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6 From Muse to Mousepad informatics and the avant-Garde Technology has put art to the rout. —David Lehman The institutional origin of the avant-garde is well known; its formative impetus being none other than Napoleon III who in 1863 set up the Salon des Refusées as a deliberate countermove to the jury tampering of the then director-general of the Imperial Museums of Paris. The Salon exhibited Manet’s new painting Déjeuner sur l’herbe to a scandalized audience, Impressionism was born, and with it the European avant-garde. But Western poetry’s origin occurs much earlier in a quasi-theological scenario of purloined voice. In his Theogony the shepherdpoet Hesiod finds himself possessed by capricious female vocalities. The Muses address him: “‘Shepherds dwelling in the fields, base cowards, mere bellies; we know how to say many false things that resemble real things; and we know also, whenever we are willing, how to say true things.’ Thus spoke the daughters of great Zeus, they whose words are exactly fitted, and they gave me a scepter, a wondrous branch of luxuriant laurel, having plucked it; and they breathed into me divine song so that I may celebrate the things that will be and the things that have been” (quoted in Calame 208). Hesiod’s etiological myth of his own poetics of empowerment differs markedly from the prevalent doxa that links poetic voice to subjectivity. In its archaic formulation, poetry is not strictly human and accordingly disturbs any attempt to identify voice with human subjectivity. The poet is dispossessed by a whimsical power that disturbs not only vocal integrity but also the certainty of truth. (This origin is also profoundly ironic when we bear in mind that the meaning of Hesiod translates literally as “who utters voice.”) The majority of contemporary mainstream poetry has lost touch with this ancient (and persistent) radical asymmetry that constitutes poetic voice. But does 76 Chapter 6 the twenty-first century usher in at least an analogous return, a reconnection to a primal duplicity between human agency and a prosthetic technology similar to that connecting Hesiod to the Muses? Jed Rasula’s erudite examination of the voice-over in current mass media and technologies suggests an affirmative answer to this question, and this chapter addresses two proclivities—avant-garde if you like—that corroborate Rasula’s claim.1 In the closing section of “East Coker,” Eliot advanced a crisis in poetics that still pertains to all post-millennial agendas. In the midway of his life, situated between two wars in a struggle to use words to forge new beginnings, but each of which is destined to be different kinds of failure, Eliot reflects on the pathos of a temporal irony: at the moment the poet has finally taken control of his words she can only express an obsolete content. The consequence is a debilitating itinerary . That crisis, a personal one of spirit in Eliot but also synecdochal of his generation, is being answered today by a paradigm shift from a primogenitary deployment of words to a creative/uncreative redeployment of existing information . “Post Language,” “Flarf,” and “Uncreative Writing” commonly name the ongoing struggle for a twenty-first-century vanguard poetics that rather than confront the institution of art embraces (or critically engages) the age of informatics . Both Flarf and the uncreative writing of Kenneth Goldsmith openly celebrate a poetics reactive to data overload. As Craig Dworkin accurately asserts , “the recycling impulse behind much conceptual writing suits a literary ecology of alarming over-production” (Against Expression xlii-xliii). If one formulates “informatics” as the “informational sublime,” then both Flarf’s and Goldsmith ’s practices emerge as two local poetics of resistance to the data-timesspeed equation of informatics. Understood as the quantum manifestation and velocity of information and its access, informatics is the direct outcome of technological supercession that allows the vast transportation of information in virtual space; it is a hyperspatial archive whose growth and accessibility is currently uncontrolled. Into this info-context enters the poetics of Flarf (also known as “Google-sculpting” and “search-engine collage”). The gods of Hesiod fled when the Internet was born; “home” is now the interface, which has become a control booth and reception point for hyperspatial and disembodied acoustic, semantic , and visual sensibilia. (We will note anticipations of this new home in chapter 8’s discussion of the Situationist strategy of the dérive and the spontaneous aspirations of New Babylon.) As projective verse and proprioception...

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