i always really like how i can slowly pick up words as i listen to a language more and more. I'm learning japanese by accident

Fëanorian Quenya

Hey friends! Do you like elves? Do you like the Silmarillion? Do you like Fëanor and co? And most of all, do you like spending hours thinking about minor details pertaining to made-up languages??? If so, boy do I have a treat for you! Let’s delve into the weird world of Fëanorian Quenya and explore some history and mechanics of why they talk Like That.

I’ve seen a lot of posts joking about the Fëanorian lisp, which is about as funny as a joke about a speech impediment can be. 👍 It’s important to understand, though, that this IS a joke. No, they didn’t really speak with a lisp. Yes, they did pronounce some S sounds as TH. That’s the critical disclaimer here: SOME. It’s not a blanket pronunciation. There’s a lot of background research that goes into determining which words would be pronounced with S and which would be TH, and that’s what we’re going to look at.

So if this is something you’ve come across in fandom and you’re not totally sure on the details, or if you ARE sure and just want some more in-depth info, read on.

The stuff probably everybody knows already

For anyone who’s been hanging around the Fëanorian corner of the Silm fandom for more than three minutes, there’s about a 100% chance you’ve heard of Fëanor’s penchant for retaining an archaic TH pronunciation after the majority of the Noldor went ahead and started pronouncing this sound as S instead. You may also know that this sound is represented by the letter thorn (Þ) in HoME, but since thorn doesn’t exist in modern English orthography and it’s a pain to keep typing the ALT code, I’m sticking to TH here. Anyway, all this was due to the fact that Fëanor was a huge mama’s boy, and his mom Míriel Therindë (later called Serindë, which made Fëanor want to punch walls and possibly also fellow elves) was an outlier who retained the TH after it fell out of use. Her son Fëanor, in turn, kept this up to honor her. Now, whether or not he would have bothered if this sound hadn’t literally been a critical part of her name is debatable, but that debate is outside the scope of this essay.

Fëanor continued to use the TH pronunciation until his death, and required his sons to use it as well. Finwë, however, switched over to S after the death of Míriel and before his marriage to Indis. Fëanor, reasonable and level-headed as he was, took this as a personal insult and decided that anybody who rejected TH likewise rejected him. So presumably, his loyal followers would have obeyed his totally reasonable demands not to give in to the seductive S-shift.

Why tho

Why did the Noldor decide to alter their pronunciation from TH to S? Great question. Nobody really knows. For the hell of it? IDK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But the important thing to understand is that elves, and especially Noldor, were really committed to making sure their language sounds cool. This is why it changed so much and so comparatively quickly for an immortal population: they were actively invested in changing it. They liked inventing new words and exploring new sounds and messing around with grammar.

So at some point some influential Noldo might have been like, hey y’all, let’s stop saying TH and say S instead! And everyone (except Míriel I guess, who was known for her elegant manner of speech and didn’t want to muck that up by changing pronunciation of a whole letter) was like, whoa, capital idea my good egg. And they went with it. Previous ideas along these lines included ‘hey y’all, let’s stop saying KH and say H instead’ and ‘hey y’all, let’s stop saying Z and say R instead’, and those went over swimmingly. Nobody could have foreseen the problem this TH to S business would cause.

Now here’s a fun fact. There was another change to Noldorin pronunciation that happened AFTER Fëanor’s birth, that he himself was involved in. This one was all about bilabial to labiodental F. And those sure are some words, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about (I don’t blame you), BILABIAL is a more whispery sound that happens when you say F using only air passing through your pursed lips, and LABIODENTAL is when you say F with your top teeth touching your bottom lip. Going forward I’m going to use PH to represent the bilabial sound, and F for the labiodental.

So F got on the radar of the Noldor via the Teleri, who used this sound in their language. And ol’ Fëanor figured it would be awesome to incorporate it into Quenya because he thought the PH sounded too close to HW, and the two were getting confused by lazy speakers. Why did he care? Because of his dad’s name and his own, of course. If people started to get lazy in their pronunciation, we’d end up with Hwinwë and Hwëanáro, which would be terrible and stupid and unacceptable. He accused the Vanyar of leaning down that road, and he wanted to stop that kind of shift before it happened to the Noldor. How to do that? Why, by instigating a different shift from traditional Noldorin PH to Telerin F!

“Hey y’all, let’s stop saying PH and say F instead!”

“Whoa, capital idea my good egg.”

Moral of the story: Fëanor is only concerned with Quenya pronunciation insofar as it affects his own name and the names of family members he likes. He does not care whether it’s staying the same or moving to a new sound so long as it personally makes him feel good and his name sound cool. Therefore the true way to piss him off would be to call him Curuhwinwë Hwëanáro, son of Serindë.

Okay so here’s how it works

Now that history is out of the way, let’s get back to how TH was used by the Fëanorians. As I mentioned earlier, TH wasn’t a blanket pronunciation. It all depended on the original form of the word, and whether the root had a TH or an S. And some very similar-sounding words come from different roots, so this can get tricky. A great resource that’ll give you this information is Eldamo: Quenya words where the S was originally TH are marked out with the Þ (thorn) symbol in the wordlist.

Some examples:

Súlë (spirit, breath) comes from the root THŪ, which means it would be pronounced with a TH. Silma (white crystal) comes from the root SIL, so it and related words like Silmaril would be pronounced with an S. No Fëanorian would say Thilmaril. Isil (moon), however, is a similar-sounding word that comes from a different root: THIL. Olos (mass of flowers) comes from the word LOTH, but: Olos (dream) comes from the root LOS. Fëanorian pronunciation would immediately differentiate between these two words.

While Fëanorians may have retained the distinct pronunciation of TH vs S, other Noldor can still differentiate between original S and S-that-used-to-be-TH in their writing. There are specific tengwar to use depending on the word’s original form. Silmë (the one that looks like a 6) is used for original S, while súlë (or thúlë, the one that looks like an h) is used for original TH.

Which other elves used this sound in their speech?

Fandom has really latched on to this TH as a Fëanorian thing, but it wasn’t that exclusively. The TH sound was actually ubiquitous in other elven languages, and in Valinor, only the Noldor dropped it. It was still used in Telerin and in Vanyarin Quendya. The Vanyar retained the TH not because of anything to do with Míriel, but just because they were a little more conservative and their language didn’t pick up on all the changes that the Noldor made. They also noped out of the Z to R shift the Noldor initiated, opting to keep the Z around.

When Indis married Finwë, she stopped using the normal Vanyarin TH and switched over to S as a gesture of loyalty to him and his people. Finarfin, however, out of love for the Vanyar and Teleri, switched BACK to TH. I like to think about how much it would have annoyed Fëanor that his snot-nosed kid brother was speaking correctly, but for the wrong reason. Go down one more generation, and Galadriel very specifically did not use TH. But this time it was absolutely a choice made as a glaring middle finger to Fëanor.

