\documentclass[oneside,english]{amsart}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage{pslatex}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage
[pdftitle={Combinatory Poetry and Literature in the Internet},
pdfkeywords={poetry, combinatorics, internet, literature},
pdfauthor={Florian Cramer},
backref=true,
pagebackref=true,
hyperindex=true,
bookmarks=true,
bookmarksopen=false]
{hyperref}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}
\sloppy


\begin{document}

\title{Combinatory Poetry and Literature in the Internet}
\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{October 19, 2000}

\maketitle

\section{\emph{Permutations}, a website}

Since I have been asked to present my website \emph{Permutations} at this
conference, this paper will first tell what the site is about and 
then address the issues it might bring up for the discussion
of a poetics of digital text.

The website (\url{http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/index.cgi})
consists of a number of server-side computer programs written in the
Perl programming language, each of them reconstructing -- and thereby
re-inventing -- one of a few dozens of combinatory poems written between
330 A.D. and today by, among others, Optatianus Porphyrius, Jean
Meschinot, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Quirinus
Kuhlmann and Tristan Tzara. Although it is difficult to distinguish a
combinatory literature from other forms of literature ever since
linguistics defined language as a combinatory system itself, combinatory
poetry nevertheless could be formally defined as a literature that
openly exposes and addresses its combinatorics by changing and permuting
its text according to fixed rules, like in anagrams, proteus poems and
cut-ups. Frequently, written combinatory literature does not denote the
generated text itself, but only a set of formal instructions with
perhaps one sample permutation. Since the poems of Scaliger,
Harsdörffer, Kuhlmann and Tzara fall into this category, they turn into
something profoundly different as soon as their algorithms are being
transscribed from book pages into computer software. The website therefore is 
an open experiment for finding out what might be lost
and gained from such a transscription. \emph{Permutations} is, in my view, not an art
project, but rather pataphysics and gay philology.\footnote{In its
technical implemention, the website is equally simple. Since all
programs run on a server and produce the lowest common denominator of
text-only HTML code, it can be read without plugins or additional
software in any web browser on any operating system even over slow
Internet connections.}

%% Fix quote of Optatianus' poem!
\begin{quotation}
I~Ardua componunt felices carmina Musae\\
II~dissona conectunt diversis vincula metris \\
III~scrupea pangentes torquentes pectora vatis\\
IV~undique confusis constabunt singula verbis. 
\end{quotation}

On the most simple level, the website shows that the history of
algorithmic and permutational literature is much older than avant-garde
modernism, let alone computer poetry proper. The classical rhetorical
figures of chiasm and hyperbaton, the latter also known as
``permutatio,'' are among the earliest Western prototypes of combinatory
poetry.\footnote{\cite{liede:spiel}, vol.2, p.160-2} The oldest
permutational text adapted in \emph{Permutations} is Optatianus
Porfyrius' \emph{Carmen XXV} from the fourth century A.D.. All words
printed in the first and the fourth column of the poem and all words in
the second and third make up two sets of words which can be arbitarily
shuffled with each other.\footnote{\cite{optatian:carmina}, vol.1, p.99}
The words in the fifth column are fixed, thereby ensuring that the poem
will remain hexametric despite its words shuffling. There are 1.62 billion
possible permutations of the text. In the computer adaption, the poem
randomly permutes each time a button is pressed. 

In its initial notation, or state, the poem tells of dysharmonic
junctions, uneven meters, rough tones and confused words tormenting the
singer. Optatianus Porfyrius, an important formal innovator of European
pattern poetry,\footnote{A comprehensive history of pattern poetry is given in
\cite{adler-ernst:text}}, makes his poem an aesthetic
self-reflection which, jumbling its own words, performs
and confuses itself simultaneously. Optatianus' \emph{Carmen XXV}
became paradigmatic for poetry when Julius Caesar
Scaliger coined the term ``Proteus verