metonymy and encoding

 

Jonathan Minton’s essay in which metonymy figures (also an appearance of Thoreau’s journals): where encoding recovers a metonymy of particulars generally erased in other forms of writing. Might I add that I found this particular piece through the (as I see it) metonymy machine of google: searching through “thoreau and metonymy”–this comes up; not an essay on Thoreau and metonymy (in fact, my Pencil of Nature essay is the first to come up), but an essay in which both appear. Does thus google (or more generally serach, data mining) thus aid in the uncompressing of metonymy that is a feature of our very scholarship and thinking–now made more metonymic to us in the web?  www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/3-minton.htm Word For Word Encoding, Networking, and Intentionby Jonathan Minton      Is it possible to argue for an underlying “intention” of a networked assembly such as the online literary journal Word For/Word? The very nature of its digital medium invites non-linear, non-sequential readings, thus making it problematic to think of its assembled works only as discrete, autonomous texts. I propose that one way to answer this question is to rethink “intention” in terms of textual encoding. Intention, in this regard, is not a by-product, or end-result, of writing, nor the manifestation of an author’s “original” idea, but an always on-going textual drift. My project explores the methods in which JavaScript can clarify this dynamic and seemingly infinite drift of textual intention by encoding and particularizing its recombinant processes.

 

In the essay “Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production,“ the digital performance group Creative Art Ensemble argue that a“primary value of electronic technology…is the startling speed at which it can transmit information. As information flows through electronic networks, disparate and sometimes incommensurable systems of meaning intersect.“ Is it possible, then, to argue for an underlying “intention“ of a networked assembly such as the online literary journal Word/ For Word, which I have been editing for the past year? The very nature of its digital medium invites non-linear, non-sequential readings, thus making it problematic to think of its assembled works only as discrete, autonomous texts. I propose that one way to answer this question is to rethink “intention“ in terms of textual encoding.  Intention, in this regard, is not a by-product, or end-result, of writing, nor the manifestation of an author’s “original“ idea, but an always on-going textual drift. My project explores the methods in which JavaScript can clarify this dynamic and seemingly infinite drift of textual intention by encoding and particularizing its recombinant processes.   Roman Jakobson has famously suggested that the “poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.“ My program engages this notion of textual intention by using JavaScript to encode the contents of the first two issues of Word For Word. The program works in three stages. In stage one, the program selects from the storehouse of possible texts in the contents of Word For Word. For example, here are some sample texts from the second issue of Word For Word culled by running the program: (1) “The Hand as Harbor,“ by Cole Swensen That would be the holding hand                                                       so I’ll stay here. And of the trees full forth on the sea, a hand is every one. And while we’re planning the future A vague starfish watermarked into the letter, a starfish burning on the window. For every ship that went down, they’d speak of the hands–“All hands on deck“ and “All hands were lost.“ “I made a ghost of all my hands“ watching the walls rock, we’d read the lists in the morning paper. (2) “King’s English,“ by Karen Garthe                             Ere & before     Saxon                                                  save & except     Romance                                      King me!                                  I’m telling you slipshod.                                              – It’s more than wonderful                                           malaprop in the ascendancy               We suggest that lies between six & ten reverential objections                                                             So much is clear. . .                                                  