What this means for your fanfic or whatever

The big takeaway here: you can’t just have Fëanorians replace every S with TH and call it a day.

If you’re inventing names for your Fëanorian OCs or coming up with phrases for them to say, it’s important to look into the history of all Quenya S-words you end up using to determine if they should be S or TH. If Fëanor got mad about somebody saying Serindë instead of Therindë, he’d get equally mad about somebody saying Thilmaril instead of Silmaril and assume they were mocking him. Remember: this is a dude with no chill. (On the other hand, if you WANT somebody to be mocking Fëanor, Galadriel would 100% do this because she has an equally negligible amount of chill.)

It’s also important to note that the TH isn’t a true shibboleth, since pretty much all elves EXCEPT the non-Fëanorian Noldor use it. And even the S-preferring Noldor would still be able to pronounce the TH. Those who went into exile would go on to use it commonly in Sindarin, and those who remained in Valinor would still encounter it among the Vanyar and Teleri. So if you’re writing a scene where somebody has to pronounce a TH word to prove their loyalty… yeah, everyone can pass this test. And in the opposite direction, you can’t use TH to prove somebody’s an evil Fëanorian, either. They might just be Vanyarin or something. Or, like. Really Old.

Would the sons (and followers) of Fëanor keep using TH after his death? Oh hell yeah. This is an entire family unfamiliar with the concept of not dying on hills. They will keep using it unto the ending of the world. Actually, with Sindarin becoming the common language of Middle-earth from the First Age, probably not a lot of change happened in exilic Quenya. It became a lore language: a piece of living history. It would have been preserved as it was when the original speakers left Valinor.

(And then, thousands of years later, Galadriel finally returns home to Tirion like, Long have mine eyes awaited this most blissful of sights, and ne’er hath my sprit soared with such grace, for I am returned! And all the Amanyar Noldor stare at her like, whatchu bangin on bout, eh? Because they had nothing better to do in the peace of Valinor than push Quenya to brave and frankly questionable new horizons.)

Anyway, there you go: a somewhat brief history of Fëanorian Quenya. I hope you found this informative and useful, or at the very least not boring. Obvs this is super condensed and, uh, not particularly scholarly, but I promise I know what I’m talking about. I have a university degree! (Not in anything even remotely related to what’s written above, but I hardly see how that’s relevant. It’s still a DEGREE.)

Questions? Need clarification or want more info? My asks are always open!

Introduction to Time and Qualia in a Cruelly Pluralistic Reality

Scattered across a couple years of posting, I've been leaving notes on an interpretation of reality designed to either resolve or clarify a number of outstanding metaphysical problems, especially regarding qualia, time, and causality -- fundamental cosmological issues which at this point tend to invoke defeat, fear, desperation, and dismissal due to the difficulties involved in a topic which upsets the foundations of the language used to discuss it, the amount of effort already spent to reach this point, and the lack of engineering applications which might entice people to study, say, M-theory to any equivalent level of difficulty. Nevertheless, the world, anomalously, exists, and that validates metaphysics as a real line of questioning.

What this post is going to attempt to do is write as clear of an outline as I can of the anomalies I've been covering, given my lack of polished essaying experience. I will try to consolidate my synonyms and place them together naturally, with some bolding. These terms come from a mixture of continental, analytical, and classic sources, as well as natural word-pairings. They may differ from the same phrase used elsewhere; This is normal in philosophy, as it is a sparsely populated field which mutates quickly from point to point, and modern analytical departments only just began the task of indexing known options a couple generations ago. “Horizon” mutates with with every flicker of an ontologist’s coping mechanisms. To limit space and executive function, many present and historical alternatives to the systems as presented will be glossed over. Many (especially formal properties bound within their scope) can be adjusted without breaking core points. Some are incompatible with core points, and may be considered disproven, too narrow to account for evidence, or in need of attention. One reaches a point where there are many valid paths, and the only way forward is to take your torch down a long path. Because this is a slightly reader-friendly outline, arguments won't appear in as full form as they do elsewhere or upon request, so the phrasing is somewhat prescriptive. I hope it's clear enough that it might make sense without a metaphysics background after a few attempts; It’s literally a one-draft infodump.

Ontology is the study of what it means "to be." Its problems are cosmological on a scale which sets the context for causality, and are not limited to the grammatical properties of "being," though that is a primary starting-point for study. Ontology is usually only understood publicly in terms of the behavior of formal properties, which are traits which exist as regions in a world built out of relations between such parts, such that the properties of some parts make the relations defining the other parts necessary restrictions according to the common behavior of the whole pattern. Scientific laws, math, and language when it's being used to behave as if grammatical rules were the primary source of meaning, are examples of theoretical formal properties. There are many different ways of interpreting meanings in these disciplines according to the basic rules we build models on, but they converge in an attempt to describe properties in as purely logical terms as can be done, within human limitations. Theoretical properties, however, are abstractions made by cognition, and cognition is a process which results from the ground of the very causes which we are attempting to study. By being a product of how causality comes to give us physical consistency in general, the many ways of modeling basic formal laws aim to trace over truths about real formal properties.

Chemical and biological properties emerge from physical properties. If you wrinkle some common subatomic particles out of spacetime, the way they fluctuate about tends to pool them into blobs of common stable patterns called atoms, which are shorthand for small and complicated processes which tend to fall into a reliable larger-scale property. Parts of human intuition and scientific methods like to understand the world in a way that makes all properties of any kind that exist in any way be the consequence of a series of more complicated patterns emerging and pushing against each other around a simple universal property, objectivity, as if the fact of the world being logical were a thing in itself, a monad, which is something so elementary that it doesn't contain specific parts, and can't be said to change because it exists in a way that lacks the context for how we understand change, but we still say it does exist by tracing the properties of the physical world as obeying a common logical symmetry which validates the causes and consequences we find. This kind of monad transcends formal reality as a universal. Physical events are instances of objectivity. The difference between an instance and a universal is an ontological difference, which is a difference so fundamental that it refers to different entire kinds of way that something can be said "to be." Because grammar is a formal theory, the way "being" normally behaves in a sentence reflects the way instantiated objective events exist, but grammar is a loose description after a wet and tangled system shaped to endure constant mutation and error, and we can recognize deep differences and point towards anything we can get ourselves to think, even if we're in a world which doesn't restrict itself to formal patterns. We can recognize a different kind of reality for a transcendent property by seeing its effects, in this case the universal fact of any physical event to follow logical causal patterns.

