Exchange on Circulars

[I've been asked to write an essay on Circulars for a volume on internet culture. The essay is going to be in three parts: the first, a basic description of what the site was about in its heyday, the second speculations on the "poetics" of the site -- basically, how its forms of "meaning" operated in ways different from other forms of protest/activist sites, and the third composed of an exchange between Darren Wershler-Henry -- who was one of the site most prolific contributors and who has written several books about in internet communities and alternative business models -- and myself. We are simply sending each other 250 word paragraphs -- I figure the restraint would keep it from getting out of hand and force us to do odd things with the grammar to get our points across. It also mimics the form of the "data packet" that underlies all forms of electronic communication. Anyway, I don't know where the dialogue is going -- we're up to 5 paragraphs, but I only have 4 at this computer. It's a bit awkward so far -- we're trying to keep at it fast but ugly -- so here goes...]

BKS: I’ve come up with an awkward, unsettling title for this essay: “Circulars as Anti-Poem.” I’m sure cries will be raised: So you are making a poem out of a war? The invasion was only interesting as content for an esoteric foray into some elitist, inaccessible cultural phenomenon called an “anti-poem”? (There is, in fact, a lineage to the term “anti-poem” but I don’t think it’s important for this essay.) This legitimate objection is to be expected, and I have no reply except the obvious: that a website is a cultural construct, shaped by its editors and contributors, and more specifically, Circulars had a “poetics” implicit in its multi-authored-ness, its admixture of text and image, its being a product of a small branch of the international poetry community, etc. Of course, the title also suggests that this website has some relationship to a “poem,” but perhaps as a non-site of poetry – as it is a non-site for war, even a non-site for activism itself, where real-world effects don’t occur. But my point for now is that the fragmentary artifacts of a politicized investigation into culture – Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks for example -- has an implicit “poetics” to it, but standing opposite to what we normally call a “poem.” This suggests roles that poets can play in the world quite divorced from merely writing poetry (or even prose, though it was the idea that poets could contribute prose to the anti-war cause – as speech writers or journalists, perhaps – that initially inspired the site.

DWH: Hey Brian: what are you using to count words? MS Word says the previous paragraph has 254 words; BBEdit says 259 (me, I'm sticking to BBEdit). Poets -- particularly poets interested in working with computers -- should be all about such subtleties. Not that we should champion a mechanically aided will to pinpoint precision (a military fiction whose epitome is the imagery from the cameras in the noses of US cruise missiles dropped on Iraq during the first Gulf War), but rather, the opposite -- that we should be able to locate the cracks and seams in the spectacle ... the instances where the rhetoric of military precision breaks down. As such, here's a complication for you: why "anti-poem" instead of simply "poetics"? Charles Bernstein's cribbing ("Poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means") of Von Clausewitz's aphorism ("War is the continuation of politics by other means") never seemed as appropriate to me as it did during the period when Circulars was most active. The invocation of Smithson's site/non-site dialectic is also apposite, but only in the most cynical sense. Is the US bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan the equivalent of a country-wide exercise in land art? In any event, the relationship is no longer dialectical but dialogic; the proliferation of weblogs ("war blogs") during the Iraq War created something more arborescent -- a structure with one end anchored in the world of atoms, linked to a network of digital nonsites.

BKS: I hesitate to tease out the “non-site” analogy -- the site itself is too variable: for me, I was thinking of Circulars as being the non-site of activism, not just a corollary to the sweat and presence of people “on the streets” but a vision of a possible culture in which these activities (otherwise abandoned to television) can exist, not to mention reflect and nourish culturally. That is, are our language and tropes going to change because of the upsurge in activity occurring around us – in the form of poster art, detourned “fake” sites, maverick blogging? I admit that some of what we’ve linked to is nothing more than glorified bathroom humor, but nonetheless if the context creates the content for this type of work as a form of dissent, I think that should be discussed, even celebrated. I haven’t read too much about this yet. Thinking of Circulars as the “non-site” of the bombing itself is both depressing and provocative: it’s no secret that one of the phenomena of this war was not the unexpected visibility of CNN, but Salam Pax’s Dear Raed blog, written by a gay man from the heart of Baghdad (even now he is remaining anonymous because of his sexuality). I could see Circulars as a “poetics” but I prefer to think it as an action with a poetics, my own tendency being to think of poetry as the war side of the Clauswitz equation, simply because poetics seems closer to diplomacy than a poem.

DWH: The variability and heteroegeneity of the site, was, I think, partly due to the infrastructural and technological decisions that you made when putting the site together, because those decisions mesh well with the notion of coalition politics (I’m thinking of Donna Haraway’s formulation here). The presence of a number of posting contributors with varied interests, the ability of readers to post comments, the existence of an RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed which allowed anyone running a wide variety of web software packages to syndicate the headlines, a searchable archive, a regular email bulletin – these are crucial elements in any attempt to concentrate attention on the web. Too seldom do writers (even those avowedly interested in collaboration and coalition politics) take the effect of the technologies that they’re using into account, but they make an enormous difference to the final product. Compare Circulars to Ron Silliman’s Blog: on the one hand, you have an deliberately short-term project with a explicit focus, built around a coalition of writers on a technological and political platform that assumes and enables dialogue and dissent from the outset; on the other hand, an obdurate monolith that presents no immediate and obvious means of response, organized around a proper name. Sure, the sites have different goals, but Silliman’s site interests me because it seems to eschew all of the tools that would allow any writer to utilize the unique aspects of the web as an environment for writing. And sadly, it’s typical of many of the writers’ blogs that exist.

Posted by Brian Stefans at June 10, 2003 04:21 PM