Monday, July 27, 2009
Gnoetic thought
The reader is ontologically de-natured from a typical lyric understanding of poetic process thru gnoetry b/c the author is as well, given her use of the machine as a prosthetic mind and hand and breath; hence, the reader is not asked, and indeed can not be asked, to fill in indeterminacies to complete the harmony of an organic whole. She is asked to leave indeterminacy in place & willfully seek meaning elsewhere; seek meaning in the poem itself, not worrying about finding connections to the "outside world" (though there is no out-right ban on that connection) or see through the language to authorial intention or psychology. Simply put, there is no meaning behind the words—we have only the meaning of the words.
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I find myself not being so concerned with issues of sign, signifier, or signified (or the lack thereof), but more with how composing texts with gnoetry can disrupt the process of signification and leave openings in the "meaning of the words," much in the way that Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons does. It's not non-sense if you mean every word of it, and mean every word to be a set of potential meanings instead of a singular one. I believe much of this comes down to the choices of the end-user, though, and not to anything inherent in the program.
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