A feather likeness

Another peculiar phrase that I encountered recently was from a "poem" by Jackson Mac Low generated through a permutation of a part of Gertrude Stein's text from Tender Buttons. The title alone would probably make you pause: "A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair" (1999). As if the many lines in Stein's work don't sound strange enough for the ''common reader,'' Mac Low now decides to ''process" the "fifty-third paragraph of the book (exclusive of titles, etc), which begins, 'A fact is that when any direction is just like that, . . .' I selected the paragraph by random-digit chance operations using the RAND Corporation's table A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates." Mac Low continues to expound on his "method":

My source and seed texts came from the first edition of Tender Buttons, issued by Donald Evan's publishing house Claire Marie (1914), as posted online in The Bartleby Archive (1995) and The New Bartleby Library (1999), both edited by Steven van Leeuwen, with editorial contributions by Gordon Dahlquist. However, I incorporated in my file of Tender Buttons fourteen corrections written in ink in Stein's hand, which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland's copy of this edition, now owned by the Special Collections of the University of Colorado at Boulder. I "mined" the program's output for words which I included in 117 sentences (several elliptical and each one a verse line) by changes and/or additions of suffixes, pronouns, structure words, forms of "to be," etc. and changes of word order. Initially, in making these sentences, I placed lexical words' root morphemes near others that were near them in the raw output--in fact I included many phrases, and even whole verse lines, of unedited, though punctuated, output, mostly in early strophes--but I was able to do this less and less in the course of writing the poem. While composing the 117 verse-line sentences, I divided them into eight strophes that successively comprise numbers of sentences corresponding to the prime-number sequence 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19. 

-http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15566

We can easily note the care by which Mac Low chose the textual edition that he wanted to use, even including the "fourteen corrections written in ink in Steins's hand which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland's copy of this edition," etc. I am really tempted to imagine a Borgesian tale with a Calvino-esque twist in this effort to make the anchoring of Mac Low's permutation of Stein's text as solid as possible through the recovery of the most precise and updated rendition of her writing. The permutation exercise must have its grounding in the most accurate version of the text, even to the extent of getting the copy that had the most authorial flavor of origin through a correction in ink by hand, which is the closest we can get to an autographed (and, therefore, official) copy of the book. We don't want anything less than the original set of words in the most original order so that we can be sure our permutation will indeed be that: a permutation, a new order of words undreamed of by Stein, a real version of it, and not a copy of its text. If we find a copy of her text that even had the slightest deviation, then we would already have a permutational text dated ahead of Mac Low's transformation. The care he took here is, indeed, justified.

From this ''definitive'' edition of the text, Mac Low then takes a section from it through a specified chance operation, then subjects this excerpt to a transformation using a diastic technique. This is followed by some editing whose grammatical rigor complements the mathematical impulse to pattern the results in strophes after the prime number sequence. As anyone would have remarked by now, this whole process of ''composition'' employed an antithetical pair of principles. On one end, we have the determination of the texte de départ as the most definitive textual origin from where a section was taken at random; on the other end, we have this part subjected to a rule-based word transformation aided by Hartman's chance program: "Eight strophes initially drawing upon the whole text of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. I sent the entire text through [Hartman’s] DIASTEX5..., his automation of one of my diastic text-selection procedures." The meeting point in the texte d'arrivée of the extremes of randomized or arbitrary and structured procedures in writing illustrates a very paradoxical situation in the practice of aleatory poetics. 

This is probably not entirely surprising as a component of this ''method.'' In one way or another, we can see the same mixing of flavors from the very beginning of the use of "chance" procedures in pre-computational literary ''composition'' in Dadaism's Tristan Tzara himself:

POUR FAIRE UN POÈME DADAÏSTE

Prenez un journal

Prenez des ciseaux

Choisissez dans ce journal un article ayant la longueur que vous comptez donner à votre poème.

Découpez l'article

Découpez ensuite avec soin chacun des mots qui forment cet article et mettez-le dans un sac.

Agitez doucement

Sortez ensuite chaque coupure l'une après l'autre dans l'ordre où elles ont quitté le sac.

Copiez consciencieusement.

Le poème vous ressemblera.

Et vous voilà "un écrivain infiniment original et d'une sensibilité charmante, encore qu'incomprise du vulgaire."

The title could as well be rendered "How to make a poem or any text Dadaist." Interestingly, the paradigmatic source material suggested for this process comes from the definitive genre of factual writing governed by journalistic rules. The ''aesthetic procedure'' is then delivered in a number of mock-serious, step-by-step instructions worthy of the kitchen, simulating the rigors of orthodox composition. By reducing artistic creativity to a handful of repeatable steps or formulae, this user-manual a.k.a. recipe of success exploiting a ready-made language demolishes all the cherished myths that the age had of romantic agency, metaphysical order, and structured artistic composition. The pretended exhortations sprinkled in to mitigate the total arbitrariness of the process (to "shake gently," to ''take out the cuttings in the order they come out," and then to ''copy conscientiously") only succeeded to impress as a cosmic dose of superficial discipline and judiciousness. In addition, the jocular nature of these directives keeps us in an ambiguous state of reception; it is difficult to say how far they can be applied or practised.

True, the price to pay in the ''application'' of these Dadaist directives may involve the "end of intelligent writing," not only because this method tends to produce textual artifacts that go beyond poetic, epistemic and communicative paradigms of language, but also because it raises the suspicion that the final, solid or stable texts that have become more or less the point of reference in language and writing are themselves informed by an originary randomness and permutation (through reading). The rigorous steps that Mac Low followed in the finalization of the output text were nevertheless founded on an arbitrary take off point. Furthermore, the diastic approach he applied pulled out any word that just happened to have been written down in this or that line of the text by Stein herself, doubly illustrating through this variation whatever was meant by his selected starting point: "A fact is that when any direction is just like that." Hence, it would be more accurate to say that the Dadaist directive is actually less an aesthetic method to adopt or to apply than a characterization of the global absence of telos in language.

In the end, the rules that Mac Low applied rigorously, even the grammatical ones, are undermined by the arbitrary nature of his point of entry into the text. The very choice of what OULIPO-like literary permutational process to use is in itself as baseless as his employment of a set of random-digit chance operations through computational technology. The scientific tools that once were tightly tied to a deterministic view now become the very arena for the elaboration of complex transformations, and are being recruited to blur the distance in nature between meaningfully structured writing and meaninglessly aleatory linguistic variations. Much of what we also have currently in the realm of computer-generated texts or machine-aided asemia are replicating in this paradoxical space of an infinitely original (Latin, origo) language where chance and order have become very difficult to separate from one another.