On the Road to a Transpersonal Relational Poetics: Notes on Some Contemporary Experimental Literatures

By Ian Irvine (Hobson)

Copyright Ian Irvine (Hobson), 2011-2013, all rights reserved. All quotes appearing in this article reproduced under international Fair Usage provisions for the purposes of criticism and education. A version of this article also appeared at http://www.authorsden.com/ianirvine Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. NB: This article is published at Scribd as part of a series of articles on historical Creativity Revolutions and contributes to Ians work on Transpersonal Relational Poetics. Image: Charles Bernstein in Stockholm (2008), by on Bernstein (Creative Commons Attribution: Share and Share Alike 3.0).

taken from the Wikipedia pages

The City of Unstable Alphabets

Meaning is the unconscious political element in lineal grammaticization. Words (with their restricted and precisely determined profit margin) are invested into the sentence, which in turn is invested in further sentences. Hence the paragraph emerges as a stage in capital accumulation within the political economy of the linguistic sign. The paragraph is the product of investment, its surplus value (meaning) being carried into some larger unit: the chapter, the book, the collected work.1

The search for a radical non-oppressive, liberational language perhaps begins, post-1945, with the experiments of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and Oulipo. Ill begin, however, by discussing the Language poets. Some of the key Language poets are Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Heijinian, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Carla Harryman, Steve McCaffery and Barret Watten. Language poetry is perhaps one of the most misunderstood contemporary poetry movements. It focuses on the gap between reality and the words we habitually use to describe it in this sense many Language poets share the following maxim: Language never accurately CAPTURES reality it is always a second order thing, indeed Language is a reality in itself, or a part of reality. Sometimes critiqued for being overly intellectual, and for literally not making sense (for deconstructing/taking apart common-sense views about meaning), it would be easy to dismiss the group if it wasnt for the fact that post-modern radicalism generally has been ringing the alarm bells in regards to the dangers of the mass media, with its capacity to manipulate the public mind, for many decades now. To the Language poets no words are harmless, combinations of words often conceal unbalanced relationships between oppressor and oppressed. For example, the combination of words one finds in Hitlers Mein Kampf could be viewed as a weapon of mass destruction since it invaded the unconscious, the thought patterns and the will, of many Germans and influenced them to act aggressively against an outcast/scapegoated other. Language Poets seek to jam or disarm the descriptions of the world we sometimes passively receive from authority figures, bureaucracies and corporate interestsforcing us in a sense to create our own meaning rather than passively consume the alienating meaningcapital of others. Here is the news! Whose news, whose words are being used to describe the news? Who is silenced by this version of the news? These are the kind of questions Language poets might ask of a media event as apparently transparent (to reality) as the nightly news. The LANGUAGE poets formed as a group in the late 1970s around the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in the US and had much in common with earlier US and European avant-garde traditions. One could see them as an offshoot of the New American Poetry of the 50s and 60s. In this sense they were influenced by, but also critical of, other radical poetries and arts movements, such as The Beats, the Deep Imagists, the Ethnopoeticists, The New York School, the Fluxists and so on. The entire technical bag of tricks associated with the 20th century avant-gardeDuchamps readymades, Dada/Surrealisms montage/collage and automatic writing techniques, Burroughs cut-ups technique, Oulipos constraints based writing, Cages chance operationsbecame conceptual precursor techniques in the Language poetry project. However such techniques are adapted and augmented, also supplemented by others aimed squarely at shocking passive receivers of texts into an

1 Steve McCAffery, From the Notebooks, p. 160, in Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (editors), The
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Vol. 1-3, 1984.

awareness of: 1) the artificialness of language codes, and, 2) the social and political relationships that inevitably permeate language exchanges. At their best their exuberant interrogations of everyday language codes and power relations produced bizarre experimental texts like the Communist Manifesto, reworked by leading English Language poet Steve McCaffery and performed in a West Yorkshire dialect. Their interest in the social production of language and their criticism of its relationship with institutional power made Language poets naturally interested in appropriating, collaging and reworking etc. texts as a means to show how they functioned to maintain hegemonies of various descriptions. Hartley perhaps summarises the political intent of the movements deconstruction of conventional poetic norms
Andrews see Ashberrys work as the germ for an Ideologiecritik, and a critique of clarity and transparency and language ; and hierarchy arising historically at the same time as instrumental literacy The notion of poetry as ideology critique, as a specific mode of ideological struggle, associates much Language poetry with the various avant-garde manifestations which occurred earlier in the 20th century.2