Physical science makes models of physical properties by modeling the logic of causality, the pattern of necessity among formal events according to their unfolding from a core property of symmetry. There exist incompatible theories of logic which nonetheless reveal common patterns of objective behavior, convergently suggesting but not proving truths about how real formal properties work. For the past hundred years, we've worked largely with axiomatic set theory, where a variable handful of basic ideas about how to include or exclude objects from being organized into groups (x = x becomes explicit) simulates a starting point for emergence which doesn't behave like a monad at its core, but achieves a similar process of emergence-relations. Once a set theory is started, you can unfold principles where "the set of all sets containing x, y, and z, where x, y, and z are not each other, is The Number Three" (the way of constructing numbers differs according to the axioms used in a set theory, but nothing alters the nature of formal properties as being a network of logical tension), create a whole mathematical system, and express physical patterns you find in its terms. The relation between objectivity and formal events, or between starting axioms and more complex physical laws, is called ontological priority. In ontological monism, such as materialistic monism (physical monism really, but few people adhere to Aristotelian matter), a universal property is said to come "before," in a special ontological sense outside the context of spacetime, anything which is an instance of it. Many monistic ontologies exist, and they are not always physical or even formal. Many forms of monotheism are often, but not always, ontologically monistic, though it is normal for everyone to have special theological techniques for describing how divinity might escape even the concept of a center of being. There are also approaches to formal properties which do not use the mathematical Platonism of the transcendent monad, though I haven't seen them differentiate themselves very thoroughly, and because I am breaking from monism anyway, and they're designed to result in similar models of physics, they won't affect much here.

On its own, this kind of Platonic monism can make working models of physics, but it doesn't provide a full cosmology. Instantiation describes the relation between events and the universal principle which transcends them, but it doesn't describe why the unchanging and prior symmetry principle would have sufficient reason to be encircled by a complex pattern which can be divided into particulars. It fulfills needs following some observations, but there is nothing to make a secondary reality which obeys it necessary. It also only describes formal properties, and we can observe properties that cannot be formal, which is the source of most of the difficulty concerning consciousness, time, and being. Although the Platonic instantiation model of form can be replaced without disrupting other parts of my ontology, my break into pluralism allows additional support for the leeching a formal realm out of a formal monad.

There are other kinds of ontological difference, and because they come from ways of existing more basic than any purely logical system's range of meaningful effects, every ontological difference must be painfully understood in its own case. Outside of forms of monism, ontological differences push the limit of what might ever be described, as they don't interact according to their different identities unfolding from a common point, nor do they behave like one has ontological priority; They entangle as a secondary effect which must be investigated according to its property of accessing them, which will make more sense when I get to the example which causes this problem (qualia). First, I have to specify the formal aspect of time, which gets spiffy in pluralism. Ontological priority is an example of time distinct from spacetime, and because "time" refers to changes or differences which are distinct according to the direction they are traced or produced, any ontological difference found will play into a fuller interpretation of time. Some aspects escape our being, such as the succession of priorities, but some entangle us in the pluralistic confusion, such as the qualia problem. These lead to confusing questions about a "moving present" when issues that arise over ontological divisions are confused for patterns entirely within formal time, and sometimes become dismissed as linguistic quirks, though they don't behave as arbitrarily as "spandrels" should.

Physical reality has a version of time which behaves like space in that it's an expression of formal properties distinguished only by its particular shape. Formal time is a dimension in spacetime relative to a given entity, also called "entropic time," because "entropy" is the name of the texture which makes following one direction in time appear different from going in the other even though the world tends toward balance. Entropy is the tendency of things jostling around arbitrarily to go from a state we interpret as orderly to disorderly, because we interpret orderliness according to how something fits a shape meant to behave a specific way, and most ways something can change randomly will leave that ideal. Once something decays, the details of its form lose their value; It is more of a general resource to be recycled or disposed of, and this holds true down to the specific thermodynamic definitions of entropy as available energy being dispersed into ambient heat. At our scale we find ourselves in a world where things fall and shatter but don't jump up and bond, and even in biological evolution, where statistical effects are creating lines of tightly organized patterns -- life -- the net entropic effect of the planet absorbing sunlight into temporary structures which decay into scraps and heat keeps the same pattern of decreasing order on the large scale. Time in this sense measures how many events are "computed," so to speak, by reality when you trace a line, and like space essentially measures the increasing mathematical complexity of possible truths as "distance." Why we live in a world where spacetime is warped into this shape instead of something flatter follows the anthropic principle, where local spacetime holding the shape where simple formal properties have an opportunity to shuffle into the cognitive processes of complex organisms assessing their environments. If there are much vaster expanses of more probable shapes of emptiness further from familiar spacetime, they are lacking in processes such as becoming bored of those regions. This kind of awareness, of the proposition of the self and the environment as formal objects in a causal system as understood by a thought process built from that system, is sometimes called "consciousness," as in "being conscious that you're an animal," but propositional consciousness is different from the properties we focus on in phenomenology, which are now popularly known as qualia. This is where things get hard.

The mind-body problem is old as balls, probably older, but it has mutated drastically over history. Before modern psychology, and for that matter modern mathematics and ontology, our professionals had some messy models of causality with the laws of motion separated from "inherent" properties of chemicals and the like, and the phrase "mind-body dualism" still provokes an outdated picture where psychological properties of a person's thought processes were opposed to the physical properties of a body, and an undefined "free will" may have been on the mental side along with qualia. In modern philosophy, psychology is understood as emerging from biology and thus being a specific pattern in formal reality as a whole, along with the physical body. Psychology deals with behavior and cognition, and cognition is thinking in the sense of a chain of formal causes, which in the case of animal brains includes moldable systems which can turn bits of information into proposition-like patterns reflecting outside events according to the limitations of the causes which shape the system. What this means is that propositional consciousness is only formal awareness; The psychological objects in question are, as with anything physical, built out of the necessities of their relation to other objects in an ongoing network of relations, of a whole universe holding its force between its parts according to the symmetry of objectivity.

This is important, because there are "mental" properties which are not formal, and thus aren't psychological, but whose differing nature reveals them despite the strangeness which grows as one investigates. The conundrum they create is not a new one, being clearly specified at the start of modernity, having a longer history of study in Indian philosophy, and sometimes appearing with minimal differentiation in the Western classics. While their presence was never lacking and their incongruities sometimes apparent, though lost in eras when every theory came in floating fragments, their ontological importance is revealed especially by a strong grasp of the formal properties of reality, which must be understood as pervading reality as thoroughly as we do among the common ontology of physical sciences and the behavior of competing theoretical formal systems gaining traction on formal reality. We study the convergence of possible formal theories and estimate the nature of objectivity itself. We see the common structure of parts making necessary and possible facts about other parts. We desire consistency, and hone in on it. Our skill of memory, not only a collection of representations but also the marks made on us in general, relate to the probabilities of facts in the direction of the entropic past, while other parts of our thought bear the mark of patterns more and more likely to predict facts in any direction. Objective reality reveals itself only by its capacity to relate logically-imitable forms, though of course any given instance can provide barriers to available clues or skills.

