Category: Brathwaite

In previous posts I have outlined 2 versions of Brathwaite’s SxVx. The first involves what other authors refer to as “re-mediation,” wherein Brathwaite, using the SxVx style, creates new versions of poems he has previously published. Certain poems have been published and republished this way many times across many books, as well as performed and recorded. I suspect there are the most versions of “Letter Sycorax,” “originally” published in X/Self (1987), and reproduced across his oeuvre in many different versions in many different publications. I refer to this kind of poem as a “first order topological poem,” because it references an “originary” point as the first publication, and then introduces a roving, diffuse set of points relative to this “original.” It also implicitly references a single printed version of the text produced by Brathwaite’s StyleWriter (Sycorax) that is then reproduced in book form by photographing that page, or by making a simulacrum in a separate design software. This reference to the single original page is shared by the second order topological poems discussed below. Another way to say this, in the theoretical language that I’m developing, is that the first order topological poems introduce a transformational point in the mathematical symbolic that emerges in a variety of ways relative to its infrastructural identity, or poetic symbolic being. An example of this kind of SxVx is below. In his larger retrospective critical/autobiographical SxVx works, such as Barbajan Poems and MR, Brathwaite will note where the “original” poem was published. Here, for example, after the quote, KB writes, “[see the ‘DreamSycorax New(s)Letter’ in MiddlePassages (1993)]. (I have inverted the color scheme of these passages to remain consistent with this blog’s aesthetic):

From this, a reader might track down the “original” publication and read the differences between that publication and this one. And many critics have. In this way, as the SxVx develops, Brathwaite’s poetic oeuvre becomes an infrastructural challenge to the reader or critic, where every reading increasingly feels partial, not just because, as in some difficult poetry, you don’t “understand” the poems, but because it explicitly references an externality you may not have access to. This novel form of partiality, an index of the proliferating media environmental of the late 20th century, has the effect of producing a latent, present absence in any reading. An implicit ‘non-knowledge’ emerges in every reading, a kind of indeterminate center-without-center, origin-without-original, or what Fred Moten has called, referencing Andrew Benjamin, anoriginality. On the other hand, there is no guarantee of any sufficient reading even should the tenacious critic track down every version of a given poem. Not only will the critic never truly exhaust “every” version of the poem (doing so necessarily begins to balloon into the vertiginous task of collecting every iteration of every published version in order to track the differences between copies of the same publication), but they will come to realize that this system under transformation, or infrastructuralist poem, includes them, the critic, in it, as the poem will have creepingly become a catalytic supplement to the critic’s life, a potentially fatal supplement that wastes time, drawing the critic ever nearer-death, as they realize, finally, the startling persistence of the poem. The poem, on the one hand, needs the reader, and on the other hand, dispenses with you by using you. We might refer to this as a fundamental lack of poetic sufficiency that has the paradoxical effect of producing a radical excess of existence bordering on the infinite. All poems could be said to accomplish this, but Brathwaite’s poetry accomplishes this uniquely as a spatial configuration that mimes (and is) the disaster of the contemporary present, and the fact of the present as a constant shattering of the stitch between past and future. My insistence on attempting to quote Brathwaite only photographically indexes an impossible to determine (but actual) measurement of time reciprocal to the poetic value I believe this work has. It is the time of my life given over to the poem. And this is precisely the beginning of living.

The poet has undergone a series of terrible disasters. Their cosmos has been disrupted. They have become without any guiding star (dis / astro) or, perhaps worse, have come under the sign of pure negation, where cosmos itself has disappeared. The result of this disaster is that the poet can no longer write, at least in any conventional sense. The poet’s fist of silent stone consigns them to nothing. The world itself becomes nothing.

From that Bermuda’s triangle emerges a new sign of hope, not an EYE, but a VOICE (Legba, Sycorax, KB’s deceased wife, his own poetic oeuvre now turned to stone for chiseling).

While Brathwaite will continue to write poetry, prose, criticism, and history, it will now be done under the sign of this cosmological disruption, a disruption that will be formally thematized in the SxVx, a disruption that will be indexed as an ongoing disaster. That Brathwaite refers to SxVx as a voice, I think, attempts to unify the phonemic and graphemic (and performative, and infrastructural) aspects of language into a morphic, 4-dimensional system that tried to take seriously Einstein’s general theory of relativity as the major cosmological disruption of the 20th century, the flipside of the terrors of genocide, colonialism, and environmental degradation.

If the first order topological poem refers to the poem that has been previously printed, the second order topological poem refers to the poem without any such origin. It is “born-topological” (or infrastructural), so to speak, in that it gives no privilege to any kind of published origin. This is work that is done entirely in the SxVx style, such as Brathwaite’s many publications in journals and magazines like Wasafari and Black Renaissance / Renaissance Noire, and in books, such as DreamStories, or work that refers to a recording where poetic material is inscribed without ever assuming the material formality of a published book, so things like lectures, readings, and interviews, such as conVERSations, Barbajan Poems, and MR, an interview, a lecture, and something like a seminar/course record, respectively.

The most baroque of these publications is probably MR, Brathwaite’s early 2000s massive two-volume publication that both theorizes Magical Realism in his peculiar style, and records, to some degree, a course/seminar he taught at NYU on Magical Realism. The book even includes part of an essay written by one of his students. These two books are fairly extreme magpie-like affairs, including visual imagery, photographs, paintings, diagrams, high stylistic variance, various levels of legibility, type-size, etc. The book is self-consciously incomplete and consistently references a book to come that will finish the many sections marked with astericks that indicate a more complete essay or book on the way. No such book ever materialized, leaving MR incomplete and partial both in the sense meant in reference to the first order topological poems above, but also in a new sense, a sense that I think importantly folds the critic/reader into Brathwaite’s SxVx project that would seek to attempt a new style adequate to the cosmological disruptions of the contemporary world, a world of disasters, yes, but also great possibility. The second-order topological poem, then, is what Brathwaite refers to as an “Open-System,” containing no formal closure, but retaining some invariance between the mathematical symbolic and poetic symbolic (as developed earlier). I.E. it retains a name (MR), but encourages readerly/writerly/critical intervention. I want to argue that this called-for intervention, an interpellating hailing without option, to complete the incomplete quite exceeds the kind of intervention usually associated with 20th century theories of readerly participation. It isn’t enough that a reader “complete the poem in their mind,” or “co-create the poem,” in order to mime constructivist subjectivity. There is no closure to reject. The point is that there is no “co-” here, and that the process of subjectivity devolves into a signification process whereby subjectivity and identity do not not obtain. In this sense, it is a radical call to enter, with Brathwaite and the SxVx, a new cosmology, one, he thinks, that is already underway, of rhizomatic palimpsest, of multiple representation, and of quantum relation, indeterminacy, and opacity.