The City of Chance Operations, Procedural Writing and Appropriated Texts In Volume II of Poems for the Millennium the editors argue that Jackson Mac Low is perhaps the fundamental experimental poet of our age. They write:
[his] work raises fundamental questions about the nature of poetry and the function of the poet as creator. It also sums up and greatly extends the experiments of many earlier avant-garde poets, not only with objective chance but with the introduction into poetry of asymmetric structure, serial techniques, and simultaneity of performance, along with a continuing use of both traditional and improvisational methods of composition.3

His occasional use of appropriated textsometimes randomly selectedas a means to generate new texts by way of procedures laid down in advance represents a form of aleatoric composition that depersonalises the resulting work. The poet becomes a re-mixer of circulating language (and attached meaning) codes, possibly with the purpose of undermining or radically destabilising the agreed upon transparency (to reality) of such languages. The texts thus produced, not surprisingly, rarely make sense in the ordinary sense of the wordthough there are occasional flashes of chance driven conventional brillianceespecially when the poet is in performance mode. Our desire to extract culturally approved (that is syntax derived) meaning is, to say the least, radically frustrated by Mac Lows approach. On the other hand there is something profoundly liberating about an indepth encounter with his work. The clue to this affect perhaps lies in its capacity to undermine habitual thinking, feeling and perceiving:
All of these [techniques] are ways to let in other forces than yourself [so] that by interacting in that way with chance or the world or the environment or other people, one sees and produces possibilities that ones habitual associationswhat we usually draw on in the course of spontaneous or intuitive compositionswould have precluded.4

2 George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, p.24. Indiana University Press, 1989. 3 Rothenberg, J & Joris, P. (editors) Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 2 p.170. 4 Jackson Mac Low as quoted in Rothenberg and Joris (editors) Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 2 p.170.

The idea of inviting in the world or the environment or other people interests me greatly. One feature of such an aesthetic is an opening up of the writer/artist and his or her text to audience participationan aesthetic manoeuvre practiced by Cage and Mac Low, as well as many Fluxists and Situationists. Interactivity allows for joint creations, communal art events that in their way emphasise relational connectednessour dependence, in reality, on a range of others. It also undermines and critique Social Darwinist (as embodied in hypercapitalism) paradigms that emphasise illusory forms of individualism. The result of such techniques, of course, in repositioning the audience as an interactive participant of art and literature is to challenge conventional notions of the audience member as a passive consumer of art. Audience passivity perhaps represents political passivity, i.e. a certain acquiescence to authoritarianism. Such experimentation seems to me to represent the beginnings of a possible nonoppressive poetics. Mac Low is not blind to the political consequences of his experiments when he writes:
the political dimension of these works is genuine The peculiar dialectic of freedom and necessity inherent in their realisation embodies basic political and existential truths and encourages an attitude of choiceless awareness even toward making choices.5

In 2006 I experimented with some of these methods and one or two of the resulting works were published. The interesting thing for me was the battle with my own mind rhythms and sense of self as a writer/poet (encapsulated, perhaps, in the traditional as well as postRomantic - understanding of the poet as an especially insightful, skilled or sensitive human being) that these procedural works brought to the surface. In the end I enjoyed immensely the escape from my encultured internal poetic voice that these techniques demanded but have opted, personally, for a mid-way point, in which the dialectics of human/non-human interaction becomes highlighted as a kind of relational exchange. Complete removal of the individual artist and complete adoption of chance and choice as self-evidently part of a non-oppressive poetic seemed to me to be an assertion open to dispute. The City of Mathematical Creativities In September 1960 a diverse group of mostly French writers and thinkers met at Cerisy-laSalle. They were there to discuss the work of the poet, Raymond Queneua. At the same meeting Queneua and fellow writer/poet Francois Le Lionnais conceived the idea of the Oulipo group. The two were looking for a metaphorical sewing circle (ouvroir) for what they would term potential literatures. Eventually a kind of anthology of experimental writings and extracts from theoretical texts entitled La Litterature potentielle appeared in1973. Among Oulipos most famous members were Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. To me they represent the European wing of the kind of experimentation that was going on in the US (as discussed above). The idea then of a group formed specifically to experiment with new literary forms is at the centre of Oulipo. Queneua, in defining the groups purpose wrote: the search for new forms and structures that may be used by writers in any way they see fit. His Cent Mille Milliards de poemes (One hundred thousand billion poems) is perhaps the most famous and controversial piece of writing produced by the group its author acknowledges that it could take upwards of a million centuries to read! Cent Mille Milliards de poemes is a ten sonnet 5 Jackson MaClow, Language and Politics in The Politics of Poetic Form, p.220, Ed. Charles Bernstein.

