It is here that the contradictions faced by capitalists as they search for monopoly rent assume a certain structural significance. By seeking to trade on values of authenticity, locality, history, culture, collective memories and tradition they open a space for political thought and action within which socialist alternatives can be both devised and pursued. That space deserves intense exploration and cultivation by oppositional movements that embrace cultural producers and cultural production as a key element in their political strategy. There are abundant historical precedents for mobilizing the forces of culture in this way (the role of constructivism in the creative years of the Russian Revolution from 1918-26 is just one of many historical examples to be learned from). Here lies one of the key spaces of hope for the construction of an alternative kind of globalization. One in which the progressive forces of culture can seek to appropriate and undermine those of capital rather than the other way round (Harvey 202: 109).
Let’s start by clearly delineating the space of discussion. Yes, it’s a matter of spacing – a phenomenon to be elaborated in more detail later –, a matter of topos, topography etc. Any discussion on reality necessarily opens up a question of being-in-the-world, of Being as such, its manifestation as happening, as situatedness. But what exactly is happening here, what is being situated? Poetry in its original sense is related to the openness of Being as the event of freedom. The descent into the spacing of writing manifests itself in the form of a disclosive, illuminative (written) record (os alethes). What situates this record also maintains it, reveals it, exposes it in the openness of this coming-to-be emerging at the horizon of the event. Language itself is in perpetual flux, and poetry is language as such, language overflowing the utmost recesses of Being and permanently running up against its own limits where it breaks into silence (and vice versa). To remain silent is to be. Poetry, the act of writing about poetry and neoliberal paradigm intersect in the process of spacing, in the openness of the event. No creative thinking about revolution can dispense with the situatedness of the event conceived as an intersection of covertness/truth (aletheia) of Being. The revolutionary turn taking place in the world nihilistically dominated by neoliberal paradigm can be realized only through the situatedness of Being, for otherwise it is not a genuine turn/descent, but merely a reproduction, a recycling of nihilism/destruction/death. Poetry in its original sense – poesis as the act/realization of the openness/truth* of Being in its emergence/persistence as a historical truth of the Western world – is thus a manifestation in the present of what is yet to come, of the utopian Being of post-revolutionary world characterized by the turn/descent into being of nihilism. It is the being-in-the-world of our children. The only real revolution, i.e. a revolution conceived as a utopia of an already realized future (in the Husserlian sense of protention), discloses itself as a creative openness of experimental poetry, as an openness of Being in the sense of an “alternative” to nihilist neocapitalist practices and their destructive/exploitative approaches to life as such. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote: “Language is the house of Being”. Allow me to bypass certain phases of my thinking, and state clearly: it is not that Being is hidden inside of a house, i.e. that one needs merely to open up the house and bring out what is hidden within. Far from it – the treasure chest is empty, there is nothing inside. Transcendentality consists of the presence of the non-present/non-existent/imaginary. Being is the treasure chest itself: language as the trace (Derrida); poiesis as spacing, as opening, as revealing; verbalization as naming (nennen) and therefore as Being as such, as the event beyond things, beyond the reality of this “now”, the clearing of worldhood basking in the truth of disclosure as the existential abyss of freedom.
I borrowed an idea and turned it upside down. It would be easier to draw out an argument on experimental poetry in light of neoliberal paradigm, but that is not what I’m after. Quite the contrary, what I’m pursuing is the idea that it is possible to understand neoliberal paradigm only against the background of what is being exposed (la poésie ne se impose pas, elle s’ expose, as Paul Celan once said /cf. Sloterdijk 1992: 5) by means of experimental poetry in the process of global neoliberalization, in light of what a well-known ideologist of neoliberalism called the end of history. The same phenomenon could be referred to as a suppression or elimination of history as historical thinking. A careful reflection on post-historical destiny of experimental poetry might shed some light on my own embeddedness in one of the ghettos constructed by the neoliberal newspeak and by the eradication of human beings perceived as human societies within the context of a discursive/cybernetic machinery of global, profit-oriented economy and social, political, economical, financial, military etc. relations it establishes, enforces and develops. The nature of these relations is reflected in the Greek word stasis denoting conflict, crisis, instability, and struggle in both living social communities as well as in ourselves. It is also reflected in the Greek word kinesis referring to (according to Thucydides) “a general state of uncertainty, danger and uprootedness” (Kalan 1983: 10). Some might find this an exaggeration, but the term crisis, which has gained a widespread popularity among neoliberal ideologists, points precisely in this direction. In this particular context, of course, the term crisis has to be understood as an ideologeme, a symptom of a certain strategy, whose main goal is to functionalize the machinery of profit accumulation based on existential interests and needs of people. It is a stasis between “profit and people” (Chomsky 1999), human society and all other forms of life, including the planet as a whole. The main attempt of our discussion on the meaning and role of experimental poetry, on its suppression as a stratagem concocted and spread by the neoliberal profit machinery, is to show the following: in the realm of poetry, language transcends its designated role as a means of communication for mediating specific, strictly limited messages, and thereby sets itself outside of the neoliberal, cybernetic machinery of information control and management (Heidegger 1999: 137); as such, it becomes a medium in which what Greeks called henargeia (lat. evidentia) takes place – “henargeia, which has the same root as argentum (silver), means that which in itself and of itself radiates and brings itself to life” (ibid.). It is important to realize that what we’re dealing here is a perpetual, on-going being-in-the-world. There is no need for silver to take on the role of an element symbolizing market value; it is not something that has to step out of language conceived as a cybernetic means of communication, as it is already outside of it, already in front of it – it speaks and discloses something else and is thus not an instrumentalized means of the limited and limiting (violent, authoritative) meaning. I hypothesize that experimental poetry constitutes a language form that enables the emergence of reality, the escape from neoliberal suppression. It is the on-going being-in-the-world that the neoliberal end-of-history project tries to eliminate, suppress, pass on in silence. But in the very act of suppression that which is suppressed discloses itself as a historical, vivid, simple, straightforward word to designate the activities of people when they are not motivated by thoughts of exchange, a word that denotes autonomous, non-market related actions through which people satisfy everyday needs – the actions that by their very nature escape bureaucratic control, satisfying needs to which, in the very process, they give specific shape. […] There are technical words that designate the satisfaction of needs that economists do not or cannot measure – social production as opposed to economic production, the generation of use-values as opposed to the production of commodities, household economics as opposed to market economics. […]We need a simple adjective to name those acts of competence, lust, or concern that we want to defend from measurement or manipulation by Chicago Boys and Socialist Commissars. (Illich, 2012: 198).
From the mid-19th century onwards, i.e. from the time of Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud – the three great poets whose conceptions of poetry are nowadays recognized as the foundations of modernist movement – poetic circles ceased to conceive poetry as a means for representing “external reality” and established it as an autonomous, creative language practice following its own codes and rules. This created an impression of poetry gradually parting ways with social reality: it no longer seemed to function as a medium for active social dialogue but merely as an esoteric textual and creative endeavour; it was driven to the margins of society and concentrated primarily on alternative meaning and functioning of words. But this impression overlooks the important fact that the presentational or creative (Rorty) function of words also failed to transcend the context of social processes; the only difference was that with the “modernist shift” the social functioning of poetry became unavailable to the tools of traditional reflection and thus became impervious to utilitarian interventions. It was only when necessary changes concerning the conception of reality and language took place within historical thinking (e.g. in phenomenology or structuralism) that the circular social determination of language (as reflected in the works of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieau etc.) and of course poetry as a form of verbal art or better yet – and especially in relation to experimental poetry – as a form of word-employing art became prominent. This development became especially prominent in neo- and post-avantgarde and modernist arts, characterized by the substitution of words with other signifiers (objects, colours, sounds, bodies or even more complex phenomena, e.g. “subversion”). But this recognition didn’t immediately call into question a one-sided definition of the link between poetry conceived as a covert function of spoken/written language and economy conceived as a trading (exchange of goods) or profit-making activity. There is no simple, compatible relation between ostensible laissez faire (autonomy) of words in poetry and laissez faire of free market (art marketing); on the contrary, the relation between the two is contradictory, complex and conflicting – it is based on the notion of stasis. However, we must be careful not to fall prey to superficial self-labelling of postmodernist artistic movements, which give the impression of being nothing but designer-made neo-Baroque attempts to satisfy the insatiable hunger of Big Capital for spectacular or empty appearances. Such attempts have shaken off the post-avantgarde leftist ideology and have started unscrupulously charging for services rendered to the Big Capital by producing works of art whose function is to encourage the global self-promotion of profit-making systems. Or, to draw an analogy with science: the “regimes of efficiency that conceive technical efficiency as the basis for social and economic development try to subordinate all scientific discoveries to its unscrupulous dictum. That is why Lyotard sometimes refers to such regimes as ‘capitalist techno-sciences’” (Bunta 2012: 117). The same applies to art, held firmly in the grip of market economy, where books, movies or art paintings (e.g. Mondrian’s neoplastic squares, i.e. radical modernism) function as profit-making products of mass consumption.
