Hyperglyphics

Kate Armstrong’s “Feeds and Streams: RSS Poetics,” originally published in a special issue of of The Capilano Review devoted to writing and technology, is available as part of a fascinating online reiteration/remix of that issue by Web artist and writer J.R. Carpenter.  In her essay, Armstrong proposes a new literary art that might arise from the steady streams of RSS feeds, Tweet streams, status updates, and headline aggregators that bombard us:

“How might an RSS feed produce new art and digital literature? The automatic delivery of text fragments can generate new patterns of reading that come to be interspersed with regular life.”

A poetics arising out of a constant, ever-changing stream of fragments? An art, a narrative, a poem that is ultimately and solely the product of an individual reader/writer’s parsing of bits and pieces of information, of text.

Armstrong calls this literature “generative” because it conflates author and readers, but it is the reader who controls the work, not the author (as classical theory would have it) or the work itself (as some postmodern theory would):

“It is the reader who has the last word, because the work – after it is released from the control of the author and dissolved into a model of generative distribution – lands with the reader and accumulates there in a completely individualized shape. Not only is the final outcome individualized by becoming attached to the reader as s/he experiences the work, but the work becomes individualized as it blends with and is absorbed into the stream of information that is already coming to the reader. This is why it gets beyond the “work” – the work itself dissolves into experience. It is not only about remixing the world or the work, but remixing the world into the work, and the work into the world.”

Embedded in and inextricable from the context of lived experience, can it be that a new conception of literary art is arising, in the age of Twitter, that is intimately connected with the reading (and writing) practices of everyday life? Armstrong suggests the answer is yes and Carpenter’s remix of the original print journal into a hybrid blog-archive-RSS feed provides support for Armstrong’s claim.

As I noted in my presentation at C&W 09 (also available as a podcast on iTunes U’s UC Davis channel: Computers and Writing 2009, E2. Blogs 2), the practice of everyday life, following Michel de Certeau, produces new forms, and methods, alternate ways of knowing that often resist or subvert the mainstream narrative. Certeau argues that reading is “poaching” and argues,

“Whether it is a question of newspapers or Proust, the text has a meaning only through its readers; it changes along with them; it is ordered in accord with codes of perception that it does not control.” (The Practice of Everyday Life 170)

He goes on to note that reading practices - the poetics that arise out of the reader’s “constructions of a text” (172) - introduce a creative function on the part of the ordinary or common reader into the act of reading. When an everyday reader interacts with a text outside of the structures of what Certeau calls “social hierarchization” (for instance, the literary and educational establishment that seeks to control the message of a given text, to dictate the way a text should be read and interpreted), then a “silent, transgressive, ironic or poetic activity of readers” is born (172).

And, in our remix culture, readers are even more capable of not just silently and invisibly creating collages of bits and pieces of the texts they have poached that coalesce in the no-place of the individual mind, they can now make visible that bricolage through re-Tweeting, h/t-ing, blogging of links, all of which create new experiences of reading, new arrangements of text that will be poached and reconstructed by new readers.

There’s a poetry in the deluge of text that rains down on us in flickering pixels each day. An art created by our arrangement and rearrangement created by the scattershot and frenetic reading habits cultivated by digital media. As Certeau noted even in 1984, the pace of everyday life has introduced speed into everything, including reading (176). A quarter century later, we are ever more mobile (as is our media) and our physical mobility has implications for our reading:

“Emancipated from places, the reading body is freer in its movements. It thus transcribes in its attitudes every subject’s ability to convert the text through reading and to ‘run it’ the way one runs traffic lights.” (176)

I like the idea of “running” a text. It hints at technology (running a program, a running feed like RSS) and at transgression (running away, running a stoplight in Certeau’s formulation). Certainly remix culture is fostered by technology and, due to our conception of authorship as proprietary (e.g., intellectual property, copyright law, etc.), it is often explicitly transgressive. I want to continue this exploration of the way these feeds and streams of text and our parsing and remixing of them might be creating a digital age poetics by looking at some more examples of remix in upcoming posts. Stay tuned…