In Lyn Hejinian’s famous “The Rejection of Closure” she writes, “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, di­rections, number, and velocities of a work’s motion. The mate­rial aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of lan­guage itself.” I am arguing that this material aporia can be further radicalized against objectification, as a simple hypostatization of objectification, and the Brathwaite achieves this through the homeomorphic first order and second order topological poems. I hope to make a bridge between Hejnian, Umberto Eco, and Brathwaite, in that each uses “open” and “closed” in specific ways that are related but different. Hejinian closes her essay, reasserting her point that words can never “match” the world, thus open a creative/productive gap in their use,

“Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the dif­ferentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.

A central activity of poetic language is formal. In being formal, in making form distinct, it opens—makes variousness and multiplicity and possibility articulate and clear. While failing in the attempt to match the world, we discover structure, distinc­tion, the integrity and separateness of things. As Bob Perelman writes:

At the sound of my voice
I spoke and, egged on
By the discrepancy, wrote
The rest out as poetry.(25)

Resting is an egg. Writing can only be as poetry. Discrepancy (discrepant engagement). Speaking to sound of one’s voice is to speak to an internal difference, an internal discrepancy, a threshold of poetry that is never crossed, but is a continuous crossing. That Hejinian closes her essay with an appeal to poetry that ostensibly agrees with her previous statement offers a novel simulacrum of closure. Here, the essay ends only with poetry. In fact, the essay ends with a page number: 25 (or parenthesis, really). But of course the notes follow. The last note offers where the poem begins (p. 11 of Perelman’s “My One Voice” in Primer). We know the poem must be at least 14 pages long. But where does it end? There is only one way to find out.

MR includes many, many more citations and outright appropriations of other author’s work than do works like conVERSations or Barbajan Poems. Interspersed with citations/remediations of his own poetry and what seem to be transcribed lectures from his seminar are long passages from Cecilia Vicuna, Alejo Carpentier, Robert Antoni, and others, all presented in the SxVx style. One of the more extreme examples of this aspect of SxVx opens this post. It is a passage from a Wilson Harris essay on V.S. Naipul with extensive in-line commentary by KB. I have photographed and modified the passage so that it reads in one long block. In MR it is split over the gutter of two pages, a fact present as the cantilevered disruption of the printed page’s straight lines. To read this passage requires unlearning our expectations of reading, and a willingness to enter the style of the text to the extent that it allows us to know (and unknow) the difference between Harris’s essay and KB’s voice. We have to read our reading reading while KB reads. This difference between author, reader, quoted, quotee, poem, book, seminar, critic and conference isn’t so much erased as radically reconfigured toward a sensation of disoriented simultaneity, a palimpsestic cosmology (like the one KB tidalectically sketches in MR, as if writing on water, writing in light) where difference syncretically disseminates along the immanent plane of the poem’s distribution of invariant relation. It is an alien phenomenology, but not one from outer space. It is the alien within our own phenomenology opened by the catalyst of the pervasive and transforming presACTIVITY of cosmological anima. Our very reading of the poem is an alien poetics, and suddenly, out from under us, the rug of reading is pulled from beneath our feet and we stop trying to understand and start interstanding (KB’s word). The death of the author does not just yield the birth of the reader, but knowledge (and non-knowledge) of the poetic symbolic, a machinic super-dense dark matter firing the cylinders of creative memory, an experience we can only have in tandem with the Other that is also Within, where identity does not mean, in fact, where a definition of identity cannot obtain. Literally. At the end of the following excerpt, just as it seems that KB will give the definition of identity according to WH, some kind of completion of the opening clause, “a reallocation of,” the line breaks off, space emerges, and one turns the page to finish the sentence only to find nothing there, because after that break there is only a new chapter. The reallocation, the reader suddenly understands, is of us (*hand turns page*), whether we can write or not.

Reading this, where capacity is a causeway, where enlightenment is [darkness!], where ground of choice is a continuum, where identity is the location/relocation/ reallocation of […] produces a form of difference repeating for however long it will retain and create a metastability that also always threatens its very identity (and any identity at all) by admitting change into the system, and a threat of destruction. The difference is never final, and the reading, impeded by the many signs and symbols disrupting the quote(s), commentary that is also a reading-with, idiosyncratic spellings that cause great leaps (ISSURE of personality) must occur slowly, like water percolating through a sponge or coral reef. It must include (by producing) an expanded phenomenology of reading as we know it. Perhaps not expanded, but cosmologically disrupted. As we get our bearings in a cosmologically disrupted word, where every center is of the disaster, we are “of” what identity conventionally is not. Slowly. At the same time, it can be quick, lightning fast, eyes at the speed of light. Opening to this phenomenology, one realizes they have opened onto an infrastructuralist phenomenology, a distributed consciousness, and thresholds of sentience that are deeply textual, deeply social, and full of confusing and delightful opacities. This aspect of the SxVx, what we might call a third order topological poetics, bends space and time around itself at the moment that moments arise and cease, that is, at the moment when everything was once thought to be susatined. One feels one becoming, just on the threshold of a new order, a new order irrupting in order. A metamorphosis within and without. The reader that undertakes reading the entirety of MR gains new eyes. Eyes that can hear Sycorax’s voice. The critic of such work must make a choice when they attempt to write about it. How do you quote from it? The answer is simple:

You can’t.