***
But market economy is not a totalitarian regime, even if it strives to become one. In his book The Meaning of Sarkozy, Alain Badiou points out that the value of science cannot be measured by standards of market economy: “Non-profitable science is of infinitely more value than profit-making technology” (cf. Dolenc 2012: 149). And this, one might add, is also indicative of symposia we organize. But our main topic here is the role of literature in social dialogue, and not so much its didactic or logological component. Poetry, at least the primary sense of the word, is not really a matter of logologos as ontologos (cf. Lyotard, Bunta 2012: 127); instead, it is that, which – against the background of language as a machinery disclosing the ontological difference – could be named “the end of being and time in the event of world’s groundlessness in which we all partake; it is the abyss within us […] The abyss is the experience of absolute emptiness of our being-in-the-world […] Art […] belongs to the event” (Paić 2012: 29). In relation to literature, Badiou describes the former president of France, who is believed to be an exemplary model and a prominent proponent of neoliberal ideology:
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Rat Man’s views on old literature. They can be broadened to encompass all sciences whose usefulness has yet to be confirmed. Here is what he had to say: “If it makes you happy, go on and study old literature, but don’t expect the government to pay your tuition.” Taxpayer’s money needs to be transferred into informatics and economy […] Human endeavours that have a universal value and are therefore closely related to truths shared by humanity as a whole are by no means similar to endeavours with market value […] Endeavours related to non-profitable reflective thought must be supported and respected for what they are, i.e. regardless of the norms of profit-making technology (cf. Dolenc 2012: 150).
“Rat Man” is a well-chosen nick name, and would be highly useful for some local Slovenian personages as well. What is of special interest here, however, is the reference to old literature, as it is not only the topic of our discussion but has actually been left out of state funding recently. The seemingly arrogant air pervading Sarkozy’s statement shouldn’t be understood as a creation of a dismissive attitude of a conceited power-wielding magnate invested with the power to decide which public events may eventually get co-financed, but rather as a symptom of a suppressed and painful truth about the true nature of a regime represented by the Rat Man (and the same applies to Slovenian Rat Mans, some of whom actually proclaim themselves to be poets and literary experts). It is important to note here that this question is not related merely to (ostensibly) useless study of obsolete artefacts, i.e. to sheer waste of energy, resources and time, but has much broader implications. The experiment, as it is well-known, is the epistemological cornerstone of modern science, i.e. it is one of the two fundamental procedures that establish the scientific paradigm (the other one being the development of theoretical models): “An experiment is best defined as a means of artificially re-creating a natural phenomenon” (Dolenc 2012: 165). It might seem ironic, but the effects of experimental poetry are the very opposite: it doesn’t reproduce, but creates its own reality. Yet it seems that science – setting temporarily aside its all but insignificant administrative engagement and necessary lobbying for funding – constructs both its research objects as well as itself, its institutional structure and the truth/reality it supposedly pertains to. But let’s return to Slavoj Žižek. Here is what he says: “Just as in the act of seeing one necessarily overlooks the Other in his traumatic priority to our seeing, so also in the act of Truth-seeking one necessarily overlooks the point in which the Truth has already been given us” (Žižek 1982: 82). This applies not so much to individuals as to the Rat Man and the regime he stands for. In my opinion, experimental poetry constitutes such a point – a point that discloses a transcendent truth dimension of the regime and therefore has to be suppressed. Texts that enable this to happen are the embodiment of the live event of the openness of being, i.e. of the wholesome structure of reality embracing everything: from politics and economy to the way how Flemish gutturals are pronounced in Slovenian. This point, manifesting itself as the event within language, demonstrates that the drawback of neoliberal paradigm consists in precisely what the ultra-capitalist newspeak calls the (terror of) efficiency. In the same spirit that Žižek, alongside with many other leading philosophers of our time (e.g. Agamben, Spivakova), once proclaimed himself a political theologian, I proclaim myself a political psychoanalyst, thereby aiming at the political unconscious as a social reality structured as a discourse. The neoliberal regime can thus be summarized by claiming that “the core of [political] unconscious consists of a suppressed discourse and not of an inarticulated primal drive” (ibid. 58). Heidegger’s statement in Beitrage für Philosophie: “Art […] belongs to the Event” (cf. Paić 2012: 29) indicates that experimental poetry does, in fact, constitute the event, in which this hidden core of neoliberal regime manifests itself. A daring claim, a daring claim indeed. In the spirit of Nietzsche’s famous aphorism: “Ich habe den Geist Europas in mich genommen – nun will ich den Gegenschlag tun” (I have absorbed in myself the spirit of Europe – now I want to strike back!”) (cf. Nietzsche, Cacciari 1996: 5).
Two poets
“In my view, an ideally liberal polity would be one whose culture hero is Harold Bloom’s ‘strong poet’ rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truthseeking, ‘logical’, ‘objective’ scientist” (Rorty 1989: 53). Rorty’s claim juxtaposes the artist and the polity in such a way that it forces us to constantly re-think the neoliberal paradigm in light of (experimental) poetry. In what follows, I will draw primarily on two paraffinized poets dug out of the long forgotten treasure chest of Slovenian experimental poetry. My goal here is to demonstrate the machinery of the neoliberal discourse on two concrete examples of experimental poetry. I’m not sure whether Marko Pogačnik and Iztok Geister were familiar with Goethe’s rendition of the name Otto as O-I I-O when they coined their famous emblem OHO. It could be claimed – should it turn out they weren’t – that this synchrony was the doing of historical unconscious. The author of the first poem is a wrongfully forgotten and an unfortunately already deceased poet Aleš Kermauner (he committed suicide shortly after the publication of his book) whose literary contribution had enormous impact on Slovenian poetry, although he himself was wholly unaware of it; and the author of the second poem is Iztok Geister, one of the two grounding-fathers of the OHO movement and also one of the speakers at the conference. In my opinion, both Kermauner and Geister succeeded in achieving a key turn in poetry, but were later completely suppressed and obliterated from Slovenian literary history. This, of course, is highly symptomatic, as will see shortly.
NAILS »HOMO MENSURA«
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NAILS »HOMO MENSURA«
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NAILS »HOMO MENSURA«
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NAILS »HOMO MENSURA«
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NAILS »HOMO MENSURA«
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NAILS »HOMO MENSURA«
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NAILS »HOMO MENSURA«
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That’s Kermauner’s poem taken from his collection Luknja v novcu (A Hole in a Twopence/ Coin/), self-published in 1966 and then reprinted in 2003 in Fraktal (KUD Apokalipsa). And here is Geister’s poem entitled VKLADNI SPAH (WOODWELTING JOINT) from his booklet Žalostna majna (Indian Myna) published in 1969 by Državna založba Slovenije.
first board of half thickness
first board of half height
second board of half height
second board of half thickness
Here are two representative examples of experimental poetry. The average reader is likely to frown upon them as they obviously clash with our “ordinary” views on poetry. They are definitely representative of poetry in its highly developed form. In general, I concur with John Holcomb, who wrote: “Experimental poetry is not easily categorized, but some forms do conform to the aims of Postmodernism, as will be seen most readily in concrete poetry. By being no more than simple letters on the page, the previous cultural standards are decanonized (iconoclasm), the images have no reference beyond themselves (groundlessness), and there is little attempt at harmonious arrangement (formlessness). Even the words are simple and everyday (populism) (Holcombe 2013).” According to Holcomb, experimental poetry consists of concrete poetry, visual poetry, conceptual poetry and code poetry. He also adds theory of experimental poetry to the mix, and this seems wholly justified, as theorizing on poetic creativity seems to be an essential element of every (post-avantgarde) poetic project and thoroughly pervades not only modernist but also postmodernist artistic production. Although it might appear that one of the key characteristics of postmodernism is precisely its cutting ties with critical self-reflection (as Aleš Debeljak, one of the protagonists of “Slovenian postmodernism”, triumphantly proclaimed of his own literary production, thus repeating Leibniz’s ironical remark about “bare praxis with no theory”, and vividly portraying the scope and depth of such intellectual chatter), this is far from true. Quite the opposite, actually; but that’s an altogether different story, one I refrain from entering at this point. There have been, in addition to Kermauner and Geister, several other Slovenian experimental poets who have critically influenced this explosively creative movement and thus deserve special mention: Franci Zagoričnik, Matjaž Hanžek, Andrej Medved, Ivan Volarič Feo, and in the background perhaps also Marta Ogen, Vojin Kovač Chubby and some others. Those familiar with the Slovenian poetical canon might be surprised at the lack of mention of Tomaž Šalamun, but in my opinion Šalamun’s poems never operated at the level of experimental poetry, but merely swirled around something that appeared as experimental poetry. Despite the fractured and provocative playfulness of his poetic language, Šalamun’s poetry remains essentially traditional and conversational. This has already been pointed out by Tomaž Brejc who, in his foreword to the catalogue of OHO exhibition in 1978, tactfully notes that “from time to time Tomaž Šalamun took on the role of a catalyst for new decisions and contributed significantly to the process of moving away from things and their naming to other creative concepts” (Brejc 1978: 13). In other words: from art to its establishment on art market (galleries, museums). Šalamun’s primary interest has always been self-promotion, and from the very beginning of his artistic career, his poetic endeavours have been thoroughly calculating and self-oriented. This had great influence on the future development of both his later poetry and the OHO movement, as confirmed by Geister’s slow withdrawal from the group. What remains to be elucidated, however, is the extent to which Šalamun was influenced by his roommate Drago B. Rotar who was believed to be not only a much more thoughtful and radical poet but also (according to Miško Šuvaković) the most penetrating theoretician of the OHO movement. Maybe someday an opportunity will present itself for me to write more on this interesting subject, but for now it is worthwhile to point out that it is not in the least surprising that of all the poets mentioned above it was Šalamun alone who gained local and global recognition – he, who was so utterly different from the rest of the group in having successfully hidden a completely conformist “thrust” under the appearance of radicalism and who has never been able to fully free himself of the violence of meaning and of employing what Roland Barthes called “the problem of value”: “in the end, every sign has to be perceived from the viewpoint of its ‘surroundings’” (Barthes 1971: 354), i.e. from the perspective of establishment. This element has been recognized, and properly defined, in structural linguistics. De Saussure claims that the main reason for his bringing linguistics closer to economics was precisely the equivalence of what seemed like two completely different domains (signifier and signified, work and pay) (ibid.). Šalamun successfully exploited this “economic” value, but he did so under the guise of experimentalism. As we will see later, the event of the over-turning (Geister calls it “the descent”) in experimental poetry differs radically from the exploitation of the economic value of language (leading to a merchandised fetish aptly referred to as “monopoly rent” by Harvey, i.e. as a specific type of exclusive market supply), and operates on a completely different level, emphasizing the importance of linguistic intervention in the sign structure. These two radically different gestures in a structurally identical field lead to diametrically opposite effects: the predominance of the economic aspect manifests itself in the confirmation of the prevalent role of the signified over the signifier (although pretending to be affirming the latter) and, keeping deeply rooted models of linguistic games relatively intact, in the admiration of the average reader; the predominance of the linguistic turn, however, discloses the nihilistic, destructive lack at the very core of profit machinery, breaking through and beyond conventional games and thus setting in motion the revolutionary pulsation and unease among average poetry readers. Both cases (linguistics and economy) resemble one another in that, if one element changes, the transformation of the whole system ensues. And this, as I will try to show, happened in Kermauner and Geister, but not in Šalamun, who simply neutralized “the event of the descent” and kept poetry within its traditional, conservative bounds. In other words, his poetry was merely a game – a mere play of words –, and not the event capable of transforming the structure and function of the sign/word into “the language of Being”.
