A. D. Thomas and Emily Lloyd link to the Greeking Machine. Here's a paragraph in "Metropolitan":
Reserved cultered delegate dignified, opera property charity noble pedigree purebred on doctoral, doctoral diamond grande. Metropolitan portfolio investments estate, career affluent ornamental auction, townhome cuisine grande. With dynasty accredited genuine career benefiting. Ballroom, tailored repertoire, housekeeping, aristocratic university ornamental benefactor ornamental classical cuisine panoramic upper noble. Rare acumen symbolizing panoramic respectable politically using with crafted stockmarket manor silk noble. High-rise portfolio, suite imported investments metropolitan pedigree elegant. Respectable silver monogram classical, opera member in becoming, theatre panoramic.
I think there's a case to be made that generators like this are among the relevant poems of our time. I'm not talking so much about individual "poems" made with the generators by individual persons, but the generators themselves as infinite, Protean fields of production that are "read" as such by poetic communities. That is, each time one pushes the "Create Output" button, it's the equivalent of turning the page in an endless poem--a poem remarkable in that it is not so much "written" by the programmers of the machine as it is by each reader who comes to it. I don't mean that the simple mechanical act of pushing the button is equivalent to an act of writing; I mean that the contextual adjustment performed by the reader in the act of
reading itself constitutes a writerly process, especially when the text is transplanted from its point of origination into a different site of readership.
But note the text at the bottom of the page:
Though the Duck Island Greek Machine is capable of humorous results, our Lorem Ipsum version produces very realistic and structured output for serious professionals)
Our Greeking Machine will produce up to 50 random paragraphs of actual Latin text in Lorem Ipsum style. Lorem Ipsum is the style preferred most by typesetters and designers who create print design and layout compositions. Lorem Ipsum and Greeking, or Greeked text can be produced as well as several other pseudo languages including Hillbilly and Metropolitan. Greeking is the method whereby Lorem Ipsum style text is created to fill a composition. Greeking replaces actual structured sentences with false text which is considered less distracting.
However diverting the texts that can be "written" at this site may be, it is made very clear that this "humorous" content is mere fluff, an interactive promotional stunt in service of the company's actual purpose: to produce "
realistic and
structured output for
serious professionals." In fact, the interactivity of the process is minimal to the extreme. And even sites that appear to offer consumers a greater degree of interactive agency, such as the DIY Chevy Tahoe ads that
Jim has recently used as virtual canvasses for his cartooning, are finally more notable for their restraining parameters than for any real space of expression they afford. As witty and provocative as Jim's mock ads are, they do not in any way constitute a transgression of the formal limits afforded by Chevy, and therefore whatever critical gestures they might enact are ultimately contained by those limits. In fact, to whatever extent they enact a critique of ad hype, they can also be said to run the risk of enabling and furthering that hype inasmuch as they participate in it in any way whatsoever.
Invitations to "creative" participation like those offered by Chevy are capital's way of anticipating and containing aggressive strategies of poetic
detournement. (And I hasten to add, I laugh at Jim's ads as hard as anyone.) More pessimistically, one could argue that all social software, all virtual community, all cultural interaction that relies in any way on corporate technology (is there any other kind?) is similarly always already coopted.
Alan DeNiro links to a fascinating
article that contrasts the managerial approaches of Friendster and MySpace, citing MySpace's savvy practice of encouraging user "hacks" rather than squashing them as Friendster tried to do.
In a related vein, recent critiques of flarf have argued that to employ "found" search engine results for poetic purposes might constitute a passive endorsement of the corporate systems that support and inform those engines. Regardless of the weakness of many of the individual arguments that have been made along this line, the basic idea is one that demands to be taken seriously. How can poets who attempt to work with the materials made available within and by the Spectacle meet the challenge of not getting instantly absorbed within the Spectacle's totalized and totalizing mass? Is
detournement a meaningful strategy at this point, or is it now just another one of the seductive distractions projected onto the millions of screens that have occluded the pre-virtual prospect?
I have no idea. But let's return to that copy at the bottom of the Greeking Machine site, which posits "false text" as being "less distracting" than "actual structured sentences." There is a strange contradiction implicit in this notion, a contradiction rendered more or less significant depending on how we define "distracting." First of all, one might think that it is the false text which is more distracting, in the sense that it works exactly in the way that the programmers intend it to: it distracts us in the same way that TV shows or pop songs or drugs distract us, providing us with an "activity" whose content is effectively treated as neutral. The true purpose of the activity is simply to keep us "occupied," held in position and rendered receptive to predatory messages which are always presented as a background to the distractions rather than as the material base that supports them (e.g., commercials which seem to be an interruption of a TV show rather than the essential apparatus in the service of which the show is allowed to exist). From this perspective, the real problem with "actual structured sentences" is that they are not distracting
enough; they do not sufficiently mask their status as commercially-motivated utterances.
We know what the Duck Mountain copywriters actually mean, of course: they mean that "actual structured sentences" constitute a confusing surplus of overly specific content that distracts from the more generally applicable functionality of the product. What they don't consider (why should they?) is that anyone would ever be inclined to treat the "false text" as "actual structured sentences," ones with their own grammar, content, and potential practical applications. That is, that a "Greeked" text might be not just a time-passing novelty, but a social message capable of being interpreted, interrogated,
read.
In some ways, the most stimulating model for a poetics in the vein I've been trying to articulate is spam, since spam makes no pretenses to user-friendly interactivity. It is a form simultaneously defined utterly by commercial interests and situated in a strange relation of antagonism to legitimate commerce. Its viral, rhizome-like growth and spread defies assignments of authorship, intention, meaning--at least as far as most of us can see. At the least, it is not a discourse with a center that can be neatly located in one coherent space of motivation or significance. It is difficult to say whether it is a discourse at all, or just an opportunistic parasite that assumes discursive shape.
When I say that I take engines like the Greeking Machine seriously as poems (again that's
poems, as opposed to just poem-making devices), I don't mean that we should all cease to write our own work and become a big insectoid colony of spam-reading drones. I simply mean that some adjustment is necessary in the way we continue to understand the dynamics that define poetry as a social phenomenon. One thing that will no longer suffice, for instance, is the continued treatment of modernism as a direct template upon which to define/draft new aesthetic formations. Another is the received understanding of avant-gardism. I invoke both of these tendencies, naturally, as attempted responses to a dominant mainstream--a mainstream that increasingly moves to enclose, accommodate, and disarm such responses.