Qualia are sensations in the sense of their actual, colorful presence. This doesn't just refer to sight, sound, et cetera, but also the sensation of thoughts moving and pressuring one another, or how recognizing a picture as a duck or a rabbit not only comes with pseudo-knowledge of what it is, but shifts the experience in a way that has sensual presence. The key to defining qualia is their immediate presence in live first-person experience, as qualities which are known by the uniqueness of their very presence. Qualia as such cannot be "hallucinations of qualia," because they are the presence of feeling itself, rather than the facts these qualities are interpreted as reflecting about the objective world of networked causes. It is true that qualia will change in line with the formal objects (brain signals in our case) they trace, but their obedience in undergoing the unique changes they embody according to the changes one follows along in formal reality is not a fact which provides any structural basis for a property to be a quality of substantial presence. The embodiment of the unique selfsame quality necessary to complete the meaning its own being as a presence is alien to formal existence; We relate it to the formal causality it traces, but presence-of-color isn't a property of a system of logical forces.

No theoretical formal system can make even a simplified model of this kind of presence, but they can show part of its disobedience without touching its actual ground. In math, the objects you study are relations among logical necessities, facts about how logical consequences in general would behave in a given formal situation, with errors according to how badly core axioms simulate the instantiation of objective events from the objectivity principle. The reality mathematical models trace is the relation of formal instances in general to the universal objectivity principle, and models of physical situations exist as specifics entirely within the range of possible mathematical facts, as is the behavior of emerging instances of a universal, and formal reality is observed to behave in a manner parallel to the essentials endpoints by which theoretical formal systems make or break themselves. Formal things exist by the tension of being a part of a whole, but there existence is made only in the tension itself; Even a complex instance has no substance, only necessity. When you write 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, both sides of the equation refer to the same universal situation (which is the aspect of any formal event in which a property will include the objects {a, b, c, d, e, f} where none are the same), and when you write 1 + x + 3 = 6, you make a necessity for for x = 2, but you could just as well make the same necessity with 1 + y + 3 = 6. It doesn't matter whether you use x or y to = 2, because they're only tracing over the fact in the context of the system of relations. Qualia seems to hold fast to physical events in our brains, but it traces over formal properties arbitrarily, the way x or y does. This is why there are famous philosophical teasers where people say "how do you know my red isn't your blue" or suchlike, because the presence of the uniqueness of quality in our real experience isn't a hollow nexus of the possible necessary states of other regions; They lends us their own kind of existence, and cannot be analyzed as a mechanism, but studying their ontological difference from formal objects, we can better understand other metaphysical problems which are normally stalled by adhering to purely formal ontologies.

This kind of presence, where "present" doesn't mean a location defined in a formal network but rather the glow of present experience, where its unique quality as something real is also the knowledge of its reality to its person, is an example of philosophical immanence; I tend to call qualia immanent qualities, to emphasize their way of transcending formal properties. The study of qualia is called phenomenology, which makes modern usage of "phenomenal properties" another term for qualia. Phenomenological suspension, or phenomenological reduction, or epoche, is any attempt to hone in on phenomenal properties by suspending your beliefs about the world your experience is a part of and observing the qualities which do not necessarily imply what you thought. If this sounds like a Buddhist meditation, that's because it can be; I've heard mention from Hindu and Buddhist students of phenomenology that there is a history of meditations on this topic. The method I explained here consists of identifying the behavior of formal properties in general, in order to better identify a large range of what could constitute a systematic idea of any kind, to bracket away and reveal the unaddressed properties of immanence. Staring off into space paralyzed in terror by the inescapability of the cosmic anomaly shining within your very soul is also a more meditative form of suspension

Phenomenal consciousness is the existence of qualia, the concern over which is popularly called the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and questions about it deal with ontology. It is different from propositional consciousness, which is a psychological awareness of one's position in local formal reality, that is, awareness of one's animal (or robot or whatever) context. Both phenomenal and propositional consciousness are referred to as "subjectivity," which is as problematic as phenomenology's obscurity ever is. "Subjectivity" refers to first-person awareness, which both are in their own way, but it usually carries connotations specific to propositional consciousness, which is that it is a small mind in a big world and can't know things for sure. Objectivity/subjectivity in formal reality is the difference between the unknown truth and our thoughts, but objectivity/subjectivity in ontology is the difference between form and immanence. Calling things "subjective" can invoke this confusion as much as the word "consciousness."

When you make statements about formal properties, you do so using “modeling” in a way which speaks to the ability of the object in question to be broken down into internal and contextual parts; networks of formal relations identical to the same truth. Statements about non-formal properties do not “model” them according to grounding structure, and though “qualia” are still the “object” of linguistic statements, the properties modeled in a discussion are the points at which they transcend formal properties and lead to statements about the general world capable of featuring such phenomena.

Although we only have reports of immanent qualities from other humans with similar patterns of propositional consciousness, other humans are the only pieces of spacetime we can reach a certain depth of communication with, and there's no good indication that any particular feature of propositional consciousness is necessary for a region of formal reality to inform immanent qualities. Immanent qualities find their ontological ground independently from formal properties, so a description of when immanent qualities would be found associated with a region of spacetime (like a flux of brain signals) is not a question of a physical system creating qualia, but rather creating circumstances which don't contradict the means by which formal and immanent qualities meet. Some suggest that such regions are anywhere a width of information in spacetime has an indeterminate interior effect which can change its outcome, as in the case of uncollapsed quantum blahblahblah, but neurologists consider it doubtful that indeterminate quantum effects can localize enough interference to regularly affect brain-scale cognition, and the separation of the information of quantum effects on the micro-scale from the causal chain of information in the human mind is a real separation. It may be that rather simple entanglements of formal properties at any scale could be reflected in immanent qualities, and that propositional consciousness only ever granted the ability to gripe about it.

The difference between phenomenal and formal properties is the modern form of ontological dualism, even when formal properties are divided into universals and instances. Dualism as such is more observation than theory, as the assumed starting point is the formal monism which produces logical language for science and expresses alternative in terms of how they deviate. Qualia appears to be an extra "kind" of thing, and when you give up trying to reconcile the properties you have two piles. It gets worse, though, so much worse. The inability of formal properties to generate immanent ones also means that it can't generate a way to refer to them and give sufficient reason for their unique contact. Likewise, because immanent qualities are not objects formed of tension against an environment of information-states, there is nothing in immanence to cause a complex of tensions, and immanent qualities are absolutely particular to their presence; They are not universals. Because they cannot necessitate each other, they cannot make a meaning which would "request" the impossible other to entangle with. Therefore, there must be properties which are neither formal nor immanent, which can be known by investigating the relation it invokes between immanence and form. This means I'm breaking dualism into a more open pluralism. They can be further studied by observing from phenomenological reduction that formal properties we take for granted often don't apply the way we expect and drawing what inferences can be drawn; Much of the progress in ontology following phenomenology consists of critiques of formal properties such as ontological priority being found less necessary than thought possible for alienated ontological properties.

