Info Body Web:

Sexual Biotech Politics in Mez's Digital Poetry

by George Hartley, Ohio University

It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

- Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"

In the just-released book Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries, Loss Pequeño Glazier writes:

The text now revels in radical forms of adjacency-a metonymy that comes from overlaying, collage, juxtaposition of visual elements, and forms of mapping. Such conjunctions of creolized, diverse, and heterogeneous components are forms that innovative print poetry has investigated extensively and will continue to investigate; indeed innovative e-poetry will continue to exist in relation to innovative print poetry. Digital innovative practice can add to the possibilities of print the concept of programming as writing and the real-time action that programs realize. . . . The non-semantic, the spatial, the polymedial, and the creolized open new registers in possibility for the text. It is crucial to recognize that emergent forms of expression may not necessarily be recognizable as variants of previous forms. In addition, in the digital medium, forms that are "live," that execute in the presence of the reader, offer experiences in textuality a world apart from the rigidity of fixed paths through a textual field. (DP 176-77)

Glazier is pointing to one of the key elements of digital poetry: the potential-not always realized-to open up the operations of the poem, of poiesis as a mode of making, to dimensions not available in the same way to print poetries. I do not want to claim, however, that the simple transfer from print to digital media is in itself somehow liberatory, as Glazier argues himself cautions. The particular mode of digital poetry I am most involved with is web-based poetry. But a web-based poetry that doesn't investigate and challenge the standardized conventions of the World Wide Web itself might offer no more than the domestication of poetry in a newer, more potentially colonized medium.

A recent web-based poem by the Australian digital poet Mez works toward such a questioning and problematizing of the web as a medium. She spoke to this issue in an interview:

My readers are those that are ][or choose 2 b][ x.posed 2 the net.work & that are curious enuff 2 x.plore & rethink in terms of the technological; those who access my website are virally inducted in2 mezangelled texts via email lists and chat sessions in which I broadcast my wurk. The difference b.tween a traditional audience and the readers/ intra.actors that view/absorb/construct my work is one of scope - an intra.actor can decide to re/deconstruct the work itself, or interact via immediate feedback, or simply rewrite the work as they see fit. The poetic boundaries are revamped substantially in terms of this type of potentially "active" readership.

The allegorical figuration of the traumatic irruption of the Real seems to lie at the heart of Mez's recent work, " >di][e][lation manifesto-:-a sliver of the future f][br][eeder<." Here the mouse click serves to destabilize the interactor. First of all, the question is where to click? Web navigation usually proceeds from the interactor's recognition of a significant "button," a visual element promising to function as a hyperlink and as such to fulfill the interactor's freedom in interactivity. But the visual clues, made up either of garbled word chunks or opaque code-like punctuation series, are barely clues at all. Once the interactor does click on the right buttons, however, popup windows appear. And here is where the traumatic irruption of History seems to be figured: what we get when we click on a button is either a scrollable mini-window containing more disjointed text OR a popup window containing a Flash movie, each one featuring some new alien creature who comes closer and closer to our faces, all the while giving off or being accompanied by some disturbing sound that somehow resembles the sounds of breathing or of a bodily pulse. "Oh my God! What have I done? What has my innocent interaction here brought into being? This is not what I had intended!" The question of who exactly the future feeder/breeders will be now becomes disturbingly indeterminate and alien. A manifesto normally claims to clarify the issues of the future; this wo/manifesto instead gives birth to some future rough beast.

2 mezangelle::

 

2 4m a text fromme the ground[ing] uppe

2 n-hance the simple text of an email thru the splicing of wurds

2 phone.tic[k-tock]aulli m-bellish a tract ov text in2 a neo.logistic maze

2 network 2 the hilt N create de[e]pen.den[ting]cies on email lizts for the wurkz dis.purse.all

2 graphi.caulli N text.u.alli e-voke a conscious sens.u.all & lingual mix

2 make net.wurkz space themz.elves in2 a spindle of liztz thru collaboratori n-tent

2 uze computer kode kon.[e]vent.ionz spliced with irc emoticons and ab[scess]breviations

2 spout punctu[rez]ationz reappropri.[s]ated in2 sentence schematics

2 polysemicalli m-ploy a fractured wurdset

2 m-brace 4m conventionz

2 flaunt pol[emic]itical l-usions

2 ig.gnaw word endinz

2 let lettahs b used as subsetz

2 x-tend N promote n-clusive meaningz.

