Have to start writing down the actual sentences for my text about the electronic/multimedia/internet/new media-poetry shown at De Waag last week. But I click’n read from poetry-blog to poetry-blog. Making the rounds: the weekly ones (a.o. Mettes: http://n30.nl/poezienotities.html, Contrabas: http://www.decontrabas.com/, Silliman), the monthly ones (Inwijkeling: http://reugebrink.skynetblogs.be/), and checking out what has happened in the e-poetry scene in the past months.

I read the discussions about Dirk van Bastelaere’s new book. Van Bastelaere was (is?) definitely one of my favorite poets. There are not many poems that I have read as often as those in Pornschlegel and Diep in Amerika. Yet I was disappointed by Hartswedervaren and Van Bastelaere’s current theoretical interests (Lacan…) are certainly not mine. And yet, even the poems in Hartswedervaren, I think, are stronger than those of Stefan Hertmans (who’s much milder, & whom I also continue to follow), or the much-praised Peter Verhelst, whose work to me always has seemed to be artificial and ‘unreal’ (‘gewild’ — tho that’s a very problematic criticism… I know). Hmm. anyway, I have to get a copy of Van Bastelaere’s de voorbode van iets groots today — so I can give my 2 cents…

I read Silliman on the poetics of Charles Olson — a very nice piece: http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/05/breathe-say-all-manner-of-meditators.html. Olson’s ideas about breath and projective verse are another ‘topic’ that I keep going back to (or ending up with?)

But what is this… research? Or am I postponing the moment to ‘jot down’ the first real draft of my text.

Reading through De Certeau’s book, checking if there’s anything that I should read or reread (I read a few chapters in the past). Struck by the fact that De Certeau is all the time assuming the existence of power-structure/master-discourse, against which the people/users devise their own counter-strategies. In that way a common poetics will always be defined as something which insinuates itself inside, is set up against, that which is in ‘power’. (Does this make sense — or have I been reading too quickly?)

‘Reading is thus situated at the point where social stratification (class relationships) and poetic operations (the practitioner’s constructions of a text) intersect: a social hierarchization seeks to make the reader conform to the “information” distributed by an elite (or semi-elite); reading operations manipulate the reader by insinuating their inventiveness into the cracks in a cultural orthodoxy.’ Michel de Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, inThe Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley etc., 1984, p. 172

‘[…]
As far as I know, there is still not a Decent Writing System anywhere in the world, although several things now come close. It seems a shame that grown men and women have to rustle around in piles of paper, like squirrels looking for acorns, in search of the phrases and ideas they themselves have generated. The decent writing system, as I see it, will actually be much more: it will help us to create better things in a fraction of a time, but also keep track of everything in better and more subtle ways than we ever could before. […]’

Quote from Nelson’s Dream Machines, 1974, as found on http://www.mprove.de/diplom/ht/tndm.html.

Of course he’s mad, but he also truly is a hero: Ted Nelson. Searching for images in a last attempt to contribute to this weekend’s Tomorrow Book-project, I land at Nelson’s Xanadu-page. You have to love this:

PROJECT XANADU MISSION STATEMENT:
DEEP INTERCONNECTION, INTERCOMPARISON AND RE-USE
Since 1960, we have fought for a world of deep electronic documents — with side-by-side intercomparison and frictionless re-use of copyrighted material.
We have an exact and simple structure. The Xanadu model handles automatic version management and rights management through deep connection.

Today’s popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.

WE FIGHT ON.

http://www.xanadu.net/

And wouldn’t it be beautiful to have “deep quotable hypertext”… if only for the terminology…

Xanadu, in development since the 1960s, never took off. I wonder what Nelson thinks about what is happening now, with blogsoftware automatically sending out (meta-)information, that is aggregated by services like Technorati.

Usable as quotes, I suppose. But because Virno does not touch upon the role of new media at all, his 4 seminars on the multitude do not really ‘apply’ to any reality nor research I’m involved in now. Not even when he touches upon the coupling of private/public. Yet am happy to’ve read it. If only, for me, as an update on Aristotle and Marx.