At this point many lean towards granting ontological priority to immanence over form, which is a monism called called phenomenalism, or taking cue for other non-formal priorities to both in monistic idealism and others. They don't get much further than feeling some kind of monism as necessary and considering some other kind more likely than simple materialism, but a desire for monism has historically been a good motive for philosophical and scientific progress. I prefer facing Ockham's nightmare of necessarily plural elements.

Ontological plurality may help with a question leftover from the monistic version of the universal/instance relation, where instances seemed to obey the priority of the universal, but didn't have sufficient cause for there to be an unfolded level of formal reality at all. If being a part of a whole completed the reality of qualia, qualia would not be of the closed tunnel of a human experience; The fact of having a quality to shine demands its distance from the very idea of a whole, whose part have their meaning in terms of complicating from a common origin, full of need and empty of presence. It may be that the seemingly arbitrary existence of instantiated objective reality, separate from objectivity as a universal, finds its cause in the coexistence of immanence and the monad itself. The monad need not change or recognize the ontological alien as real; Collisions across ontological divisions do not need to be reciprocated, as symmetry of tension is a formal pattern. The effect which touches both immanence and objectivity may join objectivity as a paired ontological priority to instantiated objectivity, leeching the need for instantiation under its ability to access the immediacy of immanence, while the unchanged objective monad remains the central reference of objective causality and, to itself, still truly being in a state of not having done or coexisted with anything at all.

Because there are unique immanent realities found alongside the tracing of entropic time which cannot be reduced to its formal nature, phenomenal time is an ontologically distinct element of the time-complex. It is suggestive of the idea of "presentism" in time, where some kind of moving present moment is real, and which is opposed to eternalism, which is the idea that all possible times exist at once as a stable array of facts. Eternalism hews to the simple and symmetrical behavior of formal reality, while presentism is usually framed in a formal context which makes it flounder even as people rub their chins at the phenomenological issue that haven't yet grasped. Phenomenal time is rarely represented comprehensively in discussions of presentism/eternalism or A-series/B-series time, which draws confusion through purely formal assumptions.

Although qualia are informed by a common objective reality, they are not made from instantiation. This means that immanent qualities do not relate to each other the way formal objects do, along a continuum of one whole spacetime would compose them. They are, rather, accessed in a common encounter with the objective world, and just as their grounding principle is their own unique presence, they have an ontological difference between each other; Immanent qualities don't contain a negative tension of that which is not present, the way formal entities share the tension of a formal continuum, because that is a property which emerges in the separation of a whole. As immanence is beyond the context of form, so too are they beyond each other, yet inevitable by their common binding to an objectivity by a process they have no means to contradict. It might be more accurate to say the apparent common nature of qualia is a product of a filtering for access to one particular way to non-contradictorily exceed the properties of form, according to the behavior of horizonal properties.

It is valid to say there is qualia for the feeling of moving through time, unique to the interflowing context of ongoing experience, but rather than the present motion, there is also the horizon, which is the reality of the fact that these ontologically alienated properties have a reality beyond one's own deepest grounding. Horizonal properties are not inherent in alienated entities; That would suggest the behavior of a formal ontological priority being sufficient to build immanent qualities. Rather, just as alienated immanent and formal properties lack the context to create each other, so too do they lack the context to meaningfully contradict a property which does not contradict their necessities but rather produces an ontologically unique situation which must be studied according to the anomalies we find rather than possible constructs of pure reason. What we observe is the capacity of a non-immanent, non-formal property to access that which is alien to it and each other. It breaks from the behavior of formal properties in its refusal of priority, but so do immanent qualities. It breaks from qualia's substantiating presence, but so do formal qualities. Its exotic behavior may be less impossible than imagined, but phenomenology takes some getting used to in the first place, and this is the bleeding edge for me. The ontological difference between experience and the horizon is another example of an asymmetrical "relation" not formed by common tension on common ground. The horizon imposes distance upon immanence despite itself and questions the self-sameness of its reality without contradicting it. This transcendence is different from the transcendence of a universal from an instance because it isn't the transcendence of a prior; It is a vulnerability to the beyond, and it is this opening from the utterly external which provides another aspect of the time-complex as the horizon: ekstasis.

"Horizonal properties" isn't a phrase that's floating around, but "horizon" is. It's a slippery word, but it ends up as the best label I have for the non-formal, non-phenomenal property of the vulnerability to being drawn into a relationship with things they have no ontological origin with. Husserl and Heidegger both wove the concept of horizon into ontologies which habitually tended toward some manner of monism -- attempting to unite phenomenal and formal properties under a common ground they all manifest, even if it wasn’t their ultimate conclusion. Husserl was very speculative about ontological statements following from his focus on phenomenological methodology, but he steered toward building formal properties out of the behavior of phenomenal reality, while Heidegger’s unity was more teleological, looking at the synthetsized results of the alienated modes (in other words, human reality as we are, with entanglements across ontological boundaries) as if it justified them in a convergent function in disclosure, which I find still carries too much symmetry in relations across ontological differences. In both of them, their concept of horizon blend aspects I have separated between formal and horizonal  (Husserl's protention/retention and Heidegger's thrownness/ecstasies), and they developed proto-formal versions of past-likeness, future-likeness, or parallel-likeness around the nest of immanent properties. I take cues from Levinas and clear things into an open pluralism moreso than most phenomenologists, and my emphasis goes to showing properties neither formal nor phenomenal nor of common ground with them, with a focus on asymmetrical intersubjectivity.

There is another anomaly which calls to effects neither formal nor immanent. Although it can become inescapably apparent that immanent qualities demand explanation, and would be difficult to return to the denial of, the immanence itself shouldn't be sufficient cause for us to notice it and discuss it as target of propositional awareness. We can see our awareness of it as its presence, but as discussed, that isn't a property which should affect any arrangement of formal necessities. This helps push some towards idealistic monism, trusting the secondary position assumed for formal properties to be concealing the truth of immanence creating external necessities, but gives little opportunity for further development and often keeps re-entangling supposedly derived formal properties into the nature of "monism" itself. Our ability to bring phenomenology into our actions gives the image of a teleological cause, a need for a reason for the possible paths of physical causality to converge into one as unlikely as a sustained and coherent field of study around a phenomenon which shouldn't partake in the causality people speak from. For the forcing of this understanding of immanence into our discourse, this gnosis, we have the appearance of a hand of fate, which means a topic which needs to be unpacked and scrutinized. Simple tricks of overlapping necessities can create teleological illusions, as in the anthropic principle’s world of seemingly improbable life-sustainability being outlined by the lack of experienced consequence for expanses which don't produce life. This should go hand in hand with the study of horizonal properties and how vulnerabilities to exotic effects can be filled or restricted. Note that any anomaly in the causality of our discourse’s context in animal causality, such as the ability of this non-formal but inescapable qualia situation to become a topic which can be honed in on by human study, means the potential contents of our reasoning differ in a certain drastic way from anything we understand about the limits of potential linguistic analysis, and we cannot declare any particular metaphysical question as forever beyond us.