Sr. Ganganelli would never               have been poisoned               provided the surface & the underlying meaning were the same. . . “If”                                                        is a small district in the kingdom (3) “Example,“ by Sheila Murphy Shear the top of flocked own intersperse. Renege on flowers, renegade. A trip trump triumph glorifies the day-old overcast. This, too, shall lapse, as quiet form of overlap. The long arm of a shuffled feast exuberates the raw mist of the seventh sea. Interpretive domains release our pearly glee. Trimmed fame lords it over flat-lined space and fangled ivy. Vineyards purse our lips for us. The porous ship shape follicles denude the dreamed-of fease. The fall of de-rocked roll commenced to have been salted. Troops to call on openly remained a fact of force. Narration to prop up underage indulgence. Stray from clarity when sticking to the unction rapt. The safest repertoire continues to uphold indemnity. A forecast dupes the unused levers to appease track records of escape from every hatch. Exasperation trains the psyche to go limber. Follow on with necessary openness to stop beyond these days. Infancy at its most sublime, corrosive sheets of lapse, some bylines balanced next to power (4) “a falling in autumn,“ by Noah E. Gordon Felt as a mistake in translation, leave for leaf, so the tree is an exit, a door into weather, a symmetry in the spectrum & the stasis of an open page. Here, morning unfolds from moment. Recasting the body in sound. The trace of objects. Echoes. What’s lost in the margins. Another X filling its box. All told, a centering of sorts. A sphere reflecting or spun to refraction. Webs, cross-stitched in the corners & the leaves, unlatching. Desire is the watermark of sight–a soaking-in. The absence of song or the absence of sin. Noise isn’t what’s been lost on ears, roots or dying limbs. It’s impenetrable. & this is the silence we’re playing back to the sky: In stage two, the program further parses the source texts and combines them: For every ship that went down, they’d speak of the hands- ‘All hands on deck’ and ‘All hands were lost.’ provided the surface & the underlying meaning were the same. . . ‘If’ is a small district in the kingdom Follow on with necessary openness to stop beyond these days. Infancy at its most sublime, corrosive sheets of lapse, some bylines balanced next to power Felt as a mistake in translation, leave for leaf, so the tree is an exit, a door into weather, a symmetry in the spectrum & the stasis of an open page. Thus, the first two stages of the program works by selection and combination. If the program were to stop here, it would simply mimic, or recreate, what’s already found in Word For Word, which could be of interest in itself, as it clarifies this type of encoding as writing, but what I am trying to investigate is the notion of textual intentionality, or the intention underlying and networking within and between the texts. Therefore, in stage three, the program uses a simple algorithm to parse the recombined text according to vowel distribution. First it parses words that contain A, then E, and so on, and then distributes the reselected words according to a randomly determined pattern. Thus, the program generates its output based on only one of innumerable possibilities: (a) that          speak          hands– hands and               hands surface meaning same.        a             small necessary days.        Infancy at         lapse, balanced                                 as a mistake      translation-    leave                                  leaf,                                  a weather, a stasis, a                                  page. (e) speak the              openness            underlying         the deck the meaning         were the same.                  Felt the same. beyond these                  were                            the same, the deck        corrosive                  were sublime, went sublime, corrosive deck (i) in kingdom meaning      provided      sublime              bylines:        corrosive district                is               provided with underlying mistake (o) to stop beyond translation,         provided to power down, to power translation, to power translation,                 on translation, corrosive of (u)                               surface &                    underlying sublime                             spectrum The finished output is thus not an arbitrary unraveling of the source texts, but instead foregrounds textuality in the sense of texture, a kind of fabric that can be infinitely cut and rewoven along multiple threads and multiple extensions, in a way similar, I would argue, to Jakobson’s idea of metonymy. As Lyn Hejinian suggests in her essay “Strangeness,“ “While metonymy maintains the intactness and discreteness of particulars, its paratactic perspective gives it multiple vanishing points. . . . Metonymy moves restlessly, through an associative network, in which the associations are compressed rather than elaborated“ (“Strangeness“ 38-9). In such a network, minor variables, those minutia that are central to the writing process, but which are ordinarily missed, repressed, or held in check, are galvanized and allowed to form new associations. Tracing such a process would be altogether unthinkable without encoding. As Loss Glazier suggests in his book Digital Poetics, digital space is  “a space where the minor matters: with monolinearity blocked, peripheral vision may again resume activity.