[Perhaps another track will get us off the big H.]
Sod (great) poetry, let's tap theory.
I had that Jean Baudrillard in the back of my cab the other day. (Spoke at
the ICA on May 8. Where *were* you?) And what an old-fashioned humanist he
is. Delightful man. Looks adequately muscular (more so than Tony Giddens
anyway) but not over big. Spoke dazzlingly about the vanishing of the end
(already past?) of the world as we count down to the millennium. But I'm
not going to try and paraphrase *that*.
In questions he was asked, inevitably, about the Internet.
He doesn't use it. He understands that there are copies/simulacra of
him/himself on the Net, but he himself doesn't use it. Not even word
processors. Why?
Because, he said, (unfairly) in English, he cannot see the what is shown on
the screen as 'text'. He sees it as image.
By this, I understand him to mean that, because of the *screen* (and ?its
signification in the culture), he sees what you are reading now as image
and not text (despite the absence of the iconographic and the more or less
exclusive presence of letters).
He then explained that he had no objection to the world of image (phew!),
but that his world was the world of text. (He used 'text' not 'textuality'
btw.)
I take this to be both profoundly wrong (as the fulness of time will
demonstrate) and rightly profound (now).
Ask yourself: Is *this* text or image? How do you read it? Do you read it
differently because of the screen? What happens to our 'texts' when we
transpose them to the screen, especially if they become illegible to, or at
least unread by, someone like Baudrillard?
It's also interesting to think these things in relation to concrete/visual
poetics - are they: not 'text'? What about performance poetics?
Fiona T. touched on this before in previous discussions. I understand her
better now.
PS. He also, btw, rehabilitated the 'we' of critical address (e.g. as in,
"... when *we* transpose them to the screen..." above). He's happy to use
it, because it *stands for* the problem of 'who is speaking,' and, for him,
it is 'the objects speaking through us.' Nice. "Objects 'r us."
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John Cayley / Wellsweep Press http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/
1 Grove End House 150 Highgate Road London NW5 1PD UK
Tel & Fax: (+44 171) 267 3525 Email: [log in to unmask]
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