LEAD New Media Poetics and Poetry
Discussion, as in dispersion, setting free, and shaking
by Sandy Baldwin
Click here to download pdf version.

by Sandy Baldwin
Director of the Center for Literary Computing and Assistant Professor
of English
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV 26505
304-293-3107
Charles.Baldwin [@] mail [dot] wvu [dot] edu

The "Leonardo Electronic Almanac Discussion" (LEAD) accompanies selected LEA Special Issues. LEAD has two components a live chat session with LEA authors and artists and a moderated discussion list for readers to engage with the special issue authors.Sandy Baldwin moderated a series of discussions around the special thematic issue on “New Media Poetics and Poetry”.

Guest edited by Tim Peterson, the issue features Loss Pequeño Glazier, John Cayley with Dimitri Lemmerman, Lori Emerson, Phillippe Bootz, Manuel Portela, Stephanie Strickland, Mez, Maria Engberg and Matthias Hillner. Don't forget to scurry over to the equally exciting gallery, exhibiting works by Jason Nelson, Aya Karpinska, Daniel Canazon Howe, mIEKAL aND, CamillE BacoS, Nadine Hilbert and Gast Bouschet. Click here to access the LEA New Media Poetics Special (LEA Vol 14 No 5 - 6).

Can we discuss this? With Issue 14.5, the special issue on New Media Poetics, Leonardo Electronic Almanac expanded to include LEAD: Leonardo Electronic Almanac Discussion. Nisar Keshvani’s “Editor’s Note” announced "a discussion forum to allow readers to engage with our renowned New Media Poetics scholars," and a "live online chat with our scholars where you interact, engage and discuss new media thematics with them." It was entirely appropriate that the first special issue to focus on new writing practices would also extend the journal into a new writing space.

The issue presented the state of the art, with articles by leading scholars and practitioners. LEAD was a supplement to the essays, and discussion as new media poetics was not a topic of the essays, yet the poetics of discussion are rooted in the net itself. Discussion on the net, as writings through subjectivity and community - in short, as postings or emissions -are by far the oldest form of net poetics. Net discussion through email listservs and chatting - much of it appearing and disappearing, some of it preserved, as in the Usenet archives available through Google - must be understood as a cultural resource, a staple. In fact, if the net exists, it is as a plurality of sites for possible discussion.

The internet protocol suite is layered for "interoperability" and the ASCII characters that fill the channels of TCP/IP exchange are mapped for transmission. One can search for origins in BBS or fone phreaking, but in the end, net discussion can not be localized in a particular application or dated to a particular time in the history of the net. Even the shiny new Web 2.0 of folksonomic participation and social networking feels once again like the oldest form of net space, like a discussion forum. People are chatting in the robust visually oriented environments of Second Life. The tagging and aggregating that characterize Web 2.0 are the return and remarking of social and individual usage, of acts of attention and interest. Email or chatting lacks the glamour of Flash or the programming hardcore of databases, and for this reason receives relatively little attention in criticism and theory of new media, and yet our email accounts follow us around and enter ubiquitously into our lifeworld in ways these applications do not.

There are differences of taste or aura within net discussion. In the middle of intense email exchanges, I am held with anticipation and tightness in the throat. I refresh my email again and again to search for new messages. The lag is burdensome inert time. In a chat, the other's messages come on top each other, several one after the other. The messages may cut right into my own postings. Time feels explosive and accelerating. Email lists feel asynchronous and chat or IM environments feel synchronous. Both are matters of degree. Email can be more or less immediate, messages appearing one on the other. Chat can suffer annoying time lags.

The point is rather the phenomenology written in the email listserv and chat exchange. In each, I write on the condition of community. This means that all net discussion, every email and every chat message, even when from an automated mailer or a chatbot, is addressed. It may be addressed to a plurality, to anonymous others, but its written condition implies transmission and its reading imagines otherness. Every email or chat message means "I <write> <to> you" on multiple channels. (In this, I echo Alan Sondheim's notion of "rewrite," of "writing oneself in and out of existence.")

The aura of net discussion is private (the chat, the personal letter) and immediate (meet the author!). At the same time, discussion always turns to governance and propriety. The LEAD discussions were no exception, with discussion of the rules of discussion, with chats on when the chat would begin. The turn to discuss protocol is not a dysfunction of discussion but part of the discursive field, part of the renewal of discussion as self-thematization of its own dispersion. Discussion is characterized by stutter, hesitation, and flow. The email messages from the New Media Poetics listserv are punctuated by "I meant to say" or "I understand you" or "I just want to reiterate" or "I'll rephrase or restart my last post" or "thanks for your comments." These phrases express an almost ritual re-negotiation of community relations. They are expressions tied to bodily gesture and display of subjectivity. Particular messages read as misunderstandings or repetitions, but the work of discussion is not the message but the thread, not clarifying but embedding and extending, not understanding of the particularities of a concept but traversing a field according to a hidden principle of ongoing knowledge production.

Every issue of every journal always presents the last word. The mere fact of giving the issue a title is a promise of perspective and judgment. Within the journal, the essay performs the author's "contribution." The essay tends towards accumulation, working towards the knowledge gathering of the journal issue. Of course, an essay is an attempt. It is a writing experiment, a journey without a specified goal. In a journal, the journey is complete, the experiment already taken place. Gathered and arranged in a journal issue, the essay is opened and closed. The essay declares itself and takes a position. A journal issue as a collection of essays is an array of positions. The journal issue could be larger or smaller but the elements are closed within each other, contained between the author’s name and title, on the one hand, and the final word, on the other. The essay defends its borders.

Discussion is something else. Discussion is dispersion, setting free, and shaking. (Look it up in the dictionary.) If the essay is an array and arrangement, discussion is disarray and derangement. Rather than the delimited site of the essay, discussion creates a variable bandwidth of authority. In fact, discussion is not added on to the essay but returns to it as extensible experiment. The assemblage of essays plus discussion is always partially written, always partly ready for use and extension. With discussion, the issue is never closed or complete.

Author Biography
Sandy Baldwin (Ph.D.) is Director of the Center for Literary Computing and Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University. His research focuses on digital literature, especially poetry, and on the cultural studies of new media.  His recent creative work focuses on 1)
interactive spatial poetry in computer game environments; and 2) hybrids of machinima, video, and codework.