“ Thus, the JavaScript, as it strings through its source texts, runs askew and askance, but gathers considerable force as it condenses the links between vowels. Peripheral patterns are brought to the center of a new text. Admittedly, this sort of compression risks undermining the appearance of any sort of normative pattern by which the reader can navigate the associative network.  If poetry is language charged with meaning, how might one find meaning amidst such meanderings, misfires, and renderings? To remedy this, Marjorie Perloff has argued for a “generative poetics,“ to which I would agree, so long as this does not entail only the generation of static, fixed texts. Such a poetics would be altogether blind to the recombinant aspects of encoding, as well as to the fact that intention need not be necessarily reduced, nor exiled, to an unmovable first-mover of poetic meaning. Or, as Glazier again suggests,“E-writing is not fixed; it is not just an arrangement of static symbols on a fixed page; it does something.“ Digital poetry, then, is poetry engaged in a particular activity. I would suggest that this particular activity generates something thatcan be read as poetry–as a lyrical and formal arrangement of words. More importantly, however, this activity can help account for the vast and largely uncharted textual intentions that are active during, and long after, a particular poem has materialized on the page–digital or otherwise. Because this continuous space resists monolinearity and stasis, fully charting it is neither likely, nor at all desirable. What we need, then, is a re-generative poetics, a poetics of encoding, which can account for both the continuous, recombinant process of intention, as well as its particular results. With this in mind, then, I would like to take a closer look at the sample outputs generated by the JavaScript. First, I would argue that the outputs generated by my program can (and should) be read as poetry, in that they often contain instances of considerable and surprising lyricism.  For instance, the conclusion to section A of the sample output is marked by a particular and engaging rhythm: translation–      leave,                                               leaf,                                               a weather, a stasis, a                                              page The single and heavy stressed lines “leaf“ and “page“ are punctuated by the interceding line with its lilting pattern light and heavy stresses. The result is not only playful, but places special emphasis on the words “leaf“ and “page,“linking them both visually and rhythmically. Plus, this connection is further developed in that the lines could easily be read as a commentary on the poetics of their own encoding in this digital process. The process begins initially as a particular kind of translation in which texts are galvanized and recombined in an associative network, a network that functions lyrically, as evident in the repetition of “l“ in “translation,“ “leave,“ and “leaf.“ This is in sharp contrast to the plosive and terminal “p“ in “page.“ Thus, the liquidity of this particular instance of consonance, which begins as pure force — or the act of translation, the divergent act of “leaving“ – grinds to a halt as the attention turns to what could be taken as the “end results“ of the process: a leaf, the weather, a written page, all in moments of stasis. Thus, the lines enact a problematic “reversal“ of the process of encoding: a lyrical, galvanizing activity is rendered as a static page. The particular activity of encoding is more fully registered in the poem’s various repetitions: “hands– hands and hands“ in section A, plus the recurrence of “corrosive,“ which functions much like a refrain throughout the middle sections of the poem. In section E, “corrosion“ is paired with “deck“ in a linguistic exchange that pits a seemingly stable structure against the force of corrosion that ultimately reveals the “openness“ underlying the deck. In fact, the poem concludes in section U with a similar idea: the presence of a varied“spectrum“ underneath a seemingly static surface, a point reinforced by the concrete arrangement of the lines on the page in which the “spectrum“ literally lies beneath the “surface.