Because we find ourselves in a world where apparently fundamentally alienated properties are aligned in non-contradiction, our existence as living souls is not only our common drive of animal objectivity, or the substantial light of our present experience, but the capacity of the horizon to call on that which is not of our deepest core or the height of possible wisdom. Between us is not only the common ground of our animal motives, or even only the ethical weight of substantial experience which descriptions of biological pain-signaling are hollow of, but our reaching each other across and as a separation as utter as the separation of the mortal from the eternal.

The Reduced Down on Technique Portion Uncovered

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The Reduced Down on Technique Portion Uncovered

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➤ “Bluenette”, and usage of other qualifying adjective

I wished to make this post to speak of ways one can refer to characters in roleplaying, or fanfic, in the fandom, primarily because, for instance, the use of the term “bluenette” is... quite odd to me. Many more phrases can be found for both Ciel and Sebastian, and I wished to share what a few of those might be. This also aims to replace commonly used term “Young Master”, that Sebastian particularly favors, this time in favor of a small collection of more various ways to reference to the character. I’m writing this post with the Kuroshitsuji fandom in mind, since that’s where I heard the most strange term “bluenette” (god knows what happens in other fandoms however, I’m sure a purplenette showed up somewhere), but it can serve for any other fandom that wishes to alter the repetitive terms in use. 

For starters, the term bluenette, as I said previously, is quite peculiar. Its grammar is visibly French, and feminine at that. Using correct grammar and transforming the term into masculine, a “better” spelling would be “blunet”, however... The impression it gives me is that of a butchery rather than anything else. I do not believe such a term to be correct. When I read a sentence containing this word, and pertaining to Ciel, I suddenly see the image of a little boy with blue hair with features mistakenly female, cavorting in some meadow in the countryside. Not at all the image I hold of Ciel in general.

The idea behind any qualifying adjective, is, well, to qualify what it refers to (yes, none of you had guessed it, I have illuminated you all). As is prone in all fandoms, we refer to characters in third person pronouns “he/she/they”, and in adjectives and descriptive phrases. These phrases most commonly concern the physical aspect of the character, one of which most prominent one is the hair  (hence “bluenette”), or the eyes. However, it is infrequent for me to come across a text that will refer to much else, the farthest I have seen it gone to is for instance the height. 

In order to vary in phrases, a change in category to dig up from is advisable.

 ➞ I will begin with Ciel. Since we are speaking of our proud Earl, I would say that, forgetting physical features, one can turn to something else that is standard and prominent about him, that is his social rank and status. His title. Which is that of an “Earl” -> “The Earl”. Replace “bluenette” with this simple phrasing, and see how already it flows. 

The way I view it is that, the key to any fitting, and non repetitive expression is sensing out the situation itself. Feel out what sort of vibe and impression you wish to convey, what must spring from the words. Exemple : Imagine a moment where The Earl was caught off guard, is at a loss, or suffered some kind of defeat in his game of vengeance, but refuses to admit it, already a simple adjective such as “proud” can be added to enhance the phrasing, taking it further away from “he” (or “bluenette”). “The proud Earl” -> “The proud Earl stood still, a diffuse sentiment of opposition emanating... [...]”. This is a random sentence which probably sucks, so for a more befitting exemple, I’ll just refer you to what I wrote myself here : “I will begin with Ciel. Since we are speaking of our proud Earl, I would say that, forgetting [...] that is standard and prominent about him.” 

All three solutions can be used, the name itself, third person pronoun, a referential phrasing. I recommend ultimately to use a mixed balance of both “he/him” and these well thought, inspired expressions to refer to and qualify Ciel. Overuse of either will lead to fatal overload. What traits are associated within the role and mask of the Earl ? “The Earl, diligently, staunchly...” ? It is otherwise a matter of listing all of his attributes. You may want, for instance, prior to writing, prepare a list containing several adjectives that may fit his character.

➞ Now moving on to Sebastian and giving out a few examples : I will be rather quick about it considering that I mostly wanted to adjust the constant, strange, usage of the term “bluenette”, but I thought I should address a few referential phrases to use with our favourite demon. Likewise as if with Ciel, if we remain in the physical category, we may fish out the most demonic feature of the butler, and that is his red eyes. -> “The red eyed [...]”, anything may be placed afterward : for instance, when using the term “Butler”, the idea behind the juxtaposition of “red eyes”, which is an unnatural, non human feature, with the very human concept of a “butler”, is to add a pinch of otherworldly mystery around the character. It may be well suited when finishing an introduction of his character, after a passage when he behaved... surreally normal, to reinforce the impression of abnormality coming off of him, it is like sprinkling and scattering in an otherwise description of an invisible rank of society hints of a noticeable flawlessness that’s strikingly out of the ordinary (that, accompanied but overtop Sebastian like behaviors, of course). When pairing “red eyes” with “demon”, we are no longer ironically hinting at his nature, but explicitly exhibit it. These examples both incorporate his physical features as well as his social status, as explained in the paragraphs concerning Ciel. 

While this post is not very long (or, is it), and is not exhaustive either, I hope that this has given roleplayers and fanfiction writers alike some ideas and thoughts of how they can arrange their writing and texts. The key is to get creative and constantly adapt your writing based on the setting and atmosphere of the content itself. As mentioned, I’ve written this post with the Kuroshitsuji fandom in head, but while I did not give other examples for different fandoms, the same principle applies to all characters, and to writing in general, whether it’s for fandoms or personal works. Thank you for reading this post if you’ve made it this far ! :)

Against a Generative Grammar of Flarf

by THOMAS BASBØLL

Most of Dan Hoy's recent essay, "The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf", in Jacket #29, "is about the uncritical use of corporate algorithms as a generator of poetic chance and catalyst for engaging the Other." Later in the essay, however, he reframes the issue in terms of "the problematics of using [Google] as [an effective generator of poems]", a characterization he uses again near the end, casting "Google as a poetic generator". This conflation of Google as a chance-generator and alterity-catalyst with Google as a poem-generator is perhaps just an imprecision in the essay, but they share an important assumption: that the use of Google directly explains or accounts for essential features of the poems, i.e., that Google constitutes a "generative" deep structure that explains the surface structure of the poems. Hoy's thesis is that Google-sculpted poetry is Google-structured poetry because the poets are either unable or unwilling to bring their material to crisis (to make "critical" use of it). He sees this as "a trend [, which I'll refer to as 'flarf',] among the ‘post-avant’ ... that betrays not just their mediated upbringings but an antiquated technophilia." I think this is the most substantial thing that is wrong with Hoy's essay. He has simply failed to consider the difference between pages and pages of Google search results and the poems that are built out of them. (Despite the fact that this difference was the primary focus of those parts of my criticism that he cites.) He offers no demonstration of any isomorphy between flarf works and Google results and therefore no basis for the claim that the procedures that generate flarf poems are isomorphic with the algorithms that generate Google returns. This is an admittedly formal refutation of Hoy's scholarship but, since he proposes explicitly not to read the poems, very little more is possible at this point. My brief (and ironic) despair over the presence of marketing on the Internet (the "muses" were never a serious option) was very precisely an awareness of the possibility his essay takes (for granted) as a structural necessity. Anyone who briefly considers the matter will realise, as I did, that it is very unlikely. It would be interesting, however, to show that the structure of a page or two of Google results corresponds in some striking way with the structure of a page or two of Deer Head Nation. If Hoy ever attempts such a demonstration of his thesis (a demonstration that his rhetoric is in some sense already obligated to provide) I would be glad to examine it. Until such time, Hoy has simply failed to demonstrate that the object of his essay exists: a trend towards the uncritical use of Google to generate poetry.