blueprint for an almost infinite number of sonnets where-in each line of the original ten sonnets could replace the same line in the other nine poems. The poem is the sum total of the possible poems that could be created using the combinatory blueprint (which is basically a mathematical equation of sorts) developed by the poet. Sometimes the poem is referred to as a combinatory ensemble. One hundred trillion sonnets could be created out of the text in its potential state. This poem is seen as the archetypal Oulipean text since it incorporates key elements of the Oulipean enterprise including the idea of constraints based writing and combinatorics. The ludic element to the Oulipean enterprise is beautifully illustrated by Le Lionnais post-face to Queneuas text: The work you are holding in your hands represents a quantity of text far greater than anything man has written since the invention of writing.6 The Oulipeans argue that all literary forms were originally formal experiments, only adoption of the resultant form (say a sonnet) by significant numbers of writers/poets etc. established it as a canonical mainstay. In this sense Le Lionnais argues for what amounts to a postmodern aesthetic involving constraints based artificiality of form (something we also came across among the Language Poets, followers of John Cage and poets like Jackson Mac Low) when he states:
Every literary work begins with an inspiration which must accommodate itself as well as possible to a series of constraints and procedures that fit inside each other like Chinese Boxes.7

They felt it was their duty to try and birth new literary forms using the new tools at the disposal of the modern writerin this respect they looked to mathematics for inspiration:
Mathematics proposes thousands of possibilities for exploration, both algebraically (recourse to new laws of composition) and topologically (considerations of textual contiguity, openness and closure). Were also thinking of anaglyphic poems, texts that are transformable by projection, etc.

It almost goes without saying that process oriented understandings of the new literature are central to this European movemente.g. the poem mentioned above is in a real sense a permanently incomplete piece of literature (the text is never really closed). Similarly, the application of artificial mathematical constraints to a text suggests a chance element to the creation of literary worksan element that is profoundly emphasised by Queneuas poem he cant possibly know in advance all of the possible works he has birthed by way of his combinatory ensemble. Though I lost interest in mathematics during 4th form at school in New Zealand Im fascinated by the attempts of some of the Oulipeans to merge maths/science and literature. Their attempts have contributed to a range of new literary/arts experiences very much indicative of the times. Queneuas text asks us, in a sense, to construct our own sonnets as an interactive experience with the constraints of his text. Hes never actually published the trillion sonnets made possible by that potential poem, but we readers could construct any number given the program he has developed (indeed one can indulge simply by going online!). Similarly, such experiments are fundamentally engaged with removing the expressive human ego (especially the culturally habituated ego) from the literary equation, or at the very 6 W.F. Motte Jr, (editor and translator), Oulipo: A Primer for a Potential Literature, p. 2-3. 7 Le Lionnais Lipo: First Manifesto in W.F. Motte Jr, (editor and translator), Oulipo: A Primer for a
Potential Literature, p. 26.