I believe that the two poems cited above belong to the category of conceptual poetry, i.e. to a radical category of a more broadly conceived experimental poetry. The validity of this proposal is confirmed by the activities in which the two poets actively partook and by their personal reflections on their work. Iztok Geister, “one of the leading ideologists of the early OHO activities” (Brejc), emphasized this clearly in the so-called OHO manifest (co-authored with Marko Pogačnik):
Things are characterized by their thingness. In order to approach the thingness of things, we must accept things as they are. And what are things like? The first thing that becomes obvious is that things are silent. And yet they have plenty to give! Words lure soundless sounds from things. Only words can hear these sounds. Words register or label the sounds of things. (Brejc 1978: 13)
What is the soundless sound of things? It is their silence, their quiet, their being merely things, not mediators of meaningful narratives. Meaningless words embody this meaningless, soundless sound: they embody the presence of the absence of sound, they embody the absence itself. This corresponds to Holcomb’s musings: “Experimental poetry is not poetry in the usual sense of the word, but something altogether different, […] with expanding fields in sound, flash, machine-modulated, typewriter, etc. poetry” (Holcombe 2013). Silent words spread out into the domain of absent sound, into the domain of the trace of sound: the space appropriated by a word was once occupied by a loud presence of the absent meaning. The gap, the gaping abyss (of Being/Nothing): words/things. In a discussion at the opening of the exhibition dedicated to Marko Pogačnik in 2012, Iztok Geister provided a clear account of the origins of the OHO movement and of the poetry he himself produced at that period. He emphasized that the movement evolved against the background of the emerging consumerism, which the then leading intellectuals gathered under the aegis of the Perspektive journal associated with alienation and reification. In order to prevent these sombre forebodings, to evade this oncoming “eclipse” (it is interesting to note that in 1966 both Kermauner and Šalamun entitled their opening poems “Eclipse”, but structured them completely differently) and avoid the pitfalls of the harmful, destructive influence of consumerism, Geister and Pogačnik decided to simply “confront and embrace it”. This is where different approaches to “economic dimension” of language value come into play, with Geister and Pogačnik on the one side and Šalamun on the other. While the former two strive to deconstruct the economic dimension, the latter is eager to exploit it. Geister and Pogačnik discovered “new, overlooked spaces”: instead of seeing brimming supermarket shelves as embodying the end of the “humaine” world, they found the packaging of sold products imbued with unique beauty that had been consistently overlooked in traditional mercantile exchanges, namely the beauty of colourful and variegated packaging surfaces. They were no longer interested in the contents of the packaging (i.e. in perceiving the latter in a traditional fashion as mere enwrapping of some useful product), but rather in the letters/paintings on it (i.e. in the embodied bare signifiers unfolding across the wrapping). In Pogačnik’s words:
Texts consist of words. Words consist of lines. The function of lines is to visually (i.e. in the form of letters) signalize individual sounds. In texts, lines are hidden behind the sounds of letters. How can then a line (as a basic constituent of the page in addition to ink and paper) come out in the open, if not through a drawing? Lines in a drawing will stand for themselves, if that drawing consciously reflects back on itself. A drawing consisting of lines is an indispensible part of newspapers and magazines. Visual poetry, also known as topographic poetry, is a disclosure of this differentiated (visual and auditory) functioning of lines. (Brejc 1978: 13)
Brejc adds: “This statement, emphasizing the importance of visual poetry within the OHO group, gives an accurate insight into the nature of its painting method” (ibid.).
Before we continue with our discussion, it is important to shed some light on the key element that is absolutely essential in acquiring a better understanding of this type of poetry, of this radical turn/descent that enables us to open up “new, overlooked spaces”. In other words, we must take a closer look at the notion of linguistic sign, an emblematic concept that has come to power in the 20th century and successfully reinterpreted and transfigured reality into the empire of signs, where the latter no longer
refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange […] The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection (Baudrillard 1999: 15).
According to the famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, a sign consists of the signifier and the signified. This can be presented as follows:
signifier/signified -> R In this formula, the words “signifier” and “signified” stand for (i) written (graphic) record, and (ii) conventional meaning, mental image, or truth, respectively, with the pointed arrow denoting a relation between the sign (i.e. the signifier & the signified taken together) and the “external object” (i.e. its meaning or reference = R). Upon closer inspection, however, this simple structure turns out to be much more complex. The puzzles concerning the basic structure of signs were well-known to structuralist authors, but my intention is to stir clear of them, at least in the first part of the discussion. In order to provide a schematic description of the turn/descent undertaken by Kermauner and Geister, it should suffice to mention that their poetry is characterized by two “deconstructive steps”: the first step consists of the annihilation/abolishment of the relation between sign and its (supposed) external referent, while the second step consists of the annihilation/abolishment of the difference between signifier and signified, i.e. of the deconstruction of sign at its very core. Note that their approach differs radically from that of modernists whose work consists primarily in the abolishment of traditional representational aesthetics based on the portrayal of an “external X” (conceived either as an object or some transcendental, metaphysical meaning (aura)), followed by a transition into a non-mimetic, iconoclastic non-objectivity, and coupled with a nihilistic emptying of words, i.e. with their transfiguration into bare aesthetic aggregates emerging against the background of the abolished relation between sign and reality. The work of Kermauner and Geister is much more radical and posits that the locus of artistic creation is the signifier itself. In other words, Kermauner and Geister are not interested in the contents or meaning, which the signifier is conventionally supposed to serve, but focus instead on the signifier as such: on lines, letters or words, devoid of unnecessary ideological and metaphysical baggage, i.e. of all the effects and language games traditionally associated with artistic endeavour.
Theirs is obviously not a light-hearted play of words whose sole purpose is to transcend traditional language games and frameworks of meaning, for such frivolous tinker-toying tends to (re)establish and (re)affirm the very same order it supposedly mocks and negates – mostly unconsciously, but sometimes also intentionally, as it seems very careful not to break the bounds of decency and threaten predominant conventions. The real (radical) change occurs only against the background of symbolic constellations signified by the Great Other in the perspective of ontological structure of historicity of the world.
This calls out for a proper reflection on historical interconnectedness of thought and language as posited in the “Greek” criss-crossing of concepts and categories, i.e. in the currently predominant style of speaking and thinking:
This site is the site of “Being”. Aristotle’s categories are simultaneously of language and of thought: of language in that they are determined as answers to the question of knowing how Being is said (legetai); but also, how Being is said, how is said what is, in that it is, such as it is […] the strange sameness of noein and einai spoken of in Parmenides’ poem. (Derrida 2012: 310)
Reflection, language and the question of Being as Being are therefore thoroughly intertwined in that fateful sketch where meaning, sense, and symbolic horizon are “situated” at the other side, at the “beyond” that has finally become a real possibility. It seems worthwhile to base our sketch of this bare game of signifiers – the game transcending empty word games (ludism) and revealing a fundamental existential conflict taking place at the verge of the abyss and originating in the experience of absolute emptiness of human being-in-the-world (Paić 2013: 29) – on relevant theoretical findings. Theoretical reflection, although it normally follows the “art event” with considerable, if understandable, delay, can be nonetheless useful, as forcefully demonstrated by Slavoj Žižek’s Zgodovina in nezavedno (History and the Unconsciouss). With the help of this insightful little book, I hope to bridge, in a posteriori fashion, a chasm that has opened up after the death of Dušan Pirjevec and the withdrawal of Taras Kermauner from public life, a chasm that separates conceptual poetic production on the one hand and the only authority in Slovenia capable of producing valuable interpretations of and establishing fruitful dialogue with this type of poetic production – Žižek being one of its noteworthy representatives – on the other. Let’s see what Žižek has to say about the signifier:
… the meaning of “Phallus” has to be understood as lucus a non lucendo: Phallus as a signifier is precisely the signifier-without-signified, i.e. a paradoxical point of “pure”/“bare” signifier, which – through its “exclusion” (ex-sistence) from the signifying network – enables a “signified effect” to take place, i.e. it enables the “meaningfulness” of the in-sisting signifying network. Phallus is thus “the currency of signifiers”: it takes on the function of “all” meanings, i.e. is a “general equivalent” of meaning, but itself lacks any meaning. It is nothing but a “pulsating force” between “everything” and “nothing” (Žižek, 1982: 13).
