Reading Jagoda’s article on Critical Making reminded me of previous work I have done or interacted with in similar modes, but for poetics. Jagoda’s article historically situates critical making within the traditions of “technoscience, human-computer interaction, digital humanities, and new media theory” (Jagoda 357). My purpose here is to argue for the inclusion of poetics into this constellation with a handful of major examples of what might be thought of as critical making.
A technique taught to me in my undergraduate time was Charles Bernstein’s idea of “wreading.” In its obvious pun, wreading combines writing and reading, or in other words is the production of works that are critical interpretations (“readings”) of other works. This was the way we were asked to engage with our own readings. Here is a link to a prospective list of wreading experiments: http://writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/wreading-experiments.html. For example, a wreading might consist of using google translate to deform a famous novel. That is, without the technology, the method of David Melnick’s Men in Aida, a homophonic translation of The Iliad that highlights the homoeroticism of the original text. Or, a wreading might consist of a setting a given text in a wide variety of fonts, changing its line breaks, or just generally morphing its text design. These techniques are like the “mods” I once wrote about on the blog, but they are used for a scholarly and interpretative purpose. We can consider these techniques to be experimental poetry, but it would be equally valid to consider them an example of critical making, since they “privilege experiences of making to acts of interpretation” (357). The process of their creation (aka, their making) allows their makers to reflect critically on their own actions and on the dynamics of a source text.
Wreading, as a practice, is based on a few different traditions: the experiments of the Dadaists in the early 20ths century, the aleatory techniques of writers like Rothenberg and Queneau, Bernadette Mayer’s famous writing experiments/prompts, and deformative criticism as coined by Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels. Allow me to take up some of these here. The cut-ups, erasures, and N+7 experiments of the Dadaist tradition are processes of engagement with text material that are easily exported to people of all different reading proficiency levels. They emphasize mechanical techniques to deform and reform literature and text. As a tradition, the Dadists viewed these techniques as politically rebellious and anti-materialist (and, in essence, anti-interpretive), but one could easily import such a technique to any kind of classroom for an act of interpretation and shared making.
While it might seem like this could be said for any kind of procedural writing, I would oppose such a view. I am specifically interested in procedural making practices that use writing as material to deform, shape, interpret, and create. These kinds of practices take writing and form it into an act of making and reflection rather than an act of genie-d inspiration, allowing for a value turn to the process of creation itself rather than the post-writing interpretation.
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