I want to direct attention to this incredible archive, The Digital Library of the Caribbean:

https://www.dloc.com/

where I’ve been able to access Kyk-Over-Al 40, 1989, an important issue for the critical literature on Brathwaite because of an interview published there with Stewart Brown and KB.

The DLOC is an amazing archive. Occasionally the internet reminds us of its most utopian possibilities. I had a similar experience when I was researching 19th century US poet James Madison Bell, whose “Poetical Works” are available at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/aalh_poeticalworksofjamesmadisonbell_r8114bel

I was working on Bell’s satirical mini-epic, “My “Policy” Man,” a poem lambasting the racist alcoholic President of the United States Andrew Johnson who assumed office following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Bell critiques Jonhson’s reconstruction policies, and the man himself, in part by slinging stereotypes at him that were in other circumstances used to denigrate black people, such as calling them unfit for education like apes and monkeys. In this way, the poem, I thought, powerfully overturned and détourned the racist linguistic organon of the USA against the POTUS. The poem begins,

There is a tide in men’s affairs,
Leading to fame not wholly theirs —
Leading to high positions, won
Through noble deeds by others done.
And crowns there are, and not a few,
And royal robes and sceptres, too,
That have, in every age and land,
Been at the option and command
Of men as much unfit to rule,
As apes and monkeys are for school.

At the time, I discovered UC Riverside’s incredible archive of California Newspapers. Some of their digitized papers date to the early 19th century. In particular, I was interested in newspapers written and edited prior to emancipation by free/d black authors, especially those that published poems by Bell. I became intrigued by these papers. Some had correspondents as far afield as Japan. While Frederick Douglass’s The North Star is easily available and is the subject of an immense body of critical research, there is a serious scholarly lack of work on these black-run Western newspapers of the mid-19th century. I came to think of these writers as a legitimate avant-garde, a group of radical black intellectuals and writers with the explicit goal of producing an irruptive interventional discourse that would make all claims to black inferiority absurd. In advance of their own legal freedom, and while working at the fringes of social death, they would demonstrate irrefutable proof of their creative, artistic, and intellectual freedom and value. Unfortunately, many of the newspapers are torn, missing pages, or unavailable, hence they have become sites of irretrievable loss. The papers I was especially interested in were The Elevator and The Pacific Appeal.

James Madison Bell was a mercurial figure. He was a revolutionary poet and charismatic orator associated with John Brown at one time, and he might have even been present at the raid on Harper’s Ferry, or at least helped in the raid’s planning. In the preface to his posthumously published collected poetical works, Bishop B.W. Arnett, D.D. writes, “His life has been one of great activity; his services rendered to his race cannot be measured by any standard that we have at our command. His influences have been one of those subtile influences. Like the atmosphere, it has gone many places, and the people have felt and acted upon it; they have become better and wiser by reason of reading and hearing his speeches.” A force like the atmosphere, unmeasurable by any standard, pervasive but partially unseen, this kind of avant-garde has always been underway, even if we don’t have the instruments to know it. Almost a hundred and fifty years before Paul Mann wrote in his blistering critique of the discourse surrounding the avant-garde that the future of the avant-garde might be “an unprecedented silence, exile…” a poet like James Madison Bell, and the critical void surrounding these sites of irretrievable loss, sites that nevertheless index radical and agonistic life and art, already performed it. Perhaps Mann’s critique is, paradoxically, better extended to the past and its simultaneity with the present, rather than as a call for the “next” avant-garde. The way to come to know this avant-garde is by reading the impossible, that is to say, by literally reading the absent pages of these magazines and the torn fragments of their pages, along with the voids that can never be recovered. Of whatever the avant-garde might be after the critical deconstruction of all things characteristic of 70s and 80s theory, Mann writes, “It cannot be described here, for the next stage of resistance must be carried out against this very discourse, this very incursion” (Theory Death of the Avant-Garde, 144). That it cannot be described, I argue, means that it cannot be represented, it cannot be experienced, it cannot even be written about and, therefore, it must be, like the atmosphere, a fundamental, if opaque, poetics. It may only be a site for contemplation, a site criticism can never hope to arrive at. My thinking now is that this kind of historical (non) reading might be related to Brathwaite’s notion of ‘tidalectics,’ an “oversatnding” of Hegel’s dialectics.

The interview I mentioned above between Stewart Brown and Kamau Brathwait is frequently referenced in the critical literature on Brathwaite. Nathaniel Mackey quotes it in “Wringing the Word,” an essay published first in 1994 in World Literature Today . It was eventually collected in Paracritical Hinge. For Mackey, the interview acts as a kind of grounding for his discussion of Brathwaite’s nation-language: “I think the real challenge for the artist who knows his English and mediates between the two languages is to develop an English which increasingly reflects the nature of nation-language.” (Brathwaite qtd. in Mackey, 52). Mackey also quotes it in “Sight-Specific Sound-Specific” because of Brathwaite’s explanation of his performance style. Brathwaite often performed alongside dub poets that could be quite extravagant in their vocalizations and body language. Brathwaite’s performance style was much more restrained. When asked about how he performs, he responds, “I don’t perform at all, it’s my poetry that does it. . . . The words on the page have a metaphorical life of their own. I do not depend upon walking up and down on the stage and doing things. People have the impression that I’m performing when in fact they are actually dealing with poetry as they ought to, that is, the poetry is singing in their ears.”

The interview is also important for Brathwaite’s discussion of his nascent Sycorax Video-Style that he calls “writing in light.” “I think the computer has moved us away from scripture into some other dimension which is “writing in light”. It is really nearer to the oral tradition than the typewriter is. The typewriter is an extension of the pen. The computer is getting as close as you can to the spoken word — in fact it will eventually I think be activated by voice and it will be possible to sit in front of the computer and say your poem and have it seen.” The interview finds its way into discussions of Brathwaite by Mathew Kirschenbaum in both Track Changes and the recently published Bitstreams, Jenny Sharpe’s recent Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (2020), Mandy Bloomfield’s, Archaeopoetics (2016), and many more.

