In this episode we discuss Peli Grietzer’s Theory of Vibe, with special guest, poet, publisher, and artist Jake Reber.
Peli Griezter’s 2014 Gauss PDF publication Amerikkkkka is an undersung masterpiece of a morning that already seems long ended. It is a document that nevertheless retains its identity as outlaw and classic, even as the sun sets on just whatever it was that was going on in the first decade and a half of this century. In a semi-manic lit-world-infused idiolect of dia/mono/logues that endlessly repeat the affectionate anacrusitical refrain “I said, I said,” a preternaturally gifted literary consciousness rushes through a veritable everlasting universe of things, launching into a discourse from which emerges a voice saturated by oversharing, love, email exchanges, and hectic reflexive theorization bordering on a saccharine pretentiousness that only succeeds by way of its astonishingly achieved ploy toward poetic and aesthetic ecstasy. Nearly falling into the category of what Brian Kim Stefans has called a literature of undigest in reference to Peter Manson’s 2006 esoteric loggorheaic un-diary Adjunct: An Undigest, what flows through the mind rolling its rapid waves, now dark, now glittering, now reflecting gloom, is something like a tucked away but irrefutable heartbeating love letter sent from the literary culture of the early 21st century, postmarked high-romanticism, bringing an unabashedly fierce Blood and Guts Kathy Acker ethos to the digital age. If Amerikkkkka remains neatly obscure, it must not be ignored, and it should be called what it is: a vitally pumping organ of a then-nascent post-conceptual writing that brought some blood back into the avant-garde, and continues to do so. It is a kind of 21st century portrait of the artist that suggests an impossible world that still persists against all odds, where ‘pataphysics, belles-lettres, and New Narrative converge into something auto-theory cannot recognize, a place that is the color of that delirious and irretrievable event of co-dependent intellectualizing and youthful abandon drugs helped fuel toward endless conversation, an endless energetic wish for and devotion to poetry’s transcendent and immanent capacity to actuate impossible dreams. It is a testament to and immanent argument for art’s viability in a world that would increasingly like to see art and poetry subordinated to simple means of power.
Peli’s Theory of Vibe seems like it has been stalking the literary scene now for many years as a haunting ghost story told around acephalic campfires. Sure, his dissertation is freely available on ProQuest, but those watching on twitter have been witness to this concept’s ongoing development beyond a precocious literary theoretical Harvard dissertation, as it moves with ludic inertia toward divulging a secret that spells out the confounding idea that the mathematization of literature will in fact not destroy poetry, but instead lead to a new kind of defense of poetry’s necessity, one quite sympathetic, it turns out, to Kant, Shelley, Sylvia Wynter, and Adrian Piper. Math and computation, even a new rationalism, he claims, will not lead us toward the kind of stultifying soul-deadening neoliberal analyses endlessly performed by a certain realm of “digital humanities,” nor will it inevitably fall victim to some putrid and adolescent faux-Bataillean Manichean utility-as-hedonism accelerationist transhuman fantasy. Instead, Theory of Vibe, and its blockbuster future iteration Big Mood, suggests that computation might provide new insights into poetry’s identity as an essential generator of intersubjective moods, frameworks of structured experience and feeling that cannot be produced any other way but in and as poetry.
Today on Buried Text we discuss a truncated publication of Theory of Vibe in the 2017 edition of Glass Bead: Site 1. Logic Gate: the Politics of the Artifactual Mind. We are joined today by poet Jake Reber, doctor of Poetics, co-founder of the online PDF publishing platform Hysterically Real, and author of the sort of recently published ZER000 excess, a book Tan Lin wrote, “unleashes a host of graphically pixelated contagions along the pathway of the book. The results blown out, dark matter, black holes you are reading, recombinant delays, auto scripts spliced to your eyes, fascination, terminal, and transgenic.”
This edition of Buried Text was recorded somewhere and sometime deep in the pandemic on Zoom, so bear with us on the audio-quality. Buried Text is Courtlin Byrd, Zack Brown, Simon Eales, and myself, Brent Cox.
Thanks for listening.