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15 COMMENTS:

Jay

said...

From Hoy's piece: "If there’s a difference between flarf and its progenitors it’s that Cage and Oulipo researched or created their generators of deterministic randomness, whether it be the I Ching, the weather, or mathematical formulas." To what degree do "flarists" actually claim Cage/etc as "progenitors"? It seems to me there exists (in the archetypal "flarfist defense" that Hoy sketches) a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between Cagean chance operations, which might be claimed to replace the ego-as-editor, and so-called "chance operations," which throw a bunch of raw linguistic material at the poet who then proceeds to edit that material according to her or his desires, whims, intuitions, etc. The latter isn't Cagean at all, in my opinion -- the ego doesn't recede, it just works with linguistic raw material that the poet didn't happen to create. My suspicion is that Hoy's fear of contamination of flarf/search-engine poetry by the values latent in proprietary corporate search algorithms has something to do with the conflating Cagean chance and "flarfist chance."

3:17 AM

Anne Boyer

said...

Yet another way Hoy misses the mark -- the progenitor of Flarf isn't Cage, or Queneau, but Baroness von Else Freytag Loringhoven. For example, a short poem by the Baroness: "No spinsterlollypop for me! Yes! We have no bananas I got lusting palate I always eat them... There's the vibrator Coy flappertoy! ... A dozen cocktails, please!"

6:28 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...

Jay: I think you're right about this. I don't see Cage as a precursor either, except as a experimentalist/avant-gardist, or something very general like that. And you're right that the two procedures don't deal with the ego in the same way. I think flarf does to the reader what Albers colour-studies did for his students: "Because of the laboratory character of these studies there is no opportunity to decorate, to illustrate, to represent anything, or to express something – or one's self." (Interaction of Color, p. 9) Though flarf does arguably offer opportunities for decoration, let's say it discourages reading the words for anything other than the effects they produce. Using the flarf operation (leaving the surrounding controversies on the side) to "express yourself" (i.e., to represent your ego") is doing it the hard way, we might say. Anne: Thanks for the new point of reference. And the squid.

1:33 PM

Anne Boyer

said...

I realized the brevity of my comment might make it seem as if I am being flip about the Baroness. I am not. As a reader, I think Flarf is at least 3/5s Dada: picking up whatever whenever, using it "wrong". This is not utopianism! The procedural element is much like the procedural element a fish uses when bottom feeding: a fairly simple consumption/digestion of crap -- and I mean this as a compliment. Bottom feeding is ecologically important. Chance hasn't so very much to do with it, other than the chance of what crap that day fell to the bottom of the tank. Then, as Jay points out, the crap-gathering is very much dependent on the individual Flarfist. Most Flarf reads (to me) as freak-out-panic-attack-oh-no-apocalypse -- a Loringhoven-esque hardcore "nonsense" made more compelling by millenialism: a dada on speed, a hat made of vomit-words found in the Internet (trash bin). I am obviously enthusiastic about this.

2:23 PM

Jay

said...

Anne - "This is not utopianism!" . . . Seems like this could be an important distinction -- the Cagean project is, as I understand it, fairly explicitly utopic . . . Thomas - I do agree that using flarf to "express oneself" (in any conventional sense of that phrase) would certainly be going about it the hard way. I suppose what I meant was that in flarf (at least as I understand it), the poet still makes certain editorial decisions that Cagean chance procedures might seek to eliminate. When writing flarf I'm not obligated, for example, to use the search results in exactly the same order that they appear on my screen, nor am I obligated to use all of the results within a certain numerical range (say, everything one pages 1-10). I might, instead, try to put things together with an ear toward creating, in Anne's words, that "freak-out-panic-attack-oh-no-apocalypse" effect . . .

10:52 PM

tmorange

said...

thomas wrote: "He offers no demonstration of any isomorphy between flarf works and Google results and therefore no basis for the claim that the procedures that generate flarf poems are isomorphic with the algorithms that generate Google returns." such a demonstration on the part of an "outsider" would be quite impossible since the alchemical secrets by which google garbage is turned into flarf gold have largely, if not exclusively, remained with the flarfistes. at least, i could never get what they were doing exactly, but then again i never asked. and clearly plenty of people have taken their own liberties with the processes. jay: you're right, i think the cage progenitor claim is largely hoy's invention. jay and boyer (anne?): the baroness is certainly a primo case of ur-flarf. as is alexi kruchenyk. and i think the "utopianist" argument is slightly off too. it's the idea -- whether held by flarfists or not, it's very much a part of the google spirit and in bernstein's blurb for deer head nation -- that google is some kind of index to the zeitgeist, this is a profoundly mistaken idea that fails to understand how google works. --tom

12:33 AM

tmorange

said...

If Hoy ever attempts such a demonstration of his thesis (a demonstration which his rhetoric is in some sense already obligated to provide) I would be glad to examine it. but he stated flat out that he wanted to take up the reception of the poems and not the poems themselves Until such time, Hoy has simply failed to demonstrate that the object of his essay exists: a trend towards the uncritical use of Google to generate poetry. i dunno, i see a lotta poems and books of poems floating around that bear evidence if not direct admission of techniques involving google, and yet i've not come across one poetics statement by any of the authors of these poems that reflects a critical awareness of the many many complicated overdeterminations that google embodies. it's high time; and if it's forthcoming at hoy's prompt, so much the better for all... tom

12:44 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...

Thanks for your comments, Tom. It is the "overdetermination" thesis that I'm questioning. Hoy has not demonstrated that Google "embodies" the determinants of Flarf. My argument is that, as a first approximation, search results radically underdetermine the poems. In fact, I'm working on a post that makes this most relevant connection between Flarf and Google. I do think there is a connection, but that it is a critical one. It is the poems that must reflect critical awareness, not the statements of their poets. My series here at the Pangrammaticon "The Annotated Pilot" did end up showing an interesting critical awareness (in Tost's "I Am Not the Pilot") of the "ruins" of Internet usage, Hoy's (rather poor) reading of those posts to the contrary. Hoy's statement about not reading the poems is just bad scholarship given his point in the essay. He says that Flarf poems are generated by uncritical use of Google, but he insists on showing this by reference to what people like me say about Flarf.