‘Private signifies not only something personal, not only something which concerns the inner life of this person or that; private signifies above all deprived off: deprived of a voice, deprived of a public presence. In liberal thought the multitude survives as a private dimension. The many are aphasic and far removed from the sphere of common affairs.’ p. 24

‘I believe that in today’s forms of life one has a direct perception of the fact that the coupling of the terms public-private, as well as the coupling of the terms collective-individual, can no longer stand up on their own, that they are gasping for air, burning themselves out.’ p. 24

‘The contemporary multitude is composed neither of “citizens” nor of “producers”; it occupies a middle region between “individual and collective”; for the multitude, then, the distinction between “public” and “private” is in no way validated. And it is precisely because of the dissolution of the coupling of these terms, for so long held to be obvious, that one can no longer speak of a people converging into the unity of the state.’ p. 25

‘One could say perhaps that “not feeling at home” is in fact a distinctive trait of the concept of the multitude.’ p. 34

‘The One of the multitude, then, is not the One of the people. The multitude does not converge into a volonté generale for one simple reason: because it already has access to a general intellect.’ p. 42

‘In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes labor (or poiesis) from political action (or praxis) , utilizing precisely the notion virtuosity: we have labor when an object is produced, an opus which can be separated from action; we have praxis when the purpose of action is founded in action itself.’ p. 52

‘One could say that every political action is virtuosic. Every political action, in fact, shares with virtuosity as sense of contingency, the absence of a “finished product”.’ p. 53

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles & New York, 2004.

And then I just finished Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude. Mixed feelings about that one. It has a good and very usable explanation of the concept of multitude. (Expect quotes later on). But for me Virno seems too caught up in his past as theorist of the 1970’s Italian workers movement.

Virno’s analysis of the Post-Fordist condition doesn’t strike me as very insightful in the sense that it basically seems to repeat what (one thinks?) one knows from let’s say the newpapers. (I am almost sure one can find better analyses in economic literature, also analyses of ‘virtuosity’, and the importance of language and talk at work).

The difference is that Virno’s analysis refers often to Marxist theory and indeed to the 1970’s worker’s philosophy of Potere Operaio. That is his ‘true’ background. Very interesting in itself, and surely the Italian Autonomist movement and its theories are very, very fascinating. As Lotringer states in the introduction, Virno takes up this past explicitely instead of not simply not referring to it too much, and that is a positive thing according to Lotringer. But at some point every sentence seems to bear the imprint of Virno’s involvement with the 1970’s workers movement, with the collectives — his theorizing seems a theorizing through that experience. Or rather, maybe I should write that this is the ’emotional feeling’ of Virno’s prose. And this put me off as the book progressed. I must admit, then, that I did not read the last chapter (his 10 theses on the multitude) very well.

But then, it might also come down to the fact that I am interested in the concept of the multitude as far as I can make it ‘work’ in reference to blogging, writing, the transformation of publishing and the media, the transformation of speaking/writing in public; I — personally — am not working on the issue of a workers movement, or on a theory of labor. And ‘new media’, indeed media, are not Virno’s thing.

Next weekend = Jan van Eyck Book Weekend. With a.o. a Tomorrow Book Projects Workshop; Stuart Bailey’s Manifesta print-on-demand shop, Gerhard Rühm (really!!), lots of Fluxus and Concrete Poetry books on display, and more;

and then of course, on sunday, 15.00 hrs. the presentation of Ubiscribe PoD 0.9.0, the publication we (Jouke, Sandra, Claudia, Inga & me) have been working on in the past 2 weeks — starting with putting content (text, images) into our wiki, ending, temporarily, with a paper publication. (In the wiki one can find already new stuff added). I just send some last corrections to Jouke. Tomorrow morning the pdf will be at the printers. Launch & learn is the term we’ve devised for this kind of ultra-quick production. It’s like learning to understand again/anew what editing is, what ‘editorial labor’ entails.

Programme for 20/21th May: http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_2_3_events_info/arc_06_bookish_weekend.html.

Started reading through The Rustle of Language, collected shorter essays of Roland Barthes from the period 1966 – 1980. Some of these I’ve read before, a few I’ve read many times — like From Work to Text. I particularly like Barthes when breaking free of it, the structuralism of his earlier work is still present.

Having read 80 pages up till now, I’m struck by 2 things: 1. the ‘beauty’ of Barthes writing — even when glues together too many subordinate clause in one sentence, 2. how clearly al lot of what he writes fits in, well, the Zeitgeist. However ‘timeless’ and ‘abstract’ his theorizing of reading and writing may be, reading through these essays again, it becomes apparent how much it was also grounded in, let say, the ‘spirit’ of the times, and how much his ideas are tied to issues that seem to’ve been topical at the time.

