fake news

On fake news and other matters

The current topic on the -empyre- soft-skinned space listserv is, perhaps unsurprisingly, “fake news.” As I’ve noted in the past, it’s free to join the listserv and of course to use the files, which are rich in thought about culture in general, but perhaps especially the arts. The arts in versions written, painted, filmed or otherwise (un)framed. Our impossible views of flux, of quiddity. What you see when you go here

 /http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/ /

provides an extensive, perhaps I should say extendible view of what’s on offer.

Birthday emojis

Birthday emojis

Hide the top half of the clock.

The room still rang,

an outside mask jazz sax;

shoreline and wave....

Paint over a roughened area;

sunset, facial distortion; groves.

A striping or ticking falls briefly

across the screen. Ribands, con-

fetti, cake & bubbly.

Salud!

Robot poetics

This month’s theme on the Empyre listserv is Robot Poetics. The terms have been taken very widely with context being obviously germane to the issues. As one would expect there is quite a lot on robot poetics and on robots and on poetics on the internet. The artificial neural networks (ANNs) that keep the internet running smoothly (mostly, in my humble opinion) and their similarities/differences with the human brain are immediately of some interest to poetry. But then it isn’t only brain that is involved in robotics. Movement comes in, somatics, visual and aural perception…. Are humans (ever) robots? Would it be preferable to answer yes? Then again, what does poem mean? As a neophyte in robot studies I’ll limit my post to this. I believe the Empyre-l discussion offers a lot both as introduction and continuation. It’s free to follow the listserv. One example of what the current discussion deals on dreaming is by Ben Bogart (scroll down for video):

http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/2017/watching-blade-runner-2016/

World Poetry Day 2017

World Poetry Day, yes.

Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” has often been a source of inspiration. Thinking today about contemporary poems, and about the context and support offered by the internet, I paused over this section:

[Poets’] language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have become thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse […]. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of Poetry.

Whatever your activity, your “poetry,” may it bring you happiness!

to take a walk but when you feel to turn one way to turn another

to take a walk but when you feel to turn one way to turn another

because it’s people with a fish on their head

cries of gulls reach of stellar explosions

oh they can be yes

i could name a street yes of course i could name several

albuquerque kalamazoo on the other hand alphabetical

sorry could i just squeeze through thanks

ever imagine you had wings then meet someone who skydives

(soft as you can play here) absolutely

and hey it’s home you know

kit and caboodle drive

in decision

in decision

again the clock in the flower

some petals are missing

rage stolen like sap

what it is is the many flowers

like a river possibly

transmission fluid

all the same one is aware that

as one might say one’s view

and similar turns

which one

Trumpism. Rules. Roles

Trumpism. Rules. Roles.

Everybody has their own America, and they have pieces of fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see.  —Andy Warhol

The “rash and erratic president”—as a recent Washington Post article termed Donald Trump (1)—has continued to cause consternation on the world stage. But the basic tactic of this new administration is simple: to create smokescreens on important governance issues by a constant and chaotic crisismongering. Evoked much of the time, on a pragmatic level, are the worst features of things like cold wars and “détente”—not to mention xenophobia. The Trumpist’s ratcheting up of dystopian worldviews also brings to mind Wittgenstein’s notion of language games. Wittgenstein viewed speech acts as involving conversation based on “moves.” What people say, in other words, sets up a kind of competition.

Language games also involve the well known difference between denotation and connotation, as well as the possibility of falsification and legitimation. And then there are levels of games and types of games. As Jean-François Lyotard stated, “In the ordinary use of discourse, for example, in a discussion between two friends, the interlocutors use any available ammunition, changing games from one utterance to the next: questions, requests, assertions, and narratives are launched pell-mell into battle. The war is not without rules, but the rules allow and encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterance” (2).   We would seem to be in the presence during some of these games of what Trump is fond of terming “fake news,” although it isn’t always certain just who is faking what. Consider, for that matter, revisions regarding Silicon Valley and “the Deep State” (3). And yes, even in an age of globalism, Wikileaks, and e-democracy.

Hopefully Lyotard’s militaristic metaphors serve as pragmatic reminders of what underlies discourse per se on a sociological level—magnified obviously on the geopolitical stage. “An institution differs from a conversation,” Lyotard (p. 17) also notes. Unfortunately the Trump administration doesn’t seem to recognize this.

Notes: (1) Robert Costa and Ashley Parker, “For 14 days Trump kept his No. 2 in the dark. What does that mean for Pence?” WP 15 February 2017.

(2) Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester UP, 1984 [1979], p. 17.

(3) As in Mike Lofgren. “Anatomy of the Deep State” <http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/>