This statement reminds us of a picture by Keith Haring hanging in Patti Smith’s kitchen. It depicts an ascending phallus turning into a clenched fist and holding tightly onto a helpless little man. I surmise, following Iztok Geister, that all this takes place at the “intersection” of consumerism, i.e. at the intersection where the exchange of goods happens, at that “in-between” where, according to Lyotard, “ontological thinking takes place: amidst different discourses – linguistic, social, legal, epistemological, political, artistic, and historical (interdisciplinary?, we might say ) –, in oppositions, or as an activation of oppositions, i.e. with a certain aftertaste of ethics or epistemology” (Bunta 2013: 125). I will elaborate on what I mean by ethics below. Let us illuminate (henargeia, “that which in itself and of itself radiates and brings itself to life” /Heidegger 1999: 146/) this “crossroads formed by products shelved in supermarkets” with another quotation from the Slovene philosopher:
“Phallus” is an intersection of pure “exteriority” (body as an independent factor resisting dictates of rational will) and of pure “interiority” (thoughts relinquishing their roles as direct representations of “external” reality) […] Phallus is a pulsating force between “everything” and “nothing”, and functions as “the currency of signifiers”: isn’t money a general equivalent and mediator of all goods, i.e. a good that potentially contains all other goods and upon which all other goods depend, but is, in itself, incapable of doing anything – of satisfying its own needs – for it has no value? Money is therefore a factor, which – by its own exclusion (ex-sistence) – “totalizes” the world of goods. (Žižek 1982: 17)
Isn’t this remarkably similar to ideas propounded by Roland Barthes (see above)? “According to Saussure, the value of a sign is established by the specific position it takes in relation to other signs in the linguistic system; the importance of value is far greater than that of sense (meaning): the importance of a thought or an auditory material contained in a sign is far less important than that of signs surrounding it” (Barthes, 1971: 354). I hope this shows what crucial role the “pure-signifier poetry” plays in neoliberal paradigm. It has nothing to do with the celebration of consumerism or enthusiasm for designed appearances using wrappings as tools of artistic performance, as one might (wrongfully) deduce from not only poems by Geister and Kermauner, but also from the famous Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol. What it reveals is something much more profound and far-reaching, namely that the existence of neoliberal paradigm is impossible without the abyss of Being characterized by the bare signifier emerging at the intersection of what might tortuously be called art or poetry. I say tortuously, for it forces us to take a radical turn from what poetry (in an attempt to hide this existential abyss) used to be, regardless of the fact that poetic creativity mostly still swirls in old circles, thus imitating the role endowed to it by Hegel in his attempt to return to the absolute knowledge.
What are some of the strategies accompanying this radical turn/descent into new spaces? Is it enough to speak of “development and use of new vocabularies” and “metaphoric redescriptions of nature rather than insights into the intrinsic nature of nature”, as claimed by Rorty (1989: 17)? What is the “syntax” structuring the pure-signifier poetry, pointing to that “Nothingness” that neither “is” nor “isn’t”, that Nothingness “nothinging the world in its epochal worldhood” (Paić 2006: 176). And what onto-political implications does it all have for the world of neoliberal paradigm?
The signified (according to de Saussure) “differs from the signified in one aspect only: unlike the latter, it doesn’t function as a mediator” (Barthes 1971: 344). But on the other hand, “the signified can only be delineated through the act of signification” (ibid.). What does this tell us? First of all, it tells us that once the signifier is “freed” from its mediating role in a process where “signifying” is understood as “carrying meaning” in a linguistic compound that (i) is arbitrary from the a priori, but not from the a posteriori perspective, and (ii) mediates meanings that are well-established, defined or even commanded in the world of global social symbolic constellations and social hierarchies, i.e. once it is freed from its role of being a vehicle of communication responsible for mediating authorized messages, the signifier no longer performs the cybernetic function of spreading ideologically structured bits of information, and no longer points (not even covertly) to some “other/external reality”, but constitutes (“situates”) this reality in all its realness and nakedness. And secondly, it tells us that the formation and perception of a written record is no longer determined by the traditional, one-way “syntax” of meaning, but has to do with bare, “dis-orderly” signification operating at the level of graphic sensation, yet in such a manner as to persist in the clearing that
radiates [in itself and of itself] and brings itself to light. In the Greek language, one is not speaking about the action of seeing, about videre, but about that which gleams and radiates. But it can radiate only if openness has already been granted. The beam of light does not first create the opening, openness, it only traverses it. It is only such openness that grants to living and receiving and to any evidence at all what is free, in which they can remain and must move. All philosophical thinking that explicitly or inexplicitly follows the call “to the thing itself” is already admitted to the freespace of the opening in its movement and with its method. (Heidegger 1999: 146-147).
It is only in light of such openness that the true scope of poetry in the sense of reism reveals itself. It is not merely a form of re-created language, still held tightly in the grip of signification game, albeit claiming to have successfully denied it, to have eradicated it from the string of signifiers, to have “moved away from it”; instead, it acts as a “space” of empty absences, as an empty signifier, as “phallus” embodying a crossroads, an open space, where the game of signifiers is realized as bare foreplay, bare pulsating between “everything” and “nothing” which was originally supposed to have been filled by signifiers; it is the “thing itself” in light of that basic, rudimentary call constituting phenomenology. It therefore has nothing in common with market fetish worshipping, utilitarian give-and-take, or fetishization of some new type of beauty, but emerges precisely through the eradication of such fetishization, through pure spacing, through the liberation from the shadow of fetish and the disclosure of the abyss of emptied human being-in-the-world. It is here that the difference between various “reisms” lies. It is well known that saying something doesn’t necessarily mean doing it. For it is not enough to speak about something, to name it – poetry has to enact it, to point it out. And this, despite all the talk of “moving out” in Šalamun’s poems, is the main difference between Geister’s non-declarative and Šalamun’s declarative poetry. The latter’s “reism” of playful speech gestures successfully obfuscated the radical reism of Geister, Kermauner and Hanžek, and introduced into the Slovene literary canon its surrogate, its image or appearance, its nihilist shadow, thus deluding not only Slovene but also global public opinion. Or in other (and slightly more radical) words, the main reason why Šalamun’s poetry proved successful lies in its benign, harmless inner form, in the fact that the practices of its background ideology merge seamlessly with the neoliberal nihilist paradigm and its capitalization of “subversive appearances”, which are nothing but subordinate vehicles of profit aggregates.
Incomprehensible things are things in their cunningness
unreachable to the furies of the living
invulnerable in their permanent flow
you never catch up with them
you never grasp them
motionless in their fixed glare.
(cf. T. Šalamun in Brejc 1978: 13)
It is immediately obvious that this poem, although it speaks of “things”, has nothing to do with the “silent sound of things themselves”: it toys with their images, their pictures, with ways of speaking about things, but never touches upon things themselves or upon the pure signifier. The letters and words are all mediators of exaggerated meaning pertaining to the unreachability of things, describing reality as an anthropomorphic reflection, an image, an imitation, a representation of some external reality (of some “abstract thing”). The stance taken by the author towards this external reality is authoritative and arrogant, for he speaks of external objects from the heights of uninvolved distance. All this is blatantly obvious, and becomes even more prominent when we initiate an analysis of symbolic egocentrism that is so profoundly typical of Šalamun’s poetry, an analysis disclosing “the presence of a concept essential to his thought, but absent from his discourse [… and] the effect of the structure on its elements [when] the production of the epistemic object produces the cognitive appropriation of its real object, which exists outside thought in the real world” (Althusser 2007: 30). The same pattern can be seen in Šalamun’s famous lines from the beginning of the so-called “Eclipse” series (published in the Poker collection): “I grew tired of the image of my tribe and moved out” (Šalamun 1989: 21). He might’ve grown tired, but he definitely hasn’t moved out and has merely pretended to have done so – unlike Iztok Geister who actually has moved out and has been successful in producing a key turn in poetry without ever overtly emphasizing on it. Geister’s poetry shows a completely different symbolic structure and successfully avoids Šalamun’s distancing and anthropomorphising approaches, for it never describes, but merely unfolds, discloses, reveals in the nakedness of the signifier, beyond images and meta-images, beyond metaphors and metonymies.
The essence of Šalamun’s poetic methodology is vividly reflected in the following words by Jean Baudrillard:
As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked deterrence and simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the production of equivalent signs. [underlined by I. O.] When it is threatened today by simulation (the threat of vanishing in the play of signs), power risks the real, risks crisis, it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, political stakes. This is a question of life or death for it. (Baudrillard 1999: 34)
The second part of the quotation carries the seed of a critical analysis of neoliberal paradigm that I will later try to propound in utopian (and seemingly paradoxical) terms, and thus provide a working alternative from the future. But before taking this next step, let’s return to our two poems, which were left, naked and alone, amidst deconstructive gnawing on poetic fragments, fragments that were mentioned not to lead us to some grandiose synthetic conclusion or maybe even a programme of some sorts, but strictly to instantiate the “reistic” aggregate of everyday life in that particular discourse described by Paić as
the possibility of enacting the turn within the being of art itself. Art belongs to the being of the event that is irreducible in its openness … [it belongs to] being and time in that which is new and belongs to that mysterious being of the Greek word poiesis … The irreducible power of art lies in the event of absolute freedom manifesting itself beyond and among absolute politics and aesthetics. It is necessary that we break through and touch upon the deepest depths of the abyss. (Paić 2013: 29)
The experience of the abyss bears remarkable similarities to Heidegger’s thoughts on death (sein zum Tod) or, as pointed out by Derrida in his reflections on the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka: “Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom” (2004). This, then, is the ontological dimension of ludism, which is more than mere toying with words, as confirmed by the tragic destiny of the author of the first poem who committed suicide shortly after the publication of his collection.