least forcing it to relate to a range of external patterns. Thinking in terms of mathematics and interactivity there is the possibility of organic, open-ended texts (i.e. the text as something alive in time and space, a relational something that others can contribute to, relate to etc. in non-authoritarian ways)poems, stories, etc.constructed relationally, by a community, rather than by individual genius writers/poets etc.. Indeed these interactive, infinite, organic/alive texts are already underway on the world wide; likewise there are now poetry, novel and screenwriting machines online. In a very real sense they are basically advanced Oulipean experiments based on the calculating and synthesising functions associated with computers processing mathematical formulae. Some of this appeals to meespecially if we have to some degree constructed a mental trap for ourselves via enculturation and the like. How many abject, oppressed, ignored, despised others might we writers be courageous enough to allow into our texts, and at various levelsrhythmic, symbolic, etc.as a means to dialogue with? We are not finished with the strange borderlands of science and literature, nature and the humanthe next section adds another ingredient to the above language stew, one which currently interests me greatly. The City of the Implicate Order and Pictographic Language What attracted me to the above experimental literatures was their shared desire to critique collective language codes as a means to confront the various elements of the post-modern crises outlined elsewhere in this book. They seem to me to share a belief that inhuman texts can circulate in a society via the mass media, literary canons, etc.. such that real human beings may be influenced to do harm to others. If the Language poets aimed to tackle, in particular, the reliance of advanced consumer capitalism (a kind of economic fascism) on shared language codes that normalised (as self-evident reality) the system, artists like Cage and Mac Low perhaps tackled the fundamental passivity and social constructedness of self (of the poet and the audience member) at the heart of any form of authoritarianism. By highlighting the role of chance in art they also highlighted choicea faculty of being that authoritarianism aims to repress. Existentialism, of course, put free will at the centre of its theorising on life. It seems to me that the Oulipeans were doing something similar with their emphasis on constraints based writing and combinatory writing. By definition such techniques highlight the artificiality of all language codes (i.e. language is not necessarily linked to reality) at the same time the Oulipeans also invite the other into textsthus undermining the ego of the author and monolithic oppressor narrativesthough admittedly by resort to inhuman mathematical formulae. Ultimately Ive found such approaches to be largely deconstructive, which is to say critical, rather than reconstructive, i.e. an alternative to oppressive conventional language systems. Along with my partner Sue, Ive increasingly found myself in search of a reconstructive relational poetics, one that emphasises connectivity rather than separateness, self in relation rather than self in isolation. Two particular models that share similarities with the above movements have attracted my interestBohns theory of the rheomode of language, a new verb focused (rather than noun focused) language, one that he hoped would reverse the narrowing of consciousness (the separating our of self from other) that typifies our current languages and allows into consciousness more aspects of what he calls the implicate order. In theory Bohns new language would act like a hologram in the sense that it would emphasise the embededness of the self in a range of relationshipshuman, organic, and non-organic, and in the past, present and future (a key feature of the discoveries of particle physics).

Transpersonal psychologist, Stanislav Grof, argues that Bohns rheomode concept was an attempt to tackle the conceptual fragmentation associated with alienated forms of language:
The conceptual fragmentation of the world that is characteristic of mechanistic science tends to create a state of serious disharmony and has dangerous consequences. It tends not only to divide what is indivisible, but to unite what is not unitable and to create artificial structures The inevitable result is emotional, economic, political and ecological crisis. Bohm pointed to the fact that the conceptual fragmentation is supported by the structure of our language He laid the foundations for a new language, the rheomode. 8

To Bohn then old-paradigm science is part of the problem. More recently, however, I came across a book entitled The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams. It seemed immediately evident to me that Abram was arguing along similar lines to Bohn in many respects. The chief differences, however, concerned Abrams detailed historical analysis of the linguistic origins of our conceptual problems. Interestingly for a poet and experimental fiction writer like myself he puts the blame for many of our problems on the evolution of languages, arguing that in the ancient shift over from oral and pictogramatic cultures, which kept language flexible and related to concrete phenomena (sight, sound and thing in itself being closely related), to languages based upon phonograms we human beings unwittingly trapped ourselves inside new, highly abstracted mental processes/imaginings. This change-over produced a dangerously non-relational sense of self and other that tended to objectify other (the environmental other in particular). Abram calls for a new animistic reconstructive paradigm (and language) that tackles our inherited language-based tendency to artificially separate objects out in the worldone from anotherwhen the new science ultimately argues that our survival depends upon interspecies reciprocity. By this view of the poet/writer/artist our job description might be to create literatures and language that allow the animistic other directly into consciousness. At first glance such a move might entail a more concrete (sensual), performance based literature especially developed to be in tune with the needs of unique localised communities and ecosystems.

8 Stanislav Grof, Beyond the Brain, p84.

Author Bio
Dr. Ian Irvine is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of a number of literary journals Scintillae 2012, The Animist ezine (7 editions, 1998-2001) and Painted Words (8 editions 20052013). Ian currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as well as the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of morbid ennui. In his recent theoretical work he has attempted to develop an anti-oppressive approach to creative writing based upon the integration of Cultural-Relational theories concerning self in relation with Jungian and Groffian models of the collective or transpersonal unconscious. Web site: http://www.authorsden.com/ianirvine