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[The poet / programmatoloist John Cayley recently reviewed my book for Mute Magazine, a journal devoted to "culture and politics after the net, published in the UK. There I am, nestled snug as a bug on page 143, second to last -- fame awaits! But sluriously folks, John's been an enthusiastic supporter of mine and I think he hits the mark quite well -- he's the serious theorist of the whole "digital poetry" world conspiracy -- if only getting at one part of the book. Run out and buy it! Or rather, run back in, after you've picked a few daisies and hugged some choice unfortunates, and order it!]
Brian Kim Stefans.
Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics.
Berkeley: Atelos, 2003.
(Paperback, ISBN 1-891190-14-8. Available from: SPD, www.spdbooks.org, US$ 12.95 plus delivery)
Fashionable Noise is published in Atelos, a series of specially commissioned projects ‘crossing traditional genre boundaries.’ The book contains six designated works and a couple of ‘appendices,’ all of which can be seen, in some sense, as process-generated, the co-work of Brian Kim Stefans and certain of his digital familiars - demons that drive both him and his media. Stefans mixes theory and poetry seamlessly and apparently effortlessly although, as he readily acknowledges, the burden of work is often shared with generative algorithms. Stefans is a New York-based poet who has engaged new media and its networks from the early days of its emergent hyperhistory. He runs arras.net and is well-known and highly regarded in the field of electronic writing particularly for ‘The Dreamlife of Letters’ (www.ubu.com/contemp/stefans/dream/), ‘a flash piece, organized by alphabetic principles, … credited with trying to exhaust all form of animated web poetry or the kinetics of movie titles.’ (His own apt characterization.)
In the midst of the book’s other pieces - a transcribed IRC dialogue, some ‘Reflections on Cyberpoetry’ that systematically recast T. S. Eliot’s reflections on vers libre, a ‘dos and donts’ of new media practice reworked from William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell,’ more ‘notes on new poetrie,’ and ‘A Poem of Attitudes’ - the main portion of the book consists of ‘Stops and Rebels: a critique of hypertext.’ This chapter, for me, was the book’s demonic heart, one of the most considered and wide-ranging creative and critical treatments of writing in networked and programmable media that I have come across.
‘Demon,’ by the way, is Stefans’ name for operative code, those non-human agents, machine dwellers, who now take some share in cultural production. It is typical of Stefans and typical of serious poetic practice that such a term is slipped into the discourse without immediate explanation, demanding, as it were, both prior and emergent understanding in his readers: that ‘demon’ means ‘program,’ and the word demonstrates, at one and the same time, a geekier, hacker’s or UNIX-literate reader’s sense of the term while also allowing any discussion of the role of code to escape the nerdish gravity of technoscience in its evocation of shared folk-magic artistry. If I call my programs demons (and I plan to do so from now on), different groups of readers may begin to take note of how they behave, and this could be properly subversive, or differently subversive of the properly designated literary corpus - as demons devour and disgorge the illustrious cadavers of ‘genius,’ as demons do.
‘Stops and Rebels’ is constructed around a poem that has been algorithmically collaged from a number of source texts. The bulk of the writing, however, consists of footnotes on the poem, written as if by ‘an over-zealous student.’ Chiefly, the piece is clear discursive prose, but the structure makes it more useful for later reference since individual notes tend to organize around distinct topics: noise and interpretation, carnival and database aesthetics, Language poetry, artificial intelligence, ambient poetics, coding, etc. Labelled as articles, these notes might appear as fragments from a lost or future encyclopaedia of new media poetics. There are far too many such topics to seriously engage in a brief review, but fortunately the book’s title itself gives me one way into its overall concerns.
You know that you are reading a poet when a punning, multiply ambiguous title proves to signify far more than mediaspeak irony, reserve and denigration. ‘Fashionable noise’ seems at first to point to the transient, modish effects of a new ‘big noise’ on the fringes of poetic practice and literary art. These negative or rather challenging connotations would not, I suspect, be entirely disavowed by Stefans, but they are self-contextualized, embedded in a title phrase that bears more and other meanings, including much that is generative and engaged. The two words could, in fact, be set as a one line emblematic poem with the current subtitle promoted to its title. ‘Fashionable’ here is derived from the verb as well as from its frequently foppish noun. It means that the ‘noise’ of digital poetics is programmed, manipulated, ‘fashioned fit’ and shifted so as to work with and influence literary and social convention. ‘[The CP (computer-poem)] starts from noise and algorithm and moves towards convention.’ Noise in this context is far from being mere linguistic waste or excess. It is many things in Stefan’s text: the stuff and matter of language on the cusp of lexical or symbolic meaning, the non- or posthuman aspects of writing with new media, the algorithm itself, and its fragmentary, found, arbitrary, chance-selected sources. This is ‘noise’ as the representation of a downgraded but integral aspect of the entire gamut of linguistic phenomena. Noise gains entitlement in this context because the encompassing world of language is the poet and writer’s proper (if potential) palette - not those few notes plucked out of the soundscape by convention and tradition, but everything from letters to their dreamlife, from noise to silence. Because new media make poetic noise fashionable, it becomes impossible for writers and artists to ignore these admittedly fashionable ways of ‘making it new.’
As with the sense of its ‘demons,’ Fashionable Noise is all but uniquely responsive to both traditional and ‘bleeding edge’ language art practice. As a critique of hypertext begun in 1996, ‘Stops and Rebels’ was way ahead of its time, although it is hard to say what remains of its earlier states. Much of its close analysis of writing in programmable media is still poorly understood even in the most recent critical texts. Besides this, there are few writers like Stefans who are also able to program what they prescribe. This book will help to reconfigure the fashionable literary arcades.
Posted by Brian Stefans at February 16, 2004 06:28 PM | TrackBack