By 1989, along with the emergence of SxVx, Brathwaite’s poetry is also beginning to incorporate more Amerindean themes and “magical realism.” He refers to X/Self, “for the first time, [there is] a significant Amerindian presence in X/Self and there is is much more of what I would call magical realism than before.” That development of magical realism in relation to Amerindian thought will find a later culmination in the two large tomes composing MR (Savacou North, 2002), where world cosmologies are juxtaposed with scientific and technical developments to explain the emergence of the genre/style known as “Magical Realism.”

Brown asks Brathwaite about the tension between technology and history, and Brathwaite responds, referencing Marshall McLuhan, “What I was saying there was that technology makes nation-language easier…the ‘global village’ concept, the message is the medium and all that…The poem was saying that the computer has made it much easier for the illiterate, the Caliban, actually to get himself visible” (56). That Brathwaite reverses the famous McLuhanism re-focuses attention on the messageness of “the medium is the message,” emphasizing their inextricability. If McCluhan’s essential intervention was to attenuate the message so that we might see the media, Brathwaite, I think, offers a necessary development of that critical intervention by reinserting the message back into the media, unifying them like a wave-particle. He goes on, discussing how on the computer “you can make mistakes…you can see what you hear. When I said “writing in light” that is the main thing about it — the miracle of that electronic screen means that the spoken word can become visible in a way that it cannot become visible in the typewriter where you have to erase physically.” This form of “visuality” is quite different than the typewriter’s. It is an ephemeral visuality that sounds a little more like Freud’s magic writer and Plato’s/Derrida’s wax tablet. I think this informs why Brathwaite terms his Sycorax style Sycorax-VIDEO. Where is the video in the Sycorax video-style? Video tends to signify the technological development of sonic and visual information hardcoded together, where “seeing and hearing” and “hearing and seeing” can be chiasmatically reversed ad infinitum, because they are inextricable. Video is also a time-based medium, where sound and image pass together, and yet, its mechanical support is a vast spatial configuration only possible at this late stage of industrial capitalism. While we might experience video’s ephemerality, part of that experience always indexes what we don’t see about its support. Brathwaite’s “static” video-poems make us continue looking at video, frame by frame, and one of the effects of this is that it focuses our attention on the whole support system of the poetry, from computer, to book, to writer, to reader.

Later in the interview, Brathwaite discusses the U.S. “experimenting with alteration of atmosphere, creation of storms, droughts and things…” to describe Hurricane Gilbert (1988), the second most intense tropical cyclone on record in the Atlantic basin, a Category 5 hurricane that was responsible for the destruction of Brathwaite’s own archive. The storm was one of the largest tropical cyclones ever observed, its storm-force at one point measuring 575 mi in diameter. Whether or not we think that storms are the result of deliberate scientific experimentation by the US intelligence sector, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that throughout the 20th century hurricanes in the Caribbean and all around world became increasingly powerful, precisely as the result of the U.S.’s (and other major emitters’) reckless emissions. Brathwaite’s Shar: Hurricane Poem, a poem I read today, also deals with this devastating storm. In part the poem is an elegy for the destruction of his archive, a repository for what might have been at the time one of the largest collections of Caribbean poetry, and certainly an archive containing invaluable tapes, records, etc. Brathwaite was a huge collector of other writers’ work, along with their working manuscripts, and his collection constituted a veritable “Library of Alexandria,” as he often called it. Brathwaite refers to the storm as a “missile,” part of the Western cosmology that he describes in MR as “missilic.” What does viewing this catastrophic storm as a literal attack against the existence of such an archive and the people it records do to our historical consciousness? Can we take such a view? Despite the devastation, Shar urges song. It is a neganthropic ecopoem.

Brathwaite continues by discussing the insidious tourist industry in the Caribbean that had by 1989 transformed the face of many Caribbean islands into brutal concrete havens for the global elite. He worries that this transformation will foreclose the poetic youth’s ability to connect with their land, because “…you can’t really relate to a Hilton Hotel.” This creeping globalization relates to Brathwaite’s repeated claim throughout the 90s that postcolonial studies, like the tourist industry reshaping the face of the archipelego, is a violent, exploitative endeavor attempting to mine new literary resources from the third world. If the computer makes Caliban visible, there is also a danger in becoming so visible. Just as Brathwaite celebrates the potential for technology to make Caliban’s voice heard, at the same time it allows Caliban to be immediately recuperated into the scholarly apparatus that extracts cultural capital from elsewheres, creating new forms of peripheral sites of resource extraction for the “citadels” of Empire, as Brathwaite often referred to NYU. The value of visibility has become increasingly troublesome in the era of data-extraction, drone bombings, and global techno-capital, hence Hito Steyerl’s wonderful, “How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic .MOV File.” Worse, even, the Anthropocene has manufactured new terrible “eyes of Apollo.” The “eyes of Apollo” is a figure meant to describe the view of the planet from a divine perspective. Today, that view is not divine, but technical, technologically sublime, even, because the atmosphere, the entire surround of Earth, is a vicious vision humanity has weaponized against itself and all things. The greatest drone bomb today is the climate itself, a new apotheosis of the missilic Western cosmology spread across the world like a sheet of cluster bombs.