Flash Popup 1

In the first Flash popup we see the visual transformation of some alien figure, as though we are looking through an x-ray screen where we catch a glimpse of the creatures skeleton and organs and flesh. The sex of the creature is ambiguous, although the pubic area appears feminine, almost like an anatomical chart of the female sex organs taking on flesh and exterior body. Below the body image is the transformation of mobile text, where the fusion of the words "formulation" and "elation" is spelled out letter by letter. For me at least, the formation of this image does not produce elation; perhaps I am to assume that the creature is elated in its formulation on the screen, but this is not an emotion I can share, given the eerie light and color mutations of the image. The creatures helmet-like head only adds to its threatening presence.

Text Popup 1

The title of the first text popup places us in media res: "_::Broadcast Violation ][Volume E][-:-." The expression in media re itself gives us the context of the poem as a whole. We are in the middle of things, in that we are in the middle of some evolutionary transition the ends of which are opaque to us; and quite literally we are in media things, mediated by the media we operate as prosthetic extensions of ourselves in cyberspace. What medium is doing the broadcasting here? Whose intention is it that something be broadcast in this way? And why is this particular mode or instance of broadcast a violation? Whatever the answers to these questions, this is Volume E of such violations or, perhaps, a violation of regulations written down in Volume E, assuming that this volume is a written one.

This message we are about to receive from the Neurec][ana][tomical Unit1 is in violation of some law relating to either practitioners or subjects of surgical neurological interventions on the order of William Gibson's Neuromancer. To emphasize the bodily nature of this deliberate nerve destruction, Mez fuses the words "neurectomical" and "anatomical."

The broadcast violation itself is made up of four parts, the first being subtitled as "Epistaxisal Dorsal Function." Epistaxisal means "bleeders." This section contains information related to the chemical make-up and taste of the blood of these bleeders, these back-bleeders, presumably, whose systems are auto-corrective and aided by stitching, just as human blood sets about repairing the body's wounds. As part of a wo][manifesto concerned with the conditions of reproduction, however, this section might also refer to menstruation or to vaginal bleeding related to birth, miscarriage, or abortion.

The second section refers to Epistemic Logic N.hancement. The body itself is subject to a form of syntax which, if erroneous, leads to hypertextic entrophy. Language, webpage, body, and logical structures are all fused here. The development or misdirection of one has implications for the others.

The third section, Epistolatory Evid][r][enc][h][ing, seems to refer to a bodily or organic transformation of e-mail networks. Collaborators are neurologically connected and unified just as this datacaster sends information through a fleshgrinder.

Genetic engineering meets uterine discharge in the fourth and final section subtitled "Epith.ethic.al Cell Boundaries." The question of boundaries is key here, especially the boundaries between biological and cybernetic cells. There is blood on the tracks, bodies on the texts, body blood on the text-exit-extracts: //B][ody][lood on the t][ex][i][t][racts]:::.

The mechanics of the popup window enlists us in this violation. We seem to be the recipients of the broadcast as we engage the javascripted internal scrollers of the window's micro-textfield. The visual containment of the broadcast into such boundaries and the necessity of our interaction for its presentation are part of the poem itself as we become cyborg units prosthetically engaged in the technopoiesis of web-based work. In this way we are further interpellated into the sub-narrative of the poem.

Flash Popup 2

The glimmer of a helmeted warrior in the x-ray image of Flash Popup 1 is corroborated in Flash Popup 2. Now we see the creature, still eerily skeleton-like, in what appears to be something like medieval Japanese armor. The image moves slowly to the foreground as it rotates to its left. When it reaches the bottom of the window area it splits into two more replicas in a brief instant, a process which is endlessly repeated. Presumably each of the new creatures is undergoing the same kind of transformation, enacting a cell-like mode of reproduction and proliferation. Above the tilting image the word "modulation" is spelled out and then unspelled repeatedly.

Text Popup 2

Ironically, in light of Mez's usual language practice, the second text popup of the piece stages the breakdown of the ability to communicate. Here the fusions of transyllabic words operates as the sign of the degeneration of language into a babble of multiple forms of aphasia. English, French, and German constructions flow in and out of this account of cyborg communication breakdown. Included in this list of types of aphasia is the fusion of amniocentesis, MOMA, and anonymous mouse handling in the phrase Amniocentesic/Norminal /MOMAnic/Anon.y.mousic

Ackfasia. The protocols of museology, espionage, and gynecology work into one intrusive technology which ends in frontal lobotomy and the "loss of allers ability to communetworkicate," a reference to one of Mez's online avatars, "netwurker." The speculum mirrors the techno-aesthetic police tactics of this New World Order in which the female body lies prone for inspection and mutilation. See Donna Haraway's essay, "The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order."