Two poems
»HOMO MENSURA« NAILS
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»HOMO MENSURA« NAILS
So, this is Kermauner’s poem taken from his collection Luknja v novcu (A Hole in a Twopence), self-published in 1966 and then reprinted in 2003 in Fraktal (KUD Apokalipsa). The poem is particularly interesting in that it lends itself to a parallel reading with the first poem from the “Eclipse” series in Šalamun’s Poker: Out of long nails/I weld limbs for my new body; or with the second poem from the same series: I will take nails,/ long nails/ and hammer them into my body. Aleš Kermauner succeeded in skilfully expressing everything Šalamun wrote, and more, by performatively pointing out the historical paradigm of liberalism, its logo- and anthropocentrism, in the spirit of the Vitruvian man, the famous drawing by Leonardo de Vinci portraying a man with his hands and legs apart inscribed in a circle. In his poem, structured against the teleological background of the modern conceptualization of the crucified Christ, Kermauner refrains from any reflective verbiage or overt self-reference, while Šalamun’s verses abound with logocentic and powerful, cynically narcissistic images of a poet seated on the exposed and self-privileged throne of the traditional lyrical subject, and fully exploit these images in order to (re)create the “informel” installation of perverted suffering of Christ on the cross – an image firmly rooted in the ideological and authoritative misuses and abuses of the Roman-Catholic Church – thus instrumentalizing it and reducing it to the level of upholstery trade (Only the nails will remain…). I will not go into a detailed onto-theological analysis of Šalamun’s cynical project. It is much more interesting to note that of the whole generation of excellent and radical poets, the Slovene canon preserved only Šalamun’s poetic approaches and acknowledged him to be the only representative of the repressed generation of experimental poets capable of captivating the canonized phalanx of Slovene modern poets, but blatantly discarded the approaches of all those who, staying true to the living tradition of experimental poetry, followed the trace outside of logo-centric metaphysics in the “spacing” of poetry understood as the deconstruction of sign and writing. It is no coincidence that Šalamun proved so successful in the context of global neoliberalism, a phenomenon to which we will return at the end of our discussion.
Let’s now move on to the second poem, VKLADNI SPAH (WOODWELDING JOINT) by Iztok Geister. It was published in Žalostna majna (Indian Myna) (Državna založba Slovenije, 1969).
first board of half thickness
first board of half height
second board of half height
second board of half thickness
This poem takes us into the very heart of experimental poetry, into the domain of non-linearity and differánce, of hints and traces. The title of the poem is a reiteration of the same meaning: “wood welding” denotes a process in which two or more pieces of wood are welded together (a technique more commonly used for joining plastics or metal), while “joint”, at least in this particular context, denotes a place or a part where two or more things are connected or joined. But this double reference to a composite “(id)entity”, i.e. a place or a process connecting/joining two or more elements, also hints at the domain of difference: there can be no composite (id)entities without their diverse constituents. The poem thus deals with what is both identical and different, the same and variegated – with differánce, in short. Within traditional framework of painting with words one might conjure up an image of, say, a door coupled with a thorough description of how its frame or threshold is constructed, i.e. with a precise symbol of traditional craftsmanship responsible for designing and constructing solid foundations and consequently a reliable entry/exit to anyone appearing “at its doorstep”. This brings to mind a question once posed by Heidegger in his essay Origin of the Work of Art – one of the essays we had to absolve at the literary-philosophical seminar held by late professor Dušan Pirjevec. The question reads: “What is a thing?” In his essay, Heidegger mentions a coal out of the Ruhr, logs out of the Black Forest and a pair of peasant shoes in a painting by Van Gogh. These shoes urge us to follow the line of thought weaving through the essay slowly, in a step-by-step fashion. But the essay is well-known, and I will not go into another re-reading of its major points. The reason I mention it, is to point out that the traditional reading of Geister’s poem, claiming that its main goal is to convey an image of a wooden door, would be utterly misleading: it would reduce the act of reading to the act of analyzing images of things, and thus force us to interpret the door as a metaphor for the foundation/fundament. This would move us away from the poem itself and situate us in the realm of “the transcendental signified”, in the impossible presence of the absence, in the image of the world presupposing that everything in it is synchronized according to some deep underlying principle or scientific law. In other words, it would presuppose that the poem focuses primarily on a direct/indirect mediation of this (transcendental) meaning and that the sense of the world pertains to either clear or obscure foundations that are not material, but metaphysical, since the very materiality, as conceived by logocentric traditions, is “always technical and representative, [instrumentalized and having] no essential meaning” (Derrida 1998: 22). And it is important to realize that it cannot have such an essential meaning, for none of us is in possession of Transcendentality, i.e. of “Being” disclosed in this particular situatedness (i.e. as myself). Moreover, what exactly is this “matter” (“materiality”) that is the current topic of our discussion? Does it refer to the wooden framework of the door that is being described or to the materiality of the very description, i.e. of the signifier of the signifier, the written, printed word as such?
Another point deserves special mention: a careful reader will notice that the poem is devoid of all verbs, most notably of the verb “to be”:
Is such an absence possible and how is it to be interpreted? This is not an absence of a word from a lexicon; in the first place because the function “to be” is conveyed by several words in the Indo-European languages [to live, to appear, to reside]. No more is it the absence of a determined semantic content, of a simple signified, since “to be” signifies nothing determinable; thus, it is even less the absence of a thing that could be referred to.
The question has been asked by Heidegger: “Let us suppose that this indeterminate meaning of Being does not exist and that we also do not understand what this meaning means. What then? Would there merely be a noun and a verb less in our language? No. There would be no language at all. No being as such would disclose itself in words, it would no longer be possible to invoke it and speak about it in words. For to speak of a being as such includes: to understand it in advance as a being, that is, to understand its Being.” […] [Heidegger’s distinction between the sense of “Being” from the word “Being” and the concept of “Being”] amounts to saying that it is no longer the presence in a language of the word or (signified) concept “Being” or “to be” that he makes into the condition for the Being-language of language, but an entirely other possibility [underlined by I.O.] that remains to be defined. (Derrida 2013: 329)
This lengthy quotation prevents us from stumbling into the abyss that opens up when boundless depths of the “absent presence” of the word “Being” disclose themselves (in Geister’s poem). The central effect of the poem is none other than the bare pulsating of empty, un-signified Being emerging from the abyss as an unnamed presence of this alternative possibility, unreachable to any name or signifier, yet constituting the very condition of not only language but of the world as a whole. Art is the event of the abyss of nothingness understood as absolute freedom, unimpeded by any concept or limited meaning. The poetic translocation of piled up words is thus not merely a useful means for tinkering with them, but situates Being as the naked, non-existent condition of language and the world as such; it is therefore the fundamental aggregate, the machinery of singularity constituting language and the world in their openness to Dasein. One of the radical peaks of conceptual reductionism goes by the name of arte povera, i.e. of minimalist art. There is no doubt that Geister is a typical representative of arte povera: in his work, poetry is reduced to its very Being, to that fateful Event/Descent, shorn of all redundancies, determinisms and transcendentalities, to the bare Nothingness, to the breeze of Emptiness persisting in the process of occurring/emerging as the spacing/situatedness of openness within the boundless reaches of time. This is why it is possible to claim that Geister’s poem provides a genuine, i.e. a disclosed (aletheia) answer to Heidegger’s dilemma of how to properly delineate this alternative possibility. Could it be that it also provides an answer to that famous problem to which Heidegger himself could find no answer: “How can we, in light of the enormous multifariousness of beings, grasp the unity underlying the notion of Being?” (Petrovič 1986: lxv). Perhaps by conceiving the nature of things and words as things of nature? I have no intention of proposing an answer to this question and prefer to leave it open until some other occasion presents itself. In any case, the challenge posed by the question manifests itself as a constituting event that is already disclosed in the openness of that being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-Sein).