I’ve been thinking of Brathwaite in relation to Steyerl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image” (despite her retraction of some of that influential essay’s claims). The essay begins, “The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution is substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.” She may as well be describing Brathwaite’s process of Sycorax Video-Style, with the caveat that in general Steyerl’s essay is about digital files, whereas one of the most unique things about Brathwaite’s work (to my mind) is that it never “went digital,” in the sense that he never began to make “video-poems” in any conventional way. Instead, his poems refused such easy access or reductive notions of movement as light play across a screen. SxVx insists on the opacity of limited editions, where movement is described in difficult to print monolithic books like Barbajan Poems and MR, along with slight but powerful DIY books like Shar: Hurricane Poem, a book that leaves visible the trace marks of the Xerox machine used to scan the 8.5×11 pages. While the traces of the Xerox machine at the margins of the pages of Shar can be understood as indexical to the physical acts of scanning and printing, they are also contiguous visual-material metonymic traces of the material system the poem is including writing, scanning, printing, distribution, binding, reading, and its manifestation of cultural resonance as creative memory.

Early in MR, Brathwaite discusses what he calls “Closed” and “Open” systems. He refers to the “Closed System” as the CMS (Closed Missile System, the European/Western cosmology) that would seek to reinscribe its missilic forms of “prehensile pretention” across the world, a prehensile pretention that views all things as terra nulius for it to conquer. By contrast he offers the “Open System” as a “concept not of tabula rasa but palimpsest / wiping the slate of literary & cultural assumptions / clean in such a way that we begin to discern the ainchen voices of the inscriptions of history y memory” (MR, 53). Not tabula rasa, but something like a continuous tabula rasa or continuous morphology of wiping clean and discerning history and memory in what otherwise might “appear” blank. He suggests that there are “Open Systems” within “Closed Systems” and “Closed Systems” within “Open Systems.” In fact, it is the nascent Magical Realist cosmology that allows such contradictions and paradoxes to flourish, and that might be the ground(less ground) for hope. The “Open System” requires the radical practice of what Keats called “negative capability.” As Brathwaite defines it in MR: “negative capability involved the willing suspension of inherited / prejudice, judgment, judementals, academic lit procedures until such / time as they become useful & / or relevant” (MR, 65). Negative capability is the precondition for willful cosmological shifts. Brathwaite conceives of cosmology as a “cultural organon that determines PART=WHOLE” but that also “can be changed.” It is this changing of cosmology that, for Brathwaite, Magical Realism, and other avant-gardes of the 19th and 20th century inaugurates by offering a cosmology of “Open” and “Closed” systems co-existent as paradox, contradiction, and the radical possibility of changing all “part / whole” relations. Thus it includes invariance and variance, structure and infrastructure. “For what this course in MR is attempting, as I’ve said before, is some understanding, some ontological interstanding of why & how certain things are / as they are or as they appear to be or as they are made to appear to be.” He tells his students that doing so requires “attention to negative capability (yr capability towards & IN it); second thru yr / honesty & diligence towards the TXT(s) & v/important – thru tributarailising [indeterminate SIC] yr / own cultural xperience(s) into the dream of the enterprise” (67). The student of the MR project of open and closed systems must be toward and in negative capability, immersing themselves in a field that negates all that which heretofore “themselves” is. Brathwaite’s refusal of the transparent distinction between open and closed, self and other, is, as he writes, radically palimpsestic. It isn’t that there is a terra nullius, but that every palimpsest can be re-written, including the palimpsest of our own cultural experience and knowledge. This, I think, is a celebration of opacity, even the opacity of our “selves,” “selves” that are, finally, part of the palimpsestic movement of “witness/crossroad / from world to word to self & from self to other selves / w/what i can only call humility” (67).

If Sycorax Video-Style is an expression of such a Magical Realist cosmology (and part of the MR is devoted to saying so), then Brathwaite here offers such continuous movement, and video, perhaps, as a fundamental Other within the One, an internal moving incessant constituting force (without constitution itself) both internal and external to the One, an Otherness that is parasitically related to (by being inside and without) all systems and institutions. Allowing this Other in (stranger, alien, foreign contaminant, anomalous material, or noise, as Brathwaite often calls it, rhyming with Michel Serres’s discussion of it in The Parasite) is to invite in the threshold quasi-object all identity finally is, an impossible invitation as it continues to stand on the threshold. That impossibility, “the best of all impossible worlds,” as Brathwaite frequently détourns Leibniz to become, becomes the poem just as it escapes us and becomes us.

