the Sycorax-Video-Style is a new kind of poem, an infrastructuralist poem, that strikes at the heart of structure itself, while finding no hard core at the heart of poetics but a processural ghosting. This processural ghosting is the domain of collective dreams, where possibility dwells. As Bernard Stiegler and Achille Mbembe argue, today, that possibility dreams hold space for has been savagely bound to cangues by the barbaric Capitolocene. Our impossible dream is currently inhibited by the barbaric, genocidal necropolitics fundamental to neoliberal ideology whose only possible telos is the continued razing of the world, an ideology inaguarated at least as early as what Sylvia Wynter has called “the overrepresentation of Man.” That processual ghosting, however, aims at a new dream, new gods even, and a new technics, something like a “negentropic neganthropocene,” even as that technics is swallowed by the voided abyss of the present.