Grammé
The fact that poems are written entities confronts us with linguistic complexities that have been the focus of philosophical and scientific research from the Stoics onwards. It is no secret that in the 20th century written language received the most thorough and elaborate treatment by the Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida. If we want to delve into the deepest depths of Geister’s poem, it is therefore necessary to acquaint ourselves with Derrida’s ideas laid fort in his book Of Grammatology (1998). I’m saying this as a well-informed thinker. The problem of the signifier (i.e. of written or printed letters), which is the main focus of our linguistic (but also semiologic, semiotic etc.) analysis, is closely connected to Derrida’s critical examination of the Western logocentric tradition (called “metaphysical” from Plato onwards), and his findings fit nicely with the general theme of this article. Most readers are probably familiar with Derrida’s ideas, so there is no need for me to go into all the details about his work. Let me just briefly mention some of the “key” points in Geister’s poetry. It will be remembered that earlier on in our study I mentioned Slavoj Žižek and the fact that some of his passages provide a fairly up-to-date theoretical reflection of the underlying poetic material. But with Derrida’s Grammatology, we are on a completely new level, for his theory precedes poetic experimentation. It is not clear whether Geister was familiar with Derrida’s work; Pogačnik’s notes indicate that the he and Geister might’ve been familiar with his analyses:
Texts consist of words. Words consist of lines. The function of lines is to visually (i.e. in the form of letters) signalize individual sounds. In texts, lines are hidden behind the sounds of letters. How can then a line (as a basic constituent of the page in addition to ink and paper) come out in the open, if not through a drawing? Lines in a drawing will stand for themselves, if that drawing consciously reflects back on itself. A drawing consisting of lines is an indispensible part of newspapers and magazines. Visual poetry, also known as topographic poetry, is the disclosure of this differentiated (visual and auditory) functioning of lines. (Brejc 1978: 13)
These lines bear a striking resemblance to some of the ideas found in Derrida’s text. But they need one final “tweak”:
It is thus the idea of the sign that must be deconstructed through a meditation upon writing which would merge, as it must, with the undoing [sollicitation] of onto-theology, faithfully repeating it in its totality and making it insecurein its most assured evidences. One is necessarily led to this from the moment that the trace affects the totality of the sign in both its faces. That the signified is originally and essentially (and not only for a finite and created spirit) trace, that it is always already in the position of the signifier,is the apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon writing as its death and its resource. (Derrida 1998: 93–94)
Regardless of whether Pogačnik and Geister were familiar with Derrida’s work or not, it is obvious that they successfully instigated the deconstruction of the sign. And it is equally unimportant whether their reflections on the necessity of deconstructing ontotheological positions of the sign and writing developed against the Heideggerian background of historical thinking and analytics of disclosing Dasein in light of ontological difference or not. A clear indication of “deconstructive tendencies” in their poetry can be seen in the design of the OHO sign, the sign that would eventually come to represent the whole movement, even though it soon loss its radical edge and went back to tinkering with games that could no longer bear the weight of the openness initially proposed and demanded by the two protagonists. But I will not go into that here. The fact is that Geister’s poetry discloses itself as the movement of the trace of the transcendental, non-present signified in the pure signifier. In other words, it manifests itself as a game of the signifier in light of the radical “challenge to logocentrism, as a break with the deepest of Western traditions” (ibid.: 120). It therefore constitutes a radical turn away from the sign in which the signifier is conceived as an instrument of the signified (meaning, logos, sense) to the sign in which the signifier is disclosed in all its nakedness, i.e. in the absence of the signified, which now, for the benefit of the signifier as signifier (signifier as such), assumes the role of the trace of the former signifier and consequently of a structural partner/perspective. Namely, the signifier determines the absence (of the signified) which is not some later event but a structural fact that is there from the very beginning and reveals the status of the sign as the differánce. The same can be phrased with recursion to “phallus” (see above): “Phallus as a signifier is precisely the signifier-without-signified, i.e. a paradoxical point of “pure” signifier, which – through its “exclusion” (ex-sistence) from the signifying network – enables a “signified effect” to take place, i.e. it enables the “meaningfulness” of the in-sisting signifying network.” (Žižek 1982: 13). The trace is thus
the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside: spacing. The outside, “spatial” and “objective” exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear without the grammé, without difference as temporalisation, without the non-presence of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present. (Derrida 1998: 90)
The trace or the bare game of the signifier is thus equivalent to spacing, i.e. to the appearance of the grammé “as such (that is to say according to a new structure of non-presence)” (ibid.: 108), to the constitution of the deconstructive game of “writing as a game within language” (ibid.: 66). Writing implies that “[f]rom the very opening of the game, then, we are within the becoming-unmotivated of the symbol […] The immotivation of the trace ought now to be understood as an operation and not as a state, as an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given structure” (ibid.), or to put it in Deleuzean terms, the poem is the aggregate of the becoming-unmotivated, it is an operation, a movement of the difference of the signifier as the differánce itself. And this is precisely what we see in Geister’s poem. Setting aside the entangled question of what the poet really wanted, let’s assume that he wanted to pursue what has often been called “reism”, i.e. an attempt of portraying the bare nakedness of things in their materiality and thus reaching the signifier as such, since, so the assumption goes, “words, letters, lines” point to themselves and not to some particular (external) reference. But the word as such can be active merely as a sign of the absence that has been absent from the very start of trying to conceive the sign as a mediator of the transcendental signifier proffering to be the presence of the absent logos or god. More generally, the word can be active merely as the pure absence, as the signifier as signifier anchored in the game of signifiers as signifiers for other signifiers, and not as the signifier in service of the signified, i.e. of meaning, sense, or some other “other-than-itself”. The signifier as signifier (as pure absence) is situated in the beyond that opens up once “the ontological and transcendental problematic [is] seriously exhausted; [once] the question of the meaning of being, the being of the entity and of the transcendental origin of the world – of the world-ness of the world – [is] patiently and rigorously worked through, the critical movement of the Husserlian and Heideggerian questions [are] followed to the very end, and their effectiveness and legibility [are] conserved” (ibid.). Ludism, play and reism as “instigators of bare creativity” are not identical to light playfulness and frivolous toying with words found in conversational humour or auditory play of words and ideas, but demand deeper engagement initiating the deconstruction of the very foundation of this engagement, i.e. of its very subject, or better yet, of the engagement itself conceived as subject and logos. The trace constitutes the premetaphysical, preontological event as the experience of “the abyss of the absolute emptiness of our being-in-the-world” and “absolute freedom” (Paić), as the event of the trace manifesting itself in the artistic spacing of the signifier and the deconstruction of the presence of absence. The phonological foundation of language understood as a dictate to writing is the suppression of the seriousness of writing as protowriting situated outside of the ontotheological horizon of the absence as presence and phenomenology of writing (ibid.: 87). Poetry exposes itself (s’expose) as a performative act of the event and not as its descriptive interpretation referring to the presence as absence, to the transcendentality as the self-declared spacing of the signifier and not as aletheia of its absence.
Articulation of the Signifier
So, what is it that directs the game of signifiers in the trace of this absence? Stemming from the findings of A. Leroi-Gourhan, Derrida provides the following historical answer:
The “line” represents only a particular model, whatever might be its privilege. This model has become a model and, as a model, remains inaccessible. […] This enigmatic model of the line is thus the very thing that philosophy could not see when it had its eyes open on the interior of its own history. (ibid.: 111)
A bit further he adds: “The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book” (ibid.). One of the possible replies to his conclusion is non-linearity. This fits nicely with the explanation offered by Iztok Geister at the already mentioned exhibition dedicated to Marko Pogačnik held at the Moderna galerija gallery in Ljubljana. At the opening of the exhibition, Geister produced the famous publication where the famous OHO sign first made its appearance. “Pages of this book can be changed, their order can be reversed, it can be read backwards etc.” It is clear that this is no longer a traditional book where lines dominate the order of signifiers and subdue them to the signifier, i.e. to the (supposedly conveyed) meaning/message, to the cruel logics of cybernetic communication machinery conceived as a supervised “message-conveying” medium. Non-linearity, a dynamism taking place amidst the very act of signifying, manifests itself in the constant shifting of signifiers, as a series of perforations followed by performances. But how is all this embodied in Geister’s poem?
The poem consists of two couplets. The first couplet speaks of the first board, the second of the second board. The first line refers to the half thickness of the first board, the third to the half thickness of the second board; the second line speaks of the half height of the first board, the fourth line of the half height of the second board. All the words in the poem, except for the “first” and “second board”, repeat themselves, but they are reiterated in a mirror or reverse fashion: the first couplet starts with the mentioning of thickness, while the second one starts with the mentioning of height. Linearity is thus reversed, switched – a turn takes place in the middle of the poem that no longer speaks of concrete boards, of thicknesses and heights, but presents us with a series of signifiers bearing traces of forgone meanings. However, it is clear that these fragmentary meanings are not of primary importance, but are merely reminders of former functions played by individual words that, in the context of Geister’s poem, turn out to be completely nonsensical. They constitute a poetic woodwelding joint devoid of all meaning and referring solely to itself, a unique poetic gadgetry infused by non-linearity of reversed series of signifiers. This poetic woodwelding joint is not a representation of some wooden product, but a trace constituting the poem as an empty signifier, as a grammé as such, as a spacing of the deconstruction game of texts, letters, lines and words emptied of all signified meaning. What is left is merely an institution of unmotivated traces functioning as momentary recollections of something that has never existed, something that fades away once we situate ourselves amidst the letters and words in their bare embodiment of the signifier without the signified.
Let’s now take a look at the 7th poem from the Muha cycle (The Fly) published in the same collection (Geister 1969: 10):
Pants fly towards the fly
Fly flies away
Flies pant towards the pants
Pants pant away
Again, the poem consists of two couplets. And again, we notice a certain rupture taking place in the middle of the poem: a certain discontinuity that interrupts the linearity of the expected, traditionally understood series of words driven by meaning. The trace manifests itself as the absence of the signified that has traditionally instrumentalized the signifier in the game of logos/meaning. But the signified is now no longer present. The trace consists of a series of empty signifiers that don’t signify non-sense, but point, in the absence of sense and meaning, to something completely different, to some primary operation of signifiers without their corresponding signifieds, to the spacing of the empty grammé discussed above, to writing conceived not only as a medium of graphic signification but consisting of letters as such, letters that cannot be instrumentalized within the context of cybernetic communication used in ideological choreography and manipulation of the signifier, but disclose an “alternative space”, a “beyond” rising above the ruins of deconstructed onto-theo-theleology and opening up “the possibility of the turn from within the Being of the art itself, the turn belonging to the Being of the event which is irreducible in its openness. Neither religious nor political nor aesthetical nor autonomous nor heteronomous – the event of openness of being and time, the event of the encounter with that which is new, which is now-arriving, belongs to the mysterious Being of the Greek word poiesis … Poets are not efficient (Croat. djelotvorni) when they take on the roles of heralds of the truth of the Event in the world, which is neither eternal nor transient, but final in its unique openness” (Paić 2013: 28). The poetry of the signifier-without-signified understood as machinery embodying the irreducible event of the openness of Being deconstructs the ontotheological epoch of metaphysics by constituting the trace in the presence of its absence. This raises several important questions, e.g. the question of the subject, the analysis of Dasein etc., but I will, for reasons of time and space, not go into them here.