8:10 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...

Jay: yes, it is the lack of "obligations" to the Google results that makes the idea that Google "overdetermines" Flarf implausible. (It could still be shown in particular cases, of cases, and, like I say, Hoy might still offer that demonstration.)

8:12 AM

Tim Peterson

said...

HOW I INVENTED FLARF Yeah, I actually wasn't going to say anything about it, because I'm the modest type, but actually neither Gary, Kasey, nor Drew is the one who invented Flarf. I did. Well, my mom is the one who came up with the name. But the basic idea was mine. I must have been about fifteen or so, and we were having some Language poets over for dinner that evening, and I was excitedly telling them about this new movement I was thinking about founding, called Matronism. My mom, who was spraying artificial cheese out of a can onto the Collected Shakespeare, suddenly butted in and said "Honey, why don't you call it Flarf, instead? I think that's a nicer name." The Language poets all nodded, and the room because stymied by intense expectation. The basic movement, as I explained to our guests, would be a poetry that involves no humor whatsoever. Irony would be completely foreign to the language, as would guile, innocence, rancor, truculence, and all vaguely impassioned tendencies. The basic goal was to employ words as "firm objects," but in the sense of a kind of beige fabric in which one could rummage around and come up with something possibly of interest, although that something would be seen as just as interesting as any other thing within the beige blanket. Or no, maybe not a blanket, more like a jagged piece of sunroof. Or a woven placemat. This effect is what I referred to at the time (in my posts of January 3 and 17, 1973) as the hypostatization of boredom, or Fred. The hypostatization of boredom effect in Flarf would ideally foreground the properties of language which situate the absent subject in a discourse of multivoiced tonality, or hyperspace continuity gumbo. But at the same time as we wanted to investigate these "firm language objects," we also wanted to write like machines. We tried a number of ways of doing this, early etch-a-sketch and "cash register" poems numbering among the more interesting acculturations. Flarf was later to pass through a number of "concrete" or "performative" stages, but at this early stage, we primarily concerned ourselves with boring holes in the various inroads that political correctness had made into our lives (and more importantly, our poems, Gary would remind me in those evenings sitting by the fire with a tall glass of mint julep and one hand down his tight-fitting trousers) by means of postcolonial theory and writing workshop hayseed materials. One of our favorite items at that time was a gong which I would hit fiercely with my rear end when an effective Flarf poem had been performed or accomplished. Some people understand the purpose of Flarf as an exploration of Googled or procedural texts, but that was actually a very late stage in the movement and my mom came up with that idea too, though how Drew got around to claiming it for himself later is a much longer story than I can get into here. No, Flarf was originally a movement that involved "getting back to nature" through a post-Derridean entrapment of the writing subject in the act of cleaning my toe fungus. And once it was written, there was very little we could inhabit but through repetition, a very spotty strategy not unlike that of the Situationists whose balls measured a full three inches across on a clear day. Yes, we all enjoyed rummaging around in Fred continually over this period of time which signified the lively formation of this movement. I can still see them, eyes glinting in the sunlight of abstract lyric possibility, my comrades Gary, Drew, Nada, Katie, Kasey, Jordan, and some other people, out on the softball field of contemporary poetry, looking back askance to me for guidance, or a sign of the shallow humor they had come to know over the past few weeks of becoming weaker through collective encumbrance, aesthetic bewilderment, and a total dour humorlessness which by this point had become a way of life for us all.

2:57 AM

tmorange

said...

thomas: Hoy has not demonstrated that Google "embodies" the determinants of Flarf. huh? this seems to have it backwards to me. isn't the argument whether or not the poems embody the determinants of google? My argument is that, as a first approximation, search results radically underdetermine the poems. yes, agreed! google search results are (and i know i'm oversimplifying) based on popularity (more frequent hits yield a higher page ranking). but google as a cultural phenomenon is overdetermined: it is a site (no pun intended) that is highly contested by a variety of forces whose interests are rarely mutually inclusive. (as a symbol of entreprenurial ingenuity, high stakes corporate investment, the internet boom, the tech bubble, computer nerds and geeks, democratization good and bad, globalization good and bad, opportunity, limitations, etc.) that's a lot of "critical awareness" to require poems to reflect. tom

6:52 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

12:09 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...

Tom, I thought I was using "embody" as you were in the following: "a critical awareness of the many many complicated verdeterminations that google embodies." I.e., the overdeterminations at issue would be "embodied" (in Google) as my mind is "embodied" (while this machine is to me). The more I think about, the more I am convinced that the sort of critical awareness that Hoy is proposing (I don't want to say "the level of critical awareness") has so vast and murky an object that if anyone took it upon themselves, they would never get any writing done. I see the opposite impulse in Flarf. Joshua Clover notes Hoy's "presumption that poets should have theorized their own work explicitly and completely as a necessary supplement to the poetry, without which it can't be trusted or read as such" and thanks you for the tip. I think it is an absurd presumption.

12:11 AM

tmorange

said...

Joshua Clover notes Hoy's "presumption that poets should have theorized their own work explicitly and completely as a necessary supplement to the poetry, without which it can't be trusted or read as such" and thanks you for the tip. I think it is an absurd presumption. well clearly from the posts i've been reading on the lucipo archives you and i have fundamentally opposed views on all of this. you have said that "Using the language [Google] collects for you doesn't commit you to the sources in any way; there is no investment" which i find absurd as i do not see how once can so easily divorce words from their contexts, nor do i see how one can not have some kind of investment in or committment to the materials one uses or appropriates or makes one's own. bests, tom

6:19 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...

Tom, when I said "absurd" I meant that it didn't make sense to me to demand that poets explicitlyand (especially) completely theorize their practices. I quoted Joshua because I had no reason to think you would think such a thing. But I think you and just disagree about this thing about investment, not in any sort of fundamental way. Though I'm sure I've thrown those words around, too, I probably don't have a fundamental position from which to approach poetry. I think the wonder (perhaps the puzzle) of Flarf is that it does make divorcing words from their contexts look easy. Making a poem out of those words may still be hard, but that initial act of estrangement is brought upon the materials in a flash of what Dan calls "corporate algorithms". The trick (and I'm still open to the idea that there is some funny-business goin on here) is to convert "sources" into "materials". The difference between these are the degree of investment. There is no appropriation because the Flarfist, to use Pound's phrase, "have not wished for property". The Flarfist does not effect an "appropriation of the materials" but an "inappropriation of the poem". The materials are just lying around for the taking. This is why the reader gets that "it was open so let myself in" (Ben Lerner) feeling when reading them.

9:56 AM