99 poets/1999: an international poetics symposium || the poetics of the complexity manifold

The Poetics of the Complexity ManifoldAuthor(s): Allen FisherSource: boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium(Spring, 1999), pp. 115-118Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303867 .

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Allen Fisher 115

Allen Fisher

The Poetics of the Complexity Manifold

Poetics encompasses all fields of each artistic endeavour, incidentally and substantially, held by ideas of aesthetics and how consciousness is consti- tuted. This interspins with the understanding that aesthetics has a deter- mined effect upon comprehension and evaluation, theoretical or practical, ethical or political. A poet's aesthetics substantially contributes to what con- stitutes that poet's consciousness. The aesthetics for one activity substantially contributes to the aesthetics of each different activity, across genres, across disciplines, across levels. Comparison across genres may be objected to as inappropriate, but this is a failure to understand the basis of aestheticisation, consciousness, and their unifying function. This is not to say that crass generic comparisons are viable, for example, a recent review of the poetry of J.H. Prynne compares his work with paintings by Willem De Kooning.1 Where the comparison is made between works of the same consciousness, comparable aesthetics become less strained and, eventually, better comprehended.

Let me enlarge on this preliminary proposal to the world in which a poet or painter perceives where they are. The proposal is that the Com- plexity Manifold gathers the aesthetics at all levels and all functions of a poet's production, both consciousness and product, and is responsible for what is gathered and held, ordered, disrupted, retained, and lost. Poetics, in this sense, spins across the epistemological boundaries of scale and energy. A poet's attitude to and understanding of quantum field theory will affect that poet's experience of gravity, drawing, and reading, just as a painter's comprehension of the annual Cup Final affects that painter's interest in television as well as the local ball game. How a poet applies an aesthetic stance interspins the poet's consciousness, which affects that poet's capacity to be active differently elsewhere.

Project schema. To begin with, consider the concept of the project schema. A worry leaps attention, why do you need projects, can't you just write poems, aren't projects always long projects? A project can be an unscripted notion or a precise plan, both and either of these. Each project has a different schema, furthermore, at another level, each project could be the aesthetics of a different poetics, deliberately or incidentally so. Each project demands its own analysis and comprehension. Application of one analysis on one project can be used on the next, but it may not work, what



116 boundary 2 / Spring 1999

is more, it may have been designed to deliberately not work. A casual observation can be made, perhaps that's the overall aesthetic, a demanded breakage from the expectation, to trip the self in its own stride. Fracture and facture, well there's a premise, does this mean that life is fractured and needs repair, that we live in fragmented times, are our understandings as banal as that, or does this lead to meaning that the process of facture, from the constructivist idea of putting together as a process of production, derives from materials that are in a state of aesthetic complexity different from the aesthetic state of the poet facturing? Each project is different in schema, more than one project is under way during the same period. What does "under way" mean, the complexity of facturing a poem with an unfin- ished canvas on the easel next door. The activity of painting with the inter- nal energy of the inconclusive research under way, or the half completed verse on the computer down the corridor.

Each of the poet's projects has a different spacetime, one is exten- sive or scheduled to be abandoned, another is planned for breakage and damage after facture; one is planned against a numeric prefiguration, another concludes when the research and vocabulary analysis, used as a basis for it, are exhausted. Some of these projects are as short as a chap- book or single verse, others are over many books or an entire exhibition. The idea of project is that its conception precedes its facture, and sometimes that conception is instantaneous and sometimes it takes many months to plan.

Conceptual Programme. The project may be differentiated from the conceptual programme by recognising that the latter concerns the machine or apparatus for each project. Sometimes this is a deliberate innovation from earlier work, sometimes this has to do with stance, or a second voice, projected as an other vociferated by the poet. Clearly the ideas of project schema and conceptual programme overlap. A conceptual programme which relies on a prefigured structure clarifies the project schema; in another example the schema may be both diagrammatic and epistemological and its limits will be deliberately in a state of proposal and breakage from the proposal, in a process-showing method that quietly works through transformations of the pages already written. A work may be undermined by additions and extractions, and this may result in extra works or large gaps in the main text.

Research. I use the term research for the work in poetry and painting that is carried out in parallel with work in the factory, in the laboratory, and in the facturing process. Irrespective of the different schema and



Allen Fisher 117

spacetime parameters, two or more programmes of research may be under way at once. The results from the research sometimes directly feature in a poetry sequence or painting, sometimes they feature differently in both. Sometimes they deliberately feed each other, sometimes their parity is incidental.