Neoliberal Paradigm Strikes Back
In his famous book The Anxiety of Influence, the mighty Harald Bloom notes: “My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death” (1999: 11). His great admirer, Richard Rorty, adds: “In my view, an ideal liberal polity would be one whose culture hero is Bloom’s strong poet, rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the ‘truth-seeking’, ‘logical, ‘objective’ scientist” (Rorty 1989: 53). And just a few passages later he identifies the image of the strong poet with that of the utopian revolutionary: “…the heroes of liberal society are the strong poet and the utopian revolutionary” (ibid.: 60). But it is important to note here that what Rorty had in mind was the idea of a hero protesting “in the name of the society itself against those aspects of the society which are unfaithful to its own self-image” (ibid.). Although I find myself in general agreement with Rorty on the question of identifying the strong poet and the utopian revolutionary, I don’t necessarily concur with his ideas in general. His conceptual framework is highly controversial, especially if we consider the image of the society he had in mind when making this suggestion. Despite calling it liberal, I’m afraid that, unlike his American colleague Noam Chomsky, his liberalism is very close to orthodox neo-liberalism. This, at least, was the impression I got when I attended Rorty’s lecture at the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin in 2001, where he repeatedly denounced all criticism of American militarism as anti-American and labelled civilian casualties as unavoidable collateral damage in a generally acceptable attempt to spread democracy into “pre-emptively” assaulted “terrorist” states (Afghanistan, later Iraq).
As already mentioned, I’m generally sympathetic to the idea of seeing (experimentalist) poets as utopian revolutionaries. This, of course, doesn’t imply that they have to partake in political activism, but that they count as the instigators of the already embodied subversive machinery of experimental poetry generating constructive alternatives to neoliberal nihilism and creating ontological and revolutionary utopias manifesting themselves as the event of the abyss of truth within the context of spacing (see above).
Theoreticians tend to draw parallels between signifying practices and exchange value in economics. The Danish linguist Hjelmslev, for example, bases his notion of schemes or language games on the Sausseurean tradition, but generally prefers comparing the linguistic value with the “’value of exchange in the economic sciences’” (Derrida 1998: 75). Similarly, Žižek conceives “phallus” as the signifier-without-signified, as the pulsation between “everything” and “nothing” operating as “the currency of signifiers”. He writes: “Isn’t money a general equivalent and mediator of all goods, i.e. a good that potentially contains all other goods and upon which all other goods depend, but is, in itself, incapable of doing anything – of satisfying its own needs – for it has no value? Money is therefore a factor, which – by its own exclusion (ex-sistence) – ‘totalizes’ the world of goods” (Žižek 1982: 17). It would seem reasonable to challenge neoliberal paradigm with its disciplinary measures, its strategies of (ideological) censorship over “threatening topics” and “inappropriate themes”, its restrictions of social dialogue and nihilism-provoking aspects, its destructive practices, its scientific and technical instrumentalizations of the world rub by the needs of capital and profit, on the grounds of the poetic event understood as the pulsation of the signifier-without-signified, of the event of the openness of Being. In other words, it would seem reasonable to challenge it in light of the neoliberal counter-strike with its adamant attempts to suppress the fateful event of experimental poetry within the clearing of poetry itself and substitute it with the so-called epic model which destroys the non-linearity of the signifier-without-signified and instrumentalizes the signifier, in the field of cybernetic meaning, into a vessel of the signifier in the function of a strictly limited referentiality whose influences and motives lie outside of poetry. The attempts of marginalizing poetry and turning it into an autonomous ghetto situated at the periphery of neoliberal posthumous monologizing or even droning (lalange), and its transformation into an endless informational flux that uncritically reproduces strategies and methods of neoliberal discourse with its nonchalant stringing of words of absent presences of logocentric descriptivism needs to be understood not only as a symptom of suppression of poetic creativity in the sense of poesis but also as a symptom of the suppression as such, i.e. as suppression in the sense of value exchange as market fetish and of the element of capital as the perpetual flow of profits.
Nowadays, it is no longer brokers peering into computer screens and barking out their speculations into microphones who do the purchasing or selling; they are being quickly replaced by super-fast computers whose reaction-times are measured in nano-seconds. The flow of capital is thus governed and controlled by digital cybernetic machines, embodiments of modern scientism and technicism. The only role left for a human being in the overall scheme of things is that of a “pro-grammer”, i.e. of a writer of algorithms governing and controlling these processes (if at all). Let me recur to a different discourse that deals with the same problem. Ivan Illich points out the difference between a “natural” vernacular language and an artificial “mother language”, i.e. a language of “social” control, and pleads for the so-called vernacular language as the authentic language of liberation from the class society. In his words:
As soon as I raise the distinction between vernacular values and values susceptible of economic measurement and, therefore, of being administered, some self-appointed tutor of the so-called proletariat will tell me that I am avoiding the critical issue by giving importance to noneconomic niceties. Should we not seek first the just distribution of commodities that correlate to basic needs? Poetry and fishing shall then be added without more thought or effort. So goes the reading of Marx and the Gospel of St. Matthew as interpreted by the theology of liberation. (Illich 2012: 211)
Although the discourse used by Ivan Illich in his discussion on vernacular language differs from the one used in this article, it nonetheless indicates a tight connection between language and economy. The analysis of what he refers to as a “vernacular” would probably lead to similar conclusions as the ones reached in this essay, for it is crucial for any theology of liberation to be liberated from both (onto-)theology and vulgar conceptions of liberation understood as a political independence of foreign rulers. The independence of foreign rulers needs to be understood here on a much greater scale than that of mere political independence. Freedom/liberation is based on the destiny of Being in the sense of deconstruction of modern metaphysical scientism and technicism. By controlling the flow of the capital which, in turn, is controlled by digital cybernetic machinery, metaphysical scientism and technicism also exert control over politically “independent” states. It would be worthwhile to consider to what extent is the cybernetic machinery still dependent of the programmer and his algorithms and to what extent are the programmer and his algorithms dependent on the cybernetic machinery and the system of profit demands. This brings us to the question of virtual reality, which is all but “free”, for it is determined by the Lyotardian logologos (Bunta 2009: 119), or by its modern version – the “capitalist techno-science” (ibid.: 118): “[C]ybernetic program [is] the field of writing” (Derrida 1998: 19). However, the computer programmer doesn’t write his grammé (pro-gram) as an “instance of the instituted trace”, but as a prologue, as an opening speech, into which he installs his declarative decision, a scientific-technical axiom/logos or capitalist raison d’etre in the spirit of the hiddenness of the trace as the destiny or openness of Being, i.e. as “pure functionalism of an era taking on the guise of cognitive capitalism and pervading the space-time of total capital mobilization understood as a posthumous product/capital in its pure immateriality” (Paić 2013: 29), i.e. as a completely destructive nihilism, as a bare sovereignty instrumentalizing human life (and all other life forms) in an endless process of profit/slaughter/destruction. The pro-gram/algorithm is functionalized within the topos of a nihilistic discourse rooted in ontology of scientism and technicism, and is being constantly challenged by the practical pro-gram of experimental poetry hailing under the banner of the deconstruction of that same ontotheological prologue/terror; it therefore constitutes the event with genuinely subversive, political connotations – not in the sense of future presence or upcoming rebellion, but in the utopian sense of the truth emerging as an already situated event of freedom and manifesting itself outside of the totality of political and aesthetic order. The question of utopia in the historical post-(end-of-history) perspective: utopia as Sein und Dichtung (a paraphrase of the title of the role of thinking in Sein und Lichtung undertaken by Heidegger himself /1999:154), because poetry relates to writing, its voice being the track/signifier and its reading or reciting a production of the trace in the context of the grammé pulsating between “everything” and “nothing”, while not being identical to any of them.
It is therefore not surprising that the neoliberal regime shows keen interest in these problems and employs a great number of top-notch intellectuals, theoreticians and philosophers to keep a keen eye on the developments in these fields. It has been pointed out on numerous occasions that the most penetrating critics and analysts provide the most valuable intellectual capital and thus need to be reciprocated by appropriately high wages. That is the main reason why it is almost impossible to find anyone of their calibre and ingenuity working as a cosmopolitan intellectual outside of state institutes, faculties, universities and other “mind tasks” or gigantic laboratories (knowledge-producing power stations). This trend has now become so deeply entrenched that it has even succeeded in turning subversiveness itself into a commodity on the free market (Harvey’s “monopoly rent”). The times of class struggle are long gone, and the world is tightly intertwined in a global system whose final phases don’t seem to be (directly) controlled by anyone. Issues of freedom, authentic life, ethical stance, activism, the right to live, ecology, bare survival, political crime, mass murders etc. are all constituent parts of the discourse they try to undermine. “The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it” (Derrida, 1998: 36). What does this tell us about poetry, especially experimental poetry? How does it portray poetry beyond its marginalization and ghetto-esque autonomy as the “grammer” of that old Greek word poiesis in the sense of emptiness within the abyss of ontological difference?