If structuralism focused on identifiable invariant structures, I argue that this conception of movement as the Open System (a movement that cannot be conceptualized) offers an important infra of structure. The infra is that which can be changed, or move/d, within a structure without the structure losing its identity. Therefore, it is the historically conditioned aspect of structure. This is, to my mind, the essence of the “post” in “post-structrualism,” at least if we mark that turn by Derrida’s essay on the historicity of the structurality of structures, “Structure, Sign and Play,” delivered at the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, and published in 1968 in Writing and Difference. For me, infrastructure denotes the broad socio-cultural understanding of this quasi-objectivism, a social understanding that identity can be retained despite dramatic physical changes of materials, where it has become normal for things to radically transform at the level of media without becoming mere “images” or “representations” of themselves, where highways and networks, for example, or artworks and poems, like Brathwaite’s SxVx, exist as a diffuse set of material instantiations that describe a topological figure with homologous points in the mathematical symbolic and the poetic symbolic. In the case of Brathwaite’s versioning of poems, for example, the poem retains identity through its many iterations (as oral reading, as vinyl record, as cassette, as print, as computer “writing in light,” as print book, in this very post) through various historicities and historically determined sets of poetic-material identity. Many writers agree on Carrie Noland’s use of “re-mediation” to describe this transformational ability. However, I think it is important not to think of his first order topological poems as “re-mediations,” because the “re,” I think, suggests something too close to an “original.” Rather, we must view these poems as accretive and diffuse material patterns in the flux of the two symbolics. The “original” and the “re-mediation” exist as one poem. The emergent symbol of that union is its structure. It is essentially mathematical in that it denotes the poem’s invariant identity. It coalesces into a proper name: the poem’s title, itself subject to change, as Brathwaite’s titles often do. It is a continuous nommos. It is fundamentally symbolic (not to say immaterial), in the structuralist sense of the term, as in it is a description of identifiable or agreed upon invariance. The infrastructure of the poem, by contrast, is symbolic in the poetic sense. It is all the material movements of matter and energy (spacetime) the poem is, up to and including its most diffuse cultural resonances as silent influence or radiating associations. This is close to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic, that which does not signify in the signification process, and/or where the drives enter language, though remaining forever unnamed (though referred to as the chora). I use symbolic slightly differently than Kristeva or Lacan. My symbolic is not related to the thetic order, but to the Greek etymology σύμβολον or symbolon meaning token, from σύν syn “together” and βάλλω bállō ” “I throw, put,” that evolves from “throwing things together” to “contrasting” to “comparing” to “token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine,” or “outward sign of something.” The poetic symbolic, or infrastructure, and the mathematical symbolic, or structure, are forms of things thrown together, one connoting the realm of symbolic knowledge (mathematical symbolic, something more like what Kristeva and Lacan mean by the symbolic order or thetic phase) and one connoting the material support where the signifying process occurs, and our sense of that “infrastructure” existing as an identity (however mutable). In this sense, my poetic symbolic is much closer to what Kristeva means by the semiotic and chora. The infrastructure (or poetic symbolic) is the minimal physical requirements, the conditions of possibility, for the maintenance of the contiguity between the two symbolics in the actual repetition of difference. My thinking is that the word infrastructure better connotes the way Kristeva discusses the difference between sign and symbol. Poetic infrastructure signifies an indeterminate identity (the non-identical / relation) within identity, identity’s support (though both more and less than that), within (and without) any structure, while structure signifies the invariance of identity applied to such an infrastructure. The infrastructuralist poem is a certain distribution of the interbeing of the incessant — an invariant in difference. The infrastructure of the poem, finally, includes the unknown of the poem, the poem’s non-knowledge, or non-conceptualizable content, whereas the structure of the poem describes its existence as knowledge, what we tend to call form. Content, here, I’m arguing, somewhat paradoxically, becomes precisely that which we cannot know everything about, because it is the expression of material semiosis in relation to form (i.e. content is a manifestation at the crossroads of the two symbolics). Both symbolic registers, the mathematical/structural symbolic and the poetic/infrastructural symbolic, are mutable, and are involved in constant relative motion. Infrastructuralism is the literal ongoing morphology of the physical and structural set of points that can be said to be the poem at any given moment, including the diffuse limits of that threshold at the boundaries of human thought and quasi-objectival interbeing. In this sense, infrastructuralism is a science of the poem’s virtuality, because it attempts the impossible, a tracing of what the poem has been, what it is, and what it might be, all while being that becoming. It is a figure written on the plane of immanence. And it is immanence writing.

I’ve had difficulty tracking down many of Brathwaite’s publications, and some of them, like Barbajan Poems and MR, are extremely expensive and extremely rare. No one, to my knowledge, has yet to make them into PDFs. Why not? Perhaps out of respect for the power they have when you hold them in your hands, watching and hearing and seeing and listening to a radical Magical Realism bringing into being that groundless ground of an entire new cosmological principle. A shaking, shuddering, stammering OPEN SYSTEM, as Brathwaite writes in MR, an OPEN SYSTEM to destroy from within the CLOSED SYSTEMS that originate with Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. In this counter-discourse, or anti-discourse, or non-philosophy, there might be an “unprecedented silence,” the kind Paul Mann asks for, what we might call an internal avant-garde of the passing sublime.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to situate Brathwaite’s critical work, especially the work done in the SxVx style, as something kin to Georges Bataille’s heterology or Summa Atheologica, itself a heterological expounding of our greatest silences. In The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, and everywhere in Bataille’s oeuvre, he calls for a radical new system of non-knowledge as the actual necessity for revolution (a necessity that would destroy all necessity), one divorced from the utilitarian demands of reason, demands that thingify humanity and the world, leaving us profane objects and things at the behest of our own destructive systems of capital’s form of sovereignty. In Heterology, Bataille writes, “Now black communities, once liberated from all superstition as from all oppression, represent in relation to heterology not only the possibility but the necessity of an adequate organization…It is only starting from this collusion of European scientific theory with black practice that institutions can develop which will serve as the final outlets…for the urges that today require worldwide society’s fiery and bloody Revolution.” Of course, Césaire, Fanon, Wynter, Spivak, and others, would soon sound the bell for the necessity of a violent revolution (both actual and intellectual) emerging from “subalternity.” Bataille, though, is hard to shake. His notions of “base material,” “l’inform,” and “general economy” remain significant ways to theorize a form of material social connection foreign to the capitalist and political social relations still ruling today, relations that tend toward thingification; thingification in the sense of alienation (commodity, labor, value), and thingification of individual subjective representation in liberal democracy. It is that excluded thing that cannot be so alienated or “thingified” that always threatens theory. It returns in writers like Bernard Stiegler and Achille Mbembe, and, more recently, in Aria Dean’s recent essay in November, “Black Bataille.” Here, she puts Bataille’s notion of l’informe and base material in conversation with Afropessimist (non)philosophy. Her striking essay concludes:

“…I hope that wedging this Bataille thing into Black art discourse, and into general art theory anew, might inspire other Black artists and scholars to reassess our practices — and everyone else’s to pursue an absolutely counter-modernism and all its hypothetical counter-legacies from a true and decisive limit point — to find, draw out, and magnify those lurking base materialistic elements in order to extend and strengthen a notion of Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness.”

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.  

