By: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 23:53:42 +0000

“…a detached language that can function perfectly well…”
Who is Mr. Bok kidding? Himself, I think, and certainly his students. There is no such thing as “detached” language. Language is an expression of attachment. This is why it is dismissed as a vehicle of enlightenment by practicioners of Zen. And since language is an expression of attachment, it cannot be “functioning” when it’s simply a rules-based assemblage generated mechanistically: its function has been eliminated. Therefore the pure blithering idiocy of Bok’s comment that “the poets of tomorrow are likely to resemble programmers, exalted, not because they can write great poems, but because they can build a small drone out of words to write great poems for us.” Texts so generated, of course, will not be poems, will not be “great,” and if they have an audience at all will have only the one Bok himself seems to aspire to: drones….

By: Kirsten Kaschock

Kirsten Kaschock — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 18:01:51 +0000

…nevertheless, we must concede to the fact that, in this case, the category of the author has simply vanished, subsumed by a detached language that can function perfectly well, despite the absence of any poetic agency.
Can we? Turing posited a machine that “fooled” human intelligences into believing consciousness existed behind it. But neither consciousness nor intelligence are qualities to be granted by the reader on the creator of the reading. If the U.S. populace has had its collective consciousness of global warming raised by Hurricane Katrina and the California wildfires–does that mean Hurricane Katrina and the California wildfires were caused by global warming? The author can be replaced, but that does not mean “the category of the author has simply vanished.” I am fascinated by the mechanism/the system that produced the above paragraph, but the paragraph itself leaves me cold, and the category of author is still warm. Still cozy. I will sit by it to roast chestnuts. Has RACTER produced something that rivals other published work? Unquestionably. Perhaps the conclusion I am most tempted to draw from this is that many readers (myself on occasion) now value work that lacks (or pretends to lack) anima. Part of anima is sense, and part is urgency, and part is a connection to the real (even if that connection is a refusal). I find the backs of cereal boxes and shampoo bottles sometimes musical, but I do not cite my interest in their sound as proof of the death of the author. And why is it so necessary to kill the author in order to privilege the reader? I think it’s all very oedipal.
As far as writing for robots… Don’t many writers do this already? Only they call it publication… and those that don’t… many claim to write for no one at all… equally frightening to me. I prefer to write for those who may have anima, and who will continue to attribute what I write to me, as a function of what I have found it is to be a human and to struggle to reach across the text toward others who, though I cannot be sure they exist, nevertheless provide the tinder-y phantasms that fuel my cursed engine, my poetic system.
Best, K

Comments on: Poetic Machines 01

By: Joseph Hutchison

By: Kirsten Kaschock