“ With such a wealth of possibilities beneath a static linguistic surface, one need only break the surface to generate and regenerate meaning. Thus the poem suggests that when words are so galvanized, it is impossible not to generate meaning. The result is no less surprising for being so inevitable. Therefore, the outputs have traditional poetic “meaning;“ however, they also function as an analysis of their source texts. For instance Karen Garthe’s poem explores the contingent nature of historical and political authority, a contingency determined, in part, by an inevitable accumulation of linguistic variation and error. Section I can thus be read as both a translation of Garthe’s poem (for what is translation if not a transference of contexts and linguistic codes?) as well as its analysis. The analysis works by combining elements of Garthe’s poem with the others. Much of Garthe’s original lines remain intact, notably “kingdom,“ “district“ and “underlying,“ all of which are key words in Garthe’s poem. Here, however, they take on new resonance. In Section I, the official structure of the kingdom provides “bylines,“ marks of official documentation and identity. Yet the kingdom is subject to corrosive and dividual districts, a parceling, or replication, which exposes the official structure to underlying mistakes. The process of encoding thus affords a previously undisclosed glimpse of Garthe’s poem. This is, of course, similar to John Cage’s process of using procedures for “reading through“ Pound’s Cantos, Thoreau’s Journals, and Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. I would suggest that this is a valuable literary tool, but is nothing altogether divergent from conventional literary analysis. Russian Formalists have long maintained that clarity through estrangement is the predominant, and foregrounding, function of literature. In Cage, this is not only a literary function, but also an analytical tool. His “reading through“ of Thoreau’s journals, in particular, clarifies much of Thoreau’s liberationist politics and aesthetics. In the case of Word For Word, the poems, existing as they do in their digital environs, are given free reign to interact.  This recombinant process is thus a process of analysis. As the poet George Oppen has suggested, “things explain each other, not themselves.“ However, the outputs also function as a textual intention, which makes particular sense if one considers the outputs as simply one stage and one instance of an ongoing process of encoding that is always at work within the seemingly fixed and static texts of Word For Word. This is the most exciting and productive aspect of the project, and this is where I see it most radically diverging from print-based poetics. For instance, it would be difficult to talk about the textual intentions of Word For Word, as I’ve defined it, without this sort of encoding, a process in which the program parses the source texts according to specific vowel distributions. The result is not merely chance-based, but determinedly recombinant — an instance of one textual weave among innumerable possibilities. Intention, in this light, is text, in the sense of“texture,“ a vast fabric whose active and recombinant minutia comprise a vast storehouse of possibilities and potentialities. Ann Lauterbach describes this activity in her essay “On Flaws“ as “the abraided and indefinite accumulation of an infinite dispersal of sums.“ Fully accounting for such a textual drift would be altogether unthinkable without the process of encoding. Therefore, the point here is not that the outputs generated by the JavaScriptcould have been a “Karen Garthe poem.“ I am not talking about individual intention, but rather the underlying textual intention of an online assemblage such as Word For Word. There are innumerable textual strings drifting in and throughout these collected and networked poems. Just as the JavaScript drifts and strings through its array of source texts, so does an underlying textual intention. I would like to conclude by returning to the essay “Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production,“ which argues that digital media can help restore “the dynamic and unstable drift of meaning by appropriating and recombining fragments of culture.“ Collective intention is thus wrested from stasis and rendered an accessible and reusable material. Obviously, my JavaScript program cannot make such a grand claim, nor would I wish it to do so, as my target has been one fragment of culture isolated in the network of Word For Word. However, I would suggest that its process of encoding and its capacity to allow for the recombinant can afford at least one glimpse of this new and compelling terrain.       dichtung-digital

