Genealogies of Poetic Technology Downloaded from by Guest on 25 February 2020 Peter Middleton*

Looking Behind the Screen: Genealogies of Poetic Technology Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 Peter Middleton* The digital technology on which poets, literary historians, and The Poem Electric: theorists now rely develops so fast that it can be easy for people of Technology and the American Lyric, Seth every generation to feel left behind by the latest computer demand Perlow. University of for increased dexterity of hand, brain, and social imagination, even Minnesota Press, 2018. to feel the pinch of lingering anachronism. Jacques Derrida recalls that he formerly used a fountain pen and manual typewriter, until he became unexpectedly attached to what he calls his “word process- Technomodern Poetics: or,” using a description that already feels somewhat old-fashioned. The American Literary Avant-Garde at the Start I can’t do without it any more now, this little Mac, especially of the Information Age, Todd F. Tietchen. when I’m working at home... As you know, the computer University of Iowa Press, maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or 2018. otherwise)... Like a hidden god who’s half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you.... I know how to make it work (more or less) but I don’t know how it works. So I The Bloomsbury don’t know, I know less than ever “who it is” who goes there.... Handbook of Electronic With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, Literature, Joseph Tabbi, editor. Bloomsbury, how “it responds.” Whereas with computers, even if people 2017. know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intui- tively and without thinking—at any rate, I don’t know—how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. (20–23) Todd Tietchen quotes the final part of Derrida’s revealing anecdote about his belated relation with a computer to make the point that John Ashbery was similarly anxious about “the new layers of techni- cal depth and entanglement intrinsic to computing culture but absent from previous expressive forms such as the codex, sculpture, *Peter Middleton is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Southampton, UK. His most recent book is Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (2015), and his essay “Unknowns” appeared in Chicago Review Summer 2018. American Literary History, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 169–189 doi:10.1093/alh/ajz052 Advance Access publication December 26, 2019 VC The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] 170 Looking Behind the Screen painting, or film” (133). These new depths and complexities are challenging: the loss of the advantages of textual fixity in the endless plasticity of visual text that can be rendered differently by the software every time it is viewed on a screen; the vast seethe of hypertex- tual information that now beckons around every corner of an online text; the anonymized phantasmagoria of online subjectivities; and Literary texts, once capacious remediations among image, sound, and sign. Literary Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 conﬁned to a very texts, once confined to a very limited range of printed forms, appear limited range of to have escaped into the wilds of unbounded media. The question is printed forms, appear to have then how much knowledge of the engineering, information theory, escaped into the design, material structures, history, linguistics, and sociality do we wilds of unbounded need to inform our digitally managed critical studies of poetic texts, media.... Digital and how can we do so without succumbing to reductive narratives technology is . such as those that ascribe scientific inevitability, or demonic agency, rapidly changing the entire infrastructure to the machinery? Although Derrida displays some interest in the of poetic practice. machine he is using, his account underlines what Seth Perlow describes as “technology’s tendency to evade critical attention” (17). To talk wittily of gods and demons is to avoid talking about software code and networked servers. The challenge today is to figure out how to redirect sufficient critical attention commensurate to the sig- nificance of the technology for our research. The books under review, and others I shall mention, attempt this task. Derrida doesn’t say anything that others haven’t also said. That even the most insightful modern philosopher of textuality can strug- gle to understand what a computer is and does, reminds us that ev- eryone has been disoriented by the new technology and its shimmer of compositional novelty. Disorientation, as he makes plain, is ac- companied by welcome. To the new ease of writing and communication that he mentions, we should add other massive improvements: the liberating effects of digital technology for dis- ability, the internationalism, and the enhancement of cultural memory. Derrida says that such change is unprecedented. Did users of earlier phases of electrical communications technology really feel they knew how and why the machinery responded to users as it facil- itated their interactions with others? If we look back at an earlier phase of extremely rapid development of technologies that extended the senses and human communication, a period that unfolded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find many parallels with our own time. Then, too, the technology generated a great deal of uncertainty, anxiety, and sheer puzzlement, especially about the apparent vitalism and spirituality active in wired and wireless devices. As Perlow observes, Emily Dickinson “often figures powerful emotion as electrical” (33). The late nineteenth century lived through a period of dizzyingly rapid adoption of diverse, socially American Literary History 171 transformative technologies based on new sources of energy, includ- ing the telegraph, telephone, wireless, railways, automobiles, and X- rays, thereby creating widespread existential upheaval not dissimilar to Derrida’s account. For those living through that revolution, it was not only disturbing to recognize how personal and social relations were changing as the new modes of communication invited new forms of connection, but it was also often difficult to be sure where Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 the boundaries of science lay, and where the demons lay hidden. People did not yet know whether ether or electricity, telepathy or te- legraphy would prove the more durable discovery. Claims that experts could talk to the spirits of the dead through Ouija boards, human mediums, or even via ciphers hidden in Shakespeare’s plays seemed plausible: messages could already be sent invisibly through wires or even the atmosphere. Electricity itself was mysterious enough: invisible, dangerous, magically potent. Telepathy and spirit communication seemed worth investigating scientifically. In his book The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Roger Luckhurst describes a world busy experimenting with metaphysics that created an “enigmatic interspace . mixing up tuning forks, ethereal waves, spark-gap detectors, synaptic gaps, hypnotic rapports, or phantasms of the living. In the late Victorian period, this interstitial space is at once overdetermined and undeterminable—that is, in a suspensive state between competing theorizations” (113). How then can we navigate our own similar spaces? Derrida’s winning admission of ignorance about the workings of the computer, and his self-exposure of the fantasies its word pro- cessor evokes, reminds us that there are many questions all of us who work with poetry still need to ask about how information technology works, about the metaphorical gods and demons of our digital pantheon. What is behind the screen; What are its internal rules or codes or mathematics? Although older generations may have dif- ferent perspectives to those born into the digital world, all of us share a central question: How is the connectivity of these proliferat- ing digital devices that have reshaped our critical engagements with literary texts altering our sense of modernism and its aftermath? Today, literary critics like Perlow and Tietchen have begun boldly to explore our own interstitial spaces with theories whose epistemological investments make large demands on existing collateral knowledge. Over the past four decades, we have lived through an extremely rapid reconfiguration of the media through which we con- duct our social relations of communication, memory, obligation, fi- nance, exchange, politics, and aesthetics, a time during which the epistemological boundaries have been far from clear. Maybe machines do think, and maybe human brains are soft-tissue computers? Maybe coordinated instantaneous interaction is possible 172 Looking Behind the Screen across distances, just as simultaneous quantum effects can be nonlo- cal, or entangled? This intriguing concept of entanglement has been widely adopted in cultural theory, perhaps partly because the high- speed responsiveness of the Internet itself appears analogous to quantum nonlocality. Will entanglement prove to be the telepathy of our time, or will it become as established as James Clerk Maxwell’s invisible electromagnetic fields? Compared to what now seems the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 austere stasis of the poetry book, poetry online often appears to be just part of a crowd of other screen activity, just a part of the picture that shades off into innumerable others. Epistemic indeterminacy casts a penumbra of speculation around digital technology hinting at new fields of inquiry, as well as the renewal of existing ones. In addition to some grasp of the physics or materiality of digital technology, answering such questions will also require a respon- sive poetics of digital terminology.

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