Anyway, some by now ‘classic’ quotes:

‘(…) the Paradox of the reader: it is commonly admitted that to read is to decode: letters, words, meanings, structures, and this is incontestable; but by accumulating decodings (since reading is by right infinite), by removing the safety catch of meaning, by putting reading into freewheeling (which is its structural vocation), the reader is caught up in a dialectical reversal: finally he does not decode, he overcodes; he does not decipher, he produces, he accumulates languages, he lets himself be infinitely and tirelessly traversed by them: he is that traversal.’ On Reading, p. 42

‘Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flies, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.’ The Death of the Author, p. 49

‘The author is a modern character, no doubt produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages, infelcted by Enlish empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, thereby discovering the prestige of the individual, or, as we say more nobly, of th “human person”.’ The Death of the Author, p. 49/50

‘(…) linguistics furnishes the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument, showing that the speech-act in its entirety is an “empty” process, which functions perfectly without its being necessary to “fill” it with the person of the interlocutors: linguistically the author is nothing but the one who writes, just as I is nothing but the one who says I: language knows a “subject”, not a “person”, and this subject, empty outside of the very speech-act which defines it, suffices to “hold” language, i.e., to exhaust it.’ The Death of the Author, p. 51

‘(T)he modern scriptor is born at the same time as his text: he is not furnished with a being which precedes or exceeds his writing, he is not the subject of which his book would be the predicate. (…) (W)riting can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observation, of representation, of “painting” (…) but instead (…) a performative.’ The Death of the Author, p. 52

‘Once the Author is distanced, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes entirely futile. To assign an Author to a text is to impose a brake on it, to furnish it with a final signified, to close writing.’ The Death of the Author, p. 53

All quotes from Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (transl. Richard Howard), University of California Press, Berkeley &c., 1989 (1986/1984).

& when I said that Barthes’ theory is tied to topical issues of the sixties, I mean for instance that his ‘death of the author’ also has to be seen in the perspective of the struggle against a certain kind of literary criticism, a way of teaching literature that was very much ‘under fire’ then. As long as Barthes’ theory is applied to literature and to writing as such, I have always found it very inspiring and to the point. As soon as one tries to apply it to political or legal speech, problems arise. I’d say.

When I found the blog, approximately 3 months ago, I thought, probably for the first time in my life on the internet: “I’m not going to tell anyone. This will go down when too many people know. This cannot last long.” It lasted longer than expected.

I had often thought about converting my collection of jazz and improvised music to mp3. My collection consists mainly out of (about 700) audio cassettes and around 100 LPs. I did convert a few tapes, then decided it really took too much time.

This blog made it possible to collect in one go all the hard-bop and free jazz as mp3s, that I own on cassette or LP. All the Coltrane’s, Ornette’s, Cecil Taylor’s that I know by heart, and yes, also the ones I’d never heard.

The blog operated on the brink, I’d say. There was no reason to doubt the good intentions of the six posters. They uploaded vinyl-rips of long out of print LPs, music that was never released on CD. They made hard to get CDs available. They uploaded everything ever recorded by Andrew Hill, to share the love for the music. I enjoyed it, downloaded as long as it lasted, was surprised again and again that most uploaded files were downloaded only like 40 times over a period of a few weeks. Only once in a while I encountered a file that was downloaded 300 times (that would be a Miles Davis, or mainstream bop). Sometimes I downloaded a file that had not even been downloaded by someone else (that would be European free jazz). But, they did upload really a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot: like basically everything of John Coltrane (I think I only did not see Expression and, funny enough, Live at Birdland).

The blog made me greedy. I put myself in the absurd position of downloading music and not listening to it. Saving for later. Knowing that audio cassettes last longer than harddisks. Knowing that the sound quality of most of my audio cassettes is superior to that of the mp3 files. It goes without saying that — also since I already ‘owned’ much of this music — there’s no chance that I would ever buy one of the CDs. It’s partly hoarding, partly downloading out of curiosity, to listen to once, maybe twice. Anyway, I already wrote about this issue in Metropolis M: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/luisteren.html.

And then, two days ago, the blog went down. “The trolls found it”. Someone complained. The blog was hijacked, files deleted. Exactly what was bound to happen. What they knew was going to happen.

I have to give a talk on mp3-blogs on the SLSA conference in Amsterdam in june. So I think I will come back to this ‘case’.

And indeed, I will not tell where it continues. Not where the bots are listening too.

Yesterday I read through my own blog: intuitive datamining for a small Ubiscribe-publication: http://www.ubiscribe.net.

‘Intuitive datamining’: clicking through the archive, quickly scanning the entries with a human brain, then remembering what I’d been writing about, subsequently finding a few bits that might be interesting to re-publish in a small print-on-demand publication.

We — the (a?) Ubiscribe-team consisting of Jouke Kleerebezem, Sandra ‘Fokky’ Fauconnier, Inga Zimprich, Claudia Hardi and myself — are filling a wiki with ‘stuff” (text, pictures), to be ‘back-upped’ on paper as version 0.9. Publication-on-paper to be presented on 21th of May, at the Jan van Eyck. For all of us the process as a whole (gathering – writing – uploading – tagging – editting – commenting – designing – ‘outputting’ on paper) is a new experience. Though any of us know part of the process, but not the same parts.

Research what publishing is, by publishing.