In the scholarship on Brathwaite that I’ve read so far most critics see in the Sycorax Video-Style (SxVx) either the culmination/advancement of Brathwaite’s aesthetic project of creating a “total Caribbean community” using what he has famously called “nation language,” or, on the other hand, they see a radical evolution of his aesthetic project that overturns his focus on the particular dialect/idiolectic “nation-language” he had advocated for in his previous work. Ignacio Infante’s “The Digital Vernacular” argues for the former, while Carrie Noland’s “Remediation and Diaspora” argues for the latter. Infante’s essay takes this to the limit, arguing that Brathwaite’s own historicization of the utopic “virtuality” offered by computer memory constitutes something like a lost potential of real utopia. In a fairly techno-utopian vein, Infante suggests that the purest form of the SxVx style is available only to the user, Brathwaite, typing in real-time on the Mac SE/30, and that anything else succumbs to the old problems of inscriptive media like paper. The only “video” Infante can imagine in the SxVx is the literal computer screen illuminated by dancing pixels while Brathwaite types. This is far too reductive a poetics for Brathwaite, whose sensitivity to the verbo-voco-visual matrix of poetry, I think, became like video in its negotiation of the discrepancy between the sonic and the visual. My ultimate feeling is that we have to take absolutely seriously the SxVx as video, perhaps, even, as video poetry. Video, after all, was a nascent medium in the 80s. Videos were especially popular among bootleggers, so it became something like a creative evolution of the Dub culture Brathwaite was part of. The medium of video is notoriously difficult to pin down (not unlike poetry), but most scholars eventually tend to agree that it has to do with the imbrication of sound and visual information on magnetic tape; that is, it is a post filmic medium at its core, but little else. Even that is too strict a definition, for the technology of video really emerged during the broadcast era, so video became inextricable to television and the domestic space. And the word “video” continues to be used today to describe audio visual information that plays in a linear timeline and has nothing to do with magnetic tape. In any case, Infante’s reduction of “video” to “computer” or “computation” is wrong, or at least reductive. So, too, is Noland’s discussion of “code” as something like the only mediating force at work. Certainly computation is part of the matrix constituting SxVx, but it is more than that. And beyond “code,” the entire apparatus of the Mac SE/30 should be taken into consideration, opening the materiality of Brathwaite’s SxVx onto the web of industrial manufacturing and supply chains. I think Noland, by the end of the essay, opens us toward discussion of the poetry in this way when she argues,

“I would argue, then, that Ancestors marks the end of a certain postcolonial ontology: a belief in the uninterrupted, expressive plenitude of call-and-response, in the uncomplicated self-identity of African subjects, and in the “immanence” of truths unveiled without the use of an “outside technology” (90).

Carrie Noland focuses on the increased discrepancy between sound and sight inaugurated by the SxVs, and how this discrepancy actually “reawakens” our sense of sight and sound from the droll slog of conventional print-based media, bringing Brathwaite into conversation with a history of the avant-garde aiming to re-enliven the senses after the dulling effects of modernity. Although Brathwaite does discuss, to some extent, the re-awakening of a pre-scriptural culture, claiming that computers are closer to oral cultures, I wonder, ultimately, if rather than some kind of nostalgic “reawakening” of sensation bringing us “back” to some kind of hieroglyphic culture, if it is not more accurate to say that the SxVx reorients our senses, or, perhaps, disorients them (at least insofar as it resists or throws into question our understanding of the sensory mediation expected by poetry).

Noland writes, and while there is much I disagree with in the article, I do tend to agree with this, that “Digital, “improvisation”…threatens to become detached from any connection to a specific community, a specific set of voices’ (95). Here, Noland suggests that the danger of the SxVx is that it detaches Brathwaite’s aesthetic from the specifically Caribbean goal he earlier focused on with his theory of “nation language,’ derritorializing it, and I think this is (partly) true, especially given the inherently global object a computer is. Trends in global history offer the same problem: the Anthropocene, Climate Change, etc., while experienced asymmetrically, also present no “outside” or “specific voice” to appeal to for guidance. At the very least: “Avant-garde experiment and diasporic practice attack in historically and geographically specific ways the particular impositions suffered as a result of the technologies through which they achieve materialization,” while also exploiting “the particular options offered by those technologies” (94-5). This opens thinking about the SxVx on a broader scale, as part of the global trend of digitalization and the increasing control of information systems. In Noland’s language, it opens us to “the X” as the “internal other, not a sound but instead a mark (X) that cannot be vocalized, that cannot be performed” (90). 

In both cases, the authors tend to refer to Brathwaite’s own account of the development of the SxVx in relation to three events: the death of his wife, the loss of a hard drive containing many of his files, and a brutal attack on Brathwaite by burglars. While one kind of writing about what a poet’s work does involves reference to biographical material, there are aspects of the SxVx that go beyond Brathwaite’s biography and that also cannot be explained by reference to what he says about it. In any case, it’s not all that interesting to me critically to say, “this is what Brathwaite says his work does,” and then to repeat that in a critical style that essentially agrees with Brathwaite.” What would be the point of writing about it, then? It is possible that critical accounts of SxVx have been weighed down too heavily by Brathwaite’s own account of the purpose of the SxVx, in part because of the many interviews he gave on the subject, perhaps even out of respect for Brathwaite himself.

I’m interested in reading the SxVx as a signal “infrastructuralist poem” that troubles structuralism and poststructuralism, appearances and essences, and identity in general, especially the identity of what constitutes the poem and what constitutes criticism of the poem. Often unremarked on in the scholarship on Brathwaite is that he developed the SxVx at precisely the moment of the global unleashing of neoliberal capitalism’s great acceleration in the form of the massive deregulation of markets characterizing the 80s. It also began around the fall of the Soviet Union, “the end of history,” so to speak, or the dawn of “capitalist realism,” as Mark Fisher would have it. At the time when “poetics in the expanded field” was trying to understand what a poem is relative to art’s long ago “dematerialization of the art object.” A poem, however, unlike the traditional art object the expanded field of minimalist sculpture and performance sought to abolish, was never a singular object like a painting or sculpture is. It has always been an entity formed by the social relation of language, a differing and difference making system of meaning. Conversely, while art dematerialized, if anything, poetry materialized, precisely at the point when whole territories of language’s heterotopic existence began to be legislated by the logic of the database.