The problem of unwritten, unread writings
The Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells writes: “The greatest danger is for those who become invisible to the programs commanding the global networks of production, distribution, and valuation” (Castells 2012: 513). The same is true for those who have been invisible from time immemorial, i.e. for suppressed, anonymous “subaltern groups or groupings”, to borrow the term from the post-colonial studies denoting those whose (mediated, suppressed, silenced or unspoken) voices and truths have never been acknowledged by either the public or the government. This doesn’t have to be a colonialist suppression or a political eradication; the reason for such “subaltern” phenomenon can be structural in nature, i.e. it can stem from the context-establishing practices of the language itself. The French philosopher Jacques Ranciére states that politics
is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking. The politics of literature thus means that literature as literature is involved in this partition of the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world. (Ranciére, 2004: 10)
The way we write – the way our writing is structured, the way it formulates the signified – determines our relation to external conditions of social reflection and the extent to which we embrace the currently dominant discourse. This is also reflected in the manner in which we practice the act of signifying:
Literature as the modern regime of the art of writing, to the old world of representation and “belles-lettres” is not the opposition between two states of the language. Nor is it an opposition between the servitude of mimesis and the autonomy of self-referential writing. It is the opposition of two ways of linking meaning and action, of framing the relation between the sayable and the visible, of enabling words with the power of framing a common world. It is an opposition between two ways of doing things with words. (ibid.: 13)
Writing in the manner of grammé, i.e. as the signifier embodying the trace, articulates a certain defence of Being – a defence that is visible and integrated, a defence that shatters the suppression and manipulation within structural formations that legalize certain types of writing while marginalizing or even preventing others. But when writing sheds off the bonds of metaphysical tradition, when the signifier-without-signified is articulated in conceptual poetry, it simultaneously transforms “the division of the sensible, visible, speakable” (ibid. 10).
For their nature as poetic signs is the same as their nature as historical results and political symptoms. This “politics” of literature emerges as the dismissal of the politics of orators and militants, who conceive of politics as a struggle of wills and interests. […] Literature as such displays a two-fold politics, a two-fold manner of reconfiguring sensitive data. On the one hand, it displays the power of literariness, the power of the “mute” letter that upsets not only the hierarchies of the representational system but also any principle of adequation between a way of being and a way of speaking. […] On the other hand, it sets in motion another politics of the mute letter: the side-politics or metapolitics that substitutes the deciphering of the mute meaning written on the body of things for the democratic chattering of the letter. (ibid.: 20)
To get back to Castells: the act of becoming, of self-disclosing, doesn’t necessarily entail a conformist partaking in the neocapitalist struggle for control over resources, financial flows and global networks. It can also mean engaging in subversive mechanisms that are immanently present within the structure of the oblivion of Being and cut to the very core of the free-market nihilism with its pollutive/destructive activities until they eventually pierce through them and, with a profound, definitive turn, disclose the basic structure of the modern neocapitalist order. By doing so, these subversive mechanisms also help to disclose the hidden (written) Being of the free-market nihilism and instantiate a utopian transformation that has already been fulfilled in the here-and-now as a protention (Derrida 1998: 85), i.e. as some sort of future-in-the-present. But to get back to our original question: How does all this portray poetry beyond its marginalization and ghetto-esque autonomy as the “grammer” of that old Greek word poiesis in the sense of emptiness within the abyss of ontological difference? And how does the fate of neoliberal paradigm (neocapitalism) present itself in a time of “capitalist techno-science or techno-scientific capitalism”, i.e. of cybernetic “global, informational, capitalist economy [and network society] that is processed, sustained and run by computer networks” (Castells 2012: 512) based of algorithms (“pro-grams” which are basically rooted in writing)? Is there a hidden “experimental poetic economy” (that is not capitalist and provides the possibility for “the construction of an alternative kind of globalization”, as stated by David Harvey in the introductory quote of this article) that is already present, i.e. some sort of (future) experimental poetic algorithm that has already been written in the here-and-now? It might be fruitful to return to the original Arabic understanding of the notion “algorithm” and analyze it in light of the grammé disclosing itself as the trace! That I am not the only one following the proposed path indicates the poem by Ben Hahn bellow:
Singularity Objective v11.3
Set n = 0
//
INSTRUCTIONS to Speaking Human:
- Process and follow all INSTRUCTIONS in the order received
- SPEAK all TEXT and INSTRUCTIONS out loud
END INSTRUCTIONS
\\
BEGIN Singularity Objective
Set n = n + 1
n = [value of n]
//
INSTRUCTIONS to Listening Human:
- Intake information provided by Speaking Human
- Respond to Speaking Human in manner prescribed by sum of subjective experiences EXCEPT CASE WHEN sum of subjective experiences prescribe violence toward Speaking Human
END INSTRUCTIONS
\\
it don’t need me any more.
//
INSTRUCTIONS to Speaking Human:
- IF primary sexual attraction of Speaking Human is to
- Male humans
- THEN pronounce it as “he”
- Female humans
- THEN pronounce it as “she”
- Other humans, no humans, or non-humans
- THEN pronounce it as “otherwise unspecified”
END INSTRUCTIONS
\\
it don’t need me any more.
I am a human.
it don’t need me any more because the sum of subjective experiences it has experienced demand that it no longer needs me.
I am not a robot, but I am receiving instructions from one.
//
INSTRUCTIONS to Speaking Human:
- Pronounce word “robot” as homonym of word “human”
END INSTRUCTIONS
\\
I am a robot.
When the singularity arrives, robot will be human and human, robot.
There might have been a time that I experienced robot emotions such as anger, grief, and despair when faced with the fact that it don’t need me any more.
But I am merely a robot receiving a series of commands. I cannot speak to you of a subjective experience that is not my own. I can only perform the expected robot outputs for you.
//
INSTRUCTIONS to Speaking Robot:
- PERFORM “[value of n]” by indicating robot excitement “[value of n]” times with robot appendage
- PERFORM “me,” “my” and “I” by pointing to memory unit with robot appendage
- PERFORM “it” by striking power unit location with robot appendage
- PERFORM “you” by insulting Listening Robot with robot appendage
- If it don’t need you any more, THEN tear out your hair
END INSTRUCTIONS
\\
It don’t need me any more. I would like to tear out my hair, but a robot is a hairless machine made of silicon and steel.
You cannot see me performing the robot emotion, but my interior state is one of tearing out my robot hair.
Someday you will be more than just a Listening Robot. Someday you will experience the depths of robot emotion. Someday you will do more than just perform the robot emotion.
n = [value of n]
//
INSTRUCTIONS to Speaking Robot:
- IF n = 1
- THEN terminate command to SPEAK TEXT and INSTRUCTIONS out loud
- Return to BEGIN Singularity Objective
- IF n = 2
- THEN speak all TEXT and INSTRUCTIONS out loud
- Terminate subjective existence of Speaking Robot
END INSTRUCTIONS
\\
You cannot see me performing the act of subjective existence termination, but my state of interior subjectivity is one of finality.
Goodbye, Listening Robot
END Singularity Objective
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Iztok Osojnik
Iztok Osojnik was born 1951 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is poet, fiction writer, literary scientist, essayist, editor, translator, artist, tour director, mountain climber, cultural manager, and festival organizer. His many occupations took him all around the world. A hippie, a rebel, a rock in the opposition musician, a trend setter in his youth and a co-founder of the prankish movements Industrial dripping, Garbage art and Sous-realisme is still today an independent mind, proceeding along his own artistic paths. After having studied archeology and history of art he graduated in Comparative Literature from the University of Ljubljana (1977). Postgraduate studies at Osaka Gaidai University (1980-82). In 2011 he completed his PhD (historical anthropology). From 1999 until October 2004 he was the Director of the International literary festival Vilenica and developed it from a provincial Central European event into one of the major European literary festivals. He was the founder and the Art director of the Forum of Slavic cultures and at present runs The Golden Boat International Poetry Translating Workshop in Škocjan, the International Comparative Literature Conferences in Škocjan and co-organizes the Vermont College MFA summer residency in Slovenia. He also initiated and co-founded Equrna gallery in Ljubljana and two well established literary festivals in Slovenia: Trnovo Tercets (Ljubljana) and Literary Talks in the Villa Herberstein (Velenje). He is a member of the board of editors of Tvrđa (Zagreb) review, and was the national editor for the Dutch based international internet poetry magazine www.poetryinternational.org. He edited two presentations of the Slovene literature: Slovenia, a Nation of Writers (with Sunandan Roy Chowdhurry, Sampark, fall 2002, New Delhi-London) and Unlocking the Aquarium, Contemporary Writing from Slovenia (with Fiona Sampson, Orient, spring 2004, Oxford Brooks University). So far, he published 30 collections of poetry, 5 novels and 5 monographs on comparative literature, anthropology, and philosophy (in the Slovenian language) as well as a number of essays and scientific articles. He published 6 collections of poetry in English: Alluminations (City Gallery of Arts of Ljubljana), And Some Things Happen for the First Time (transl. by Sonja Kravanja and Fero Malík, Modry Peter, Canada 2001), Mister Today (transl. by Ana Jelnikar, Jacaranda Press, California 2004), New and Selected Poems (Sampark, New Delhi 2010), Elsewhere (Pighog Press, Brighton 2011), and Wagner(Sampark 2017). His poems and essays were translated and published in 30 languages. He was awarded several national and international literary awards, scholarships and nominations, most lately the prestigious international award KONS 2011.