In his atypically structured essay “Artiface and Absorption”, poet Charles Bernstein poses the question of whether the structure or content of the poem ‘mean’ anything, whether they are mutually exclusive and how meaning is ‘absorbed’ by the viewer/reader. Poems where the structure requires further reading (beyond the structure) to find the meaning, he calls Artiface, opposed to Realism, which involves an unmediated and direct meaning.
Just as McLuhan demands that the content is not priority and that the medium must be considered, Bernstein states that the structure must be considered, lest all that remains is content and content does not automatically equal meaning. He states that if the structure or materiality is foregrounded, there is a tendency to assume that there is no meaning at all, as though the poem is an experiment in the mechanics of the language. This is interesting in light of the concrete poets for whom the mechanics of the language were often (or often appeared to be) the priority.
In describing the submeanings of a poem structured in what Bernstein calls Artiface, McCaffery uses economic terms first outlined by Georges Bataille. Bataille took Marx’s notion of a restricted economy based in market value, and applied it to aesthetics, ritual and transgression. General economy, as opposed to the restricted economy according to Bataille, is excess value, or runoff. In McCaffery’s paper on writing as a general economy, he takes this notion of excess and applies it to structurally-based poetry. In this model, in a restrictive economy, the content is privileged at the expense of the structure (wherein the structure of the language/poem is ignored); in the general economy, the structure is privileged at the expense of the content: the medium is the message.
Bernstein makes note of a young theorist of the 60s, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, who developed the notion of the total image complex. For Forrest-Thompson, the image-complex is the node that encapsulates the rhythm, structure, sound, materiality and semiotics of a poem outside the critical reading. She felt that the viewer/reader should reserve judgment on the critical reading in order to experience the image-complex. Again, this is a McLuhanesque notion; that the entire –rounded, rather than eye-dominant -sensory experience be observed outside of the content, or the message.
Just as McLuhan demands that the content is not priority and that the medium must be considered, Bernstein states that the structure must be considered, lest all that remains is content and content does not automatically equal meaning. He states that if the structure or materiality is foregrounded, there is a tendency to assume that there is no meaning at all, as though the poem is an experiment in the mechanics of the language. This is interesting in light of the concrete poets for whom the mechanics of the language were often (or often appeared to be) the priority.
In describing the submeanings of a poem structured in what Bernstein calls Artiface, McCaffery uses economic terms first outlined by Georges Bataille. Bataille took Marx’s notion of a restricted economy based in market value, and applied it to aesthetics, ritual and transgression. General economy, as opposed to the restricted economy according to Bataille, is excess value, or runoff. In McCaffery’s paper on writing as a general economy, he takes this notion of excess and applies it to structurally-based poetry. In this model, in a restrictive economy, the content is privileged at the expense of the structure (wherein the structure of the language/poem is ignored); in the general economy, the structure is privileged at the expense of the content: the medium is the message.
Bernstein makes note of a young theorist of the 60s, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, who developed the notion of the total image complex. For Forrest-Thompson, the image-complex is the node that encapsulates the rhythm, structure, sound, materiality and semiotics of a poem outside the critical reading. She felt that the viewer/reader should reserve judgment on the critical reading in order to experience the image-complex. Again, this is a McLuhanesque notion; that the entire –rounded, rather than eye-dominant -sensory experience be observed outside of the content, or the message.