Fracture and facture. Fracture may be considered a necessary and positive process. A metonym for broken civilisation or damaged social duty is not necessarily intended. The initial facture derives from direct fracture of the research. The factured product is a consequence of the fracture which has been involved, particularly in post-collage and in transforma- tional poetics. By this I mean that the facture of the text has been possible through a series of transformations. Fracture and facture thus overlap with the earlier proposals, of project schema, conceptual programme and research, and lead into an overlap with the ideas of transformation addressed from a variety of levels.

Transformation. At the level of words in the text, for instance, transformations may be used which deliver word links through the use of sound (rhyming), comparable meaning (rhetoric), disruption of meaning (poetic), and damaged pasting (found in most genres including poetry, painting, and comedy). The factured product has thus undergone transformation through a series of fractures and factures. Sometimes this series involves planned breakage and incidental repair, sometimes the work uses collagic disruption, sometimes the pasting together of different parts simulates continuity.

Underpinnings: theoretical and practical. In conclusion it might be useful to discuss some bases of these poetics. In 1804 William Blake painted Albion walking into the New Jerusalem carrying one of the glass spheres for making electricity to his partner. In 1817 John Keats articulated "Negative Capability" as "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."2 Charles Olson was to paste this against Werner Heisenberg's 1927 "Uncertainty Principle" to clarify his manifolds in 1950 and 1956.3 In 1818 Faraday published his essays in phi- losophy and aesthetics, followed in 1821 by his first conception of "field." In the nineteenth century a range of understandings of truth were discussed, continuing what by then had become a tradition of questioning finite and golden concepts. Such questioning had already started to promote radical change through the work of Samual Taylor Coleridge and eventually Ger- ard Manley Hopkins. Project schemas had groundings in ideas of visual planning and geometric configuration that needed radical shift from ideas of Golden Section in Euclid and Vitruvius. Conceptual programmes were



118 boundary 2 / Spring 1999

beginning to establish a difference from the ideas of proportion articulated by Fibonacci. In the second half of the nineteenth century Riemann, Bolyai, Lobachevsky, Gauss, and others had demonstrated alternatives to the lin- ear geometry of Euclid's Elements. Baudelaire and Courbet differentiated between finished and complete. Monet visualised the amorphous nature of position and momentum in an age where report of the fleeting was part of the new science of phenomenology. Before the end of the nineteenth century Rosso and Cezanne had articulated the shifts in perception that understood shifts in physics. Braque was reading Bergson and Nietzsche. By the 1920s Godel had proven that truth cannot be demonstrated. Ideas of order, planning and exact proportions were developed into ideas of complexity, linking natural constants like the speed of light to indeterminacy in quantum theory. For instance, the ideas of ether and space and time were reappraised following the concepts of field in Faraday then Maxwell then Einstein, Hilbert and Lorentz, and others. Electricity and magnetism became inseparable, but human existence could no longer rely on the certainty that potential led to action. In the 1970s understandings of gravity and its con- straints on spacetime and existential form matched Rene Thom's analysis of morphogenesis and biological development (promoted as catastrophe theory).4 "Catastrophe" marked each heartbeat, each electromagnetic shock wave lost in observation of it, felt at each breath as altitude and thus oxy- gen affected each conducted bar beat, each brush stroke. It became apparent that process and development, like quantum leaps, are step-like or sometimes better characterised as phase transition activities, that conceptual programmes needed to take this into account. Subsequently Man- delbrot's rambling analysis, published as Fractal theory, partly articulated an array of potential truths.5 All of these factors impinge on research, and indeed become part of the reading for that research. These factors also impinge on transformation, as each sentence or phrase shifts with the step-like change in words. This is the threshold of the Complexity Manifold and the description has only just begun.

1. Birgitta Johansson, The Engineering of Being: An Ontological Approach to J.H.

Prynne, Uppsala, Sweden, 1997. 2. John Keats letter to George and Thomas Keats, c. 21 December 1817. 3. For example, Charles Olson, Human Universe and Other Essays, Grove, New York, 1967. 4. Ren6 Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a General Theory of Models, trans. D. H. Fowler, Reading, Massachusetts, 1975. 5. Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension, San Francisco, 1977.



99 poets/1999: an international poetics symposium || the poetics of the complexity manifold

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