thoreau: metonymy and remoteness

Thoreau, Emerson’s neighbor, provides some words to think about metonymy (the figure of naming by reducing and displacing, but by way of intimate association). Here is a paragraph from the “House-Warming” chapter of Walden that offers an example of metonymy in the act of thinking. Let me quote the passage before thinking through it.

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far-fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells away in the North West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen?

These thoughts catch my attention as I am reading Walden and thinking about Thoreau and his own interest in a kind of living learning that Emerson finds in him (recall Emerson’s model from back in 1839, for learning by one’s hands). Metonymy speaks to this in several ways.

• First, the focus on language. The way Thoreau works here is familiar: the pun on palaver. But we see here that language is not just the problem, but also a solution, since the problem is really a degradation or distancing from where our language originates. The tension here is not between nature and a symbolic use of language, but a dynamic within the language of nature; between, in other words, metaphor and metonymy.
• The metaphoric: tropes, as he names them, that become far-fetched, remote. In this version, metaphors are symbols that become too remote from their origins–which, like Emerson’s view in Nature, suggest that language originates in the metonymic, in proximity–in dwelling “near” to use.
• Thoreau’s trope in this passage tropes upon this issue of distance: when the parlor gets too far from the original center of the house, the kitchen and the workshop, we get palaver. In other words, we get dead metaphor (parlor, cut off from its original meaning) when we forget the metonymies or our language: where we make and cook our symbols.
• This remoteness from symbol, in addition to Emerson, brings John Dewey to mind: where the necessity of symbols in learning also becomes a problem when those symbols become palaverized (we can now say, reading Thoreau into Dewey); a means made into an end. Does not Dewey want to move the classroom back closer to the workshop?
• The kitchen and workshop also bring Kenneth Burke to mind: perhaps a Thoreauvian version of his interest in the alchemy and transformation of thought through language. Burke’s Emersonian alembic or machinery and transcendence here more earthly and homely: the kitchen. And Emerson’s notion of passing, of condition of passing in our language for our genius (think how Cavell draws on this) is here figured in terms of the home. The problem, once again, of metonymy degenerating into metaphor–passing far from symbols as we move into passages distant from the hearth. Dwelling is another key term that evokes the metonymy at hand (think how Garber focuses this in terms of inscription–dwelling nearest the earth)

This passage offers a view onto the complexity of metonymy (passing for and into metaphor). But also a view onto a critical approach Thoreau uses to re-metonymize or de-metaphorize our thinnking. In its reduction (Burke), metonymy is about the near–and potentially, about the near becoming remote (when forgotten). Thoreau’s scholar (note this word here) needs to re-learn (or un-learn) the remoteness and nearness of his language. Thus pedagogy and place. The emergence of ecological literacy, in its emphasis on place and working with one’s hands, its comfortable associations with Thoreau–comfortable in seeing Thoreau as a pedagogical forebear–seems a useful way to explore metonymy in Emerson’s sense. Perhaps, in this way, Thoreau is closer to us in our understanding of metonymy (figured as: hand or workshop); and Emerson suffers in how we have made him pass at too great a remoteness, too far a fetching, from his own interest in this symbol.  Thoreau works in Emerson’s kitchen. 

Reader, what do you need and want to know about metonymy?

bennett: book of virtues

The problem with Emerson today is two-fold and contrary: he is forgotten in his views for education (see the “Reading Emerson’ piece from Education Week) and at the same time poorly read. Bennett’s use of Emerson in The Book of Virtures has something of both.

He has two selections from Emerson.  One is this paragraph from “Friendship” (336)

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother’s soul, is the nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games, where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man, who, under a certain religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and, omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility, — requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Bennett’s headnote: “Emerson writes that friendships are gifts and expressions of God; they form when the divine spirit in one individual finds the divine spirit in another, and ‘both deride and cancel the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, and circumstance.’”

This paragraph contains the phrase “paradox in nature,” though Bennett would seem to glide past the highly paradoxical nature of friendship that Emerson has in mind–a paradoxical quality that I think approximates his interest (and problem) for education: we can be influenced too much by our institutions, our learning. The very premise of this book of virtues. That problem is implicit in Self-Reliance–the other selection in this anthology from Emerson’s prose (he does include poem, Concord Hymn)–the first three paragraphs of the essay.

So, one problem is that Emerson lives on only by being normalized, institutionalized–made to become the very voice he resists—an abusive book.  And the other is for him to be not read at all. Isn’t this the legacy of Emerson in the earlier 20th century: when he is picked up and highlighted by the way to wealth crowd, how to win friends and influence people; and at the very same time, he is lost to literary history or philosophy.

Interesting that Bennett does not include nor cite Franklin–his would seem to be a copy of his art of moral perfection: perhaps too close to home. Nor does Thoreau make an appearance.

Reminds me of one of my instincts at the beginning of this project. To want a more popular audience for Emerson and for the issues for education. To pitch Emerson, as it were, to the home school crowd–thinking of his early lecture on the home as a school. But having opened that door (also Emerson’s interest in spirit, in recognizing the link between spirit and inspiration), to transform or transfigure how those conceptions today have been largely figured only for conservative politics.