Flash Popup 3

In the third and final Flash popup another creature appears. The creature is even more ambiguous and ominous than before. Starting off as a small red object at the top center of the web page, the creature comes closer into view until, following the trajectory of Renaissance perspective, the image appears closest and largest in the center of the visual field. What first appears as an anatomical chart of some intestinal system housed in a ribcage appears more like some alien crab-like creature as it comes closer. What originally appeared as the pubic region now seems to be a mouth. To its left is a yellow replica of the image rising slowly up an extending line as if marking some kind of progress or development. Suddenly another yellow replica appears to its right, stationary and further up the screen than the left-hand image. The implication again seems to be that the creature is self-replicating. The sound file is like some animalistic snarl combined with mechanical movement, adding to the alien cyborg effect. Ultimately the figures are replaced by the teletyped mezangelle transformation of "emulation" into "manipulation," with the letter U written out as the pronoun YOU, the call of interpellation. The title bar of the browser suggests further the words "elation" and "e-manipulation." E-manipulation, like e-mail or e-poetry, marks the digital nature of this process and suggests a darker side to the utopian claims for interactivity and subjective absorption.

Text Popup 3

The title of the third text popup, ][C][Un][e][iform R.e][mbryo][source Locator, continues the progressive fusion of internet birthing scripts. The root phrase, Uniform Resource Locator or URL, grounds us in a web-based context. But Uniform is also Cuniform, the ancient Sumerian and Persian script that figures prominently in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash as the Ur-Script that functioned like a neurological virus, spreading ideology along with language. This Ur-script is fused with the phrase "embryo source locator." The acronym FTP is spelled out as the word "fetal," followed by the DOS crash terms "abort" and "retry," ultimately writing out the phrase "abort retry fetal tissue reactivated and reanimated." Mez is invoking the biotechnology involving the use of fetal tissue for reproducing cells and for cloning, which is the topic of one of her other works. What we have is the fantasy come to life of the resurrected abortion, the death-in-life and life-in-death of reproductive biotechnologies.

What follows is a set of instructions, a list of commands which further weave us into the infomatics of this fantasy. Yet, despite the distanced language, we are still struck dumb, made speechless in awe, surprise, shock at this scene of resurrection. This is a test of your dream sequence as well as a reading protocol: jumble the elements and stitch. Mez creates a dialectical transformation of this technology from its Hollywood set to the denial of death to reanimation of the dead. But this reanimation sequence marks a traffic-lighted trauma. The question remains: who is scripting this narrative? Who is engaging these technologies? Who is it who can control the passage of life to death to rebirth?

We come back to the hystericized subject, then. The clicker of this webwork is not only thrown off by the frightening progression of alien cyborg Flash-forms, but is also slowly woven through the deciphering of the mezzangellated language into a not-so-futuristic text narrative of the triumph of the hidden gods of biotechnology. What did we do to bring these creatures into being? What are the consequences of our interactions? And who ultimately is calling the shots? In these way, Mez challenges the clicker to take stock of the material networks operating behind the seductive narratives and interactive technologies of the web.

I will close as I opened, with a passage from Donna Haraway, this time from her essay "The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order":

[Nancy] Scheper-Hughes writes that the conditions of shantytown life [in northeast Brazil], marriage becomes much more informal, consensual, and, in my ironic terms, postmodern. "Shantytown households and families are 'made up' through a creative form of bricolage in which we can think of a mother and her children as the stable core and husbands and fathers as detachable, circulating units. . . . A husband is a man who provides food for his woman and her children, regardless of whether he is living with them." The symbolic transaction by which a father "claims" his child and his woman is to bring the infant's first weeks' supply of Nestogeno, an especially valued Nestlé product in a lovely purple can. A woman who breastfeeds is thought of as an abandoned woman, or a woman otherwise unprovided for or sexually disdained by the man. Ideally, the equation is, "Papa: baby's milk'" (Scheper-Hughes 1992:323-25). Through that particular and historical milk, meanings of paternity circulate. In this specific narration of metonymy and substitution, a powerful version of feminist desire is born. The desire is not for a supposed natural mother over and against a violating father but a new world order in which women, men, and children can be linked in signifying chains that articulate the situated semiotic and material terms of reproductive freedom. (Modest_Witness@Second Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse 211)

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