Paul Stephens on the Destruction & Renewal of (Poetic) Attention in Age of Info Overload
At Guernica, writer Paul Stephens considers information overload and its eventual attention: "[t]here are 2.5 million stars in my pocket .... I have nearly unlimited access to music; I can audio record my entire day; I can record high definition video and send it wirelessly. There are over 40,000 messages in my Gmail inbox. The world’s major newspapers are continually updated by the minute." But is information overload a "spreading and dangerous epidemic"?
The philosopher Bernard Stiegler has recently suggested that we should rethink the pervasive effects of information technology through the lens of what he calls “psycho-power.” For Stiegler,
Psycho-power is the systematic organisation of the capture of attention made possible by the psycho-technologies that have developed with the radio (1920), with television (1950) and with digital technologies (1990), spreading all over the planet through various forms of networks, and resulting in a constant industrial canalization of attention which has provoked recently a massive phenomenon of the destruction of this attention that American nosologists call attention deficit disorder. This destruction of attention is a particular case of, and an especially serious one, the destruction of libidinal energy whereby the capitalist economy self-destructs.
A number of modern and postmodern narratives coalesce in this passage: the mass media is envisioned as a predatory organism, and technocratic capitalism is seen as essentially at odds with the genuine acquisition of knowledge and experience. Technology in this model essentially holds out innumerable lures that distract us from our real desires. While there is much to be said for Stiegler’s provocations, there are also qualifications to be made. Despite reservations about some of Stiegler’s more extreme formulations, I share his concern that the increasing rapidity of capitalism’s “creative destruction” process is taking a severe toll on individual psyches, as well as exacerbating unequal patterns of information distribution globally.
Even further, Stephens reframes Lyn Hejinian's question: “Isn’t the avant-garde always pedagogical?” to ask: “Isn’t the avant-garde always technological?” Poetry as a participatory act, in constant renewal of its attention to form:
Perhaps the most iconic avant-garde work of information overload is Raymond Queneau’s 1961 One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, in which ten sonnets can be combined to form 1014 possible sonnets. According to Francois le Lionnais, “Queneau calculated that someone reading the book 24 hours a day would need 190,258,751 years to finish it.” This works out to 2.7 million human life spans at seventy years each. So demanding was the project of writing the poem(s) that Queneau sought the assistance of le Lionnais, a mathematician, thereby inaugurating the Oulipo (or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, the gathering of mostly Francophone writers and mathematicians who used constrained writing techniques).
Queneau’s poem participates in the information sublime at the same time that it adheres to most of the conventions of the classical sonnet. In accomplishing this fusion of the finite sonnet with the infinitude of the machine, Queneau literalizes two of William Carlos Williams’s most famous statements: “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” and “to me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance.” No final meaning can be assigned to a poem whose very parameters exceed the attentional capacities of its readers. But this is not to say that the poem is without meaning. In a 1938 essay, “Wealth and Limit,” Queneau expressed strong concerns about an overabundance of information: “A finite individual cannot, in a finite amount of time, amass an infinite quantity of knowledge (facts).” For Queneau, “By reading many books one can accumulate wealth, but in order to be truly rich you must renounce wealth; you must renounce what Goethe called ‘infinite detail.’” One means by which Queneau aspired to renounce the wealth of information to be found in poetry and in literary history was to undertake to “haikuify” a sonnet of Mallarmé’s, preserving only its rhyming words. Although One Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets at first appears to be a limitlessly expansive work, one might also read it as focusing the reader’s attention on the most fundamental attributes of the sonnet form. Reduction and multiplication both function in Queneau’s work as responses to a culture in which “To consult [the Larousse de XXe Siècle], or any catalogue, or any bibliography, is to learn nothing…. [N]o one reads the original works any longer, and if they do glance at them, it’s only for a quick look at the index or the table of contents.” Queneau sees the accumulation of specialized information as having reconfigured the ways in which literary texts are created and experienced. He does not, however, react to this transformation with nostalgia, but rather with a renewed attention to poetic form. This commitment to writing under constraint, which Craig Dworkin refers to as “radical formalism,” continues to be central to the practice of younger poets such as Trisha Low, Sophia le Fraga, Shiv Kotecha, Kieran Daly, Danny Snelson, Joey Yearous-Algozin, and Holly Melgard. Much of this work, which draws heavily on online sources, can be found on sites such as Gauss PDF and Troll Thread. Take, for instance, Danny Snelson’s recent Epic Lyric Poem, which draws from a 257.8 MB database of pop lyrics that is published together with the poem.
Poets have not been passive victims of the proliferation of information, but rather have actively participated in—sometimes benefiting from, sometimes implicitly advocating, sometimes resisting—that proliferation.
Read it all at Guernica. And keep your eyes out for The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing, out this month from the University of Minnesota Press.