I aim to make a strong connection between Brathwaite’s own thinking of ghosts and spirits in relation to the technology of the computer (without losing the specificity of Brathwaite’s explicitly reference to Vodun culture), and the ghostly time the 90s is, an anticipatory time of a future yet to come that already seems to determine the present, hence the apathy. (cf. Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, for example, or Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic, or later, of course, the eternal stasis of the bodies harvested in The Matrix and/or Minority Report’s complex dealings with time and crime). The hauntologicaly hyperstitional vibe of the 90s was partially the result of the rapid increase of financial speculation and this process’s attendant “making of indebted man,” as Maurizio Lazzarato would have it, or what Achille Mbembe has called the “the becoming black of the world,” and what others might refer to as the general proletarianization of life that we experience today as the pervasive condition of radical precarity, the gig-economy, and “the death of capital,” in the words of Mackenzie Wark. Indeed, Brathwaite’s Sycorax-Video-Style should be read alongside Dub, Raggae, and hip-hop’s transformation (co-evolvement) with techno, house, jungle, drum n bass, etc. There is no doubt that Brathwaite’s work is hauntological. But is it hyperstitional?

Of course, Fisher’s hauntology derives from Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, a text suffused with the ghostly, the haunted, time’s “out-of-jointness,” and the radical discrepancy between the essence of a thing and its appearance. Marx, for Derrida, is the ultimate spectre, the endlessly recurring signifier for a world liberated from the strictures of private property and hierarchical capitalist rule. Marx is not hollow, but reveals the hollowness of the capital relation. Derrida’s main metaphor for this hollowness throughout Spectres comes from Hamlet, specifically the armor worn by the king’s ghost. When sovereignty becomes indeterminate and ghostly, then time is out of joint, but this is precisely when the specter appears to remind us of the artificiality of our understanding of identity, especially the naturalized identity of commodities. To outline briefly, Brathwaite’s SxVx, like the king’s armor in Hamlet, creates an indeterminate shell or carapace around the identity of the poem in the form of its processural topological condition as a split thing, irreconcilably fissured in its identity as the “original” and the “remediation.” This brings the question of identity to poetry and poetics in a unique way, and gives the critic an explicit, impossible challenge. What do you read? The absent center of Brathwaite’s oeuvre, the hollow of identity shielded by the armor of the SxVx, is a diffuse set of points describing the shape of Brathwaite’s quite difficult to track oeuvre, with its many versionings, evolutions, transformations, and indeterminacies. The king doesn’t not have clothes on, the king is clothes all the way down. We understand it (sovereignty) exists only in negative, in relation, as a fundamentally opaque but active field of forces. Power is the expression of this field of forces. Anaoriginal by nature (in Fred Moten’s sense), the work, finally, presents only the possibility of critical dehiscence from the desire for an “actual” poetic object, any determinate poem whatsoever. This, I think, shifts critical responsibility to an ethic of care, and away from an ethic of explanation, paranoia, or even reparative reading. It might shift us away from reading altogether. The death of the reader, too. Perhaps it produces a subjectivizing concern, where the poem must be understood as the catalytic dissolution of subject/object boundaries continuing to infect the discourse of philosophical aesthetics (See: Nicholas Whittaker, “Blackening Aesthetic Experience). The SxVx is the articulation of a ghosted presence that conforms to no presence; it is a hollow nothing or an “internal difference,” where meaning lies. But a hollow nothing is not nothing, it is no-thing, where form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Or “when” I should say. This is poetics, not aesthetics. 

While I’m interested in reading the differences between the “original” and the SxVx texts, as well as the SxVx texts “without original,” as mentioned in the previous post, I’m most interested in formulating a poetics of the conditioning of this diffuse realm of aesthetic experience (that we will syncretize into poetics as that which is without aesthetics or experience) that essentially includes the exclusion of apprehension and understanding — what I think Jean Francois Lyotard means by “passing” — and/or the anoriginal “materiality” where Derrida’s trace defers and differs. One of the ways Brathwaite’s work brings this space to attention, if not apprehension, is in the sheer difficulty (read: impossibility) of locating it. That passing place, for Brathwaite, is a writing of the disaster, as in Blanchot’s formulation of the disaster as what everything becomes under the disaster, even as that everything is understood as a fissure from the stars (dis / aster). “The disaster ruins everything, all while leaving everything in tact.” We are under the disaster in precisely the same way as we are under the stars. One of the disasters today is that the spacetime between the computer and the printer, or reader and writer, or user-protocol-user, a spacetime that becomes, in poetry, no space at all, no time at all, the absolute limit of space and time where that limit becomes what is shared, what shares, and at its best, marks a possible heterotopia, and/or the constant processural utopia of difference — this possibility has been colonized by an essentially disastrous, barbaric notion of time, by systems moving at ¾ the speed of light (as Bernard Stiegler would often write) with the explicit goal of reducing all space and time to a profane machine for profit, all while destroying our ability to dream. Possibility here becomes the impossible. Ghosts emerge when the dream is dead. 

In my next post, I plan to discuss how several versions of Brathwaite’s piece “Asturias” presents the critic with a new challenge. While I’ve been unable, so far, to track down the “original” publication in Black Renaissance Noir, I have been able to find some transcribed versions (whether by computer or by human I can’t tell). These new versions of the SxVx should give us pause, and offer a novel development in the indeterminate, diffuse, open-set-topology Brathwaite’s poems encourage us to expand into, or rather, become. It turns out that OCR makes of these poems even stranger artifacts than they already are.

X_|3r@7|-|\/\/@;73_X is a blog dedicated to Brent Cox’s current study of the poetry of Kamau Brathwaite. I am at work on a dissertation chapter undertaking theoretical engagement/poetics research on Brathwaite’s “Sycorax Video-Style.” (I shorten this: SxVx) I will be blogging links to materials relevant to my study, as well as written thoughts working out the content of my chapter. I consider this blog to be part of the dissertation chapter that has yet to be written, and part of its overall form. It will act as a shadow-ground of poetics activity, and it will remain as an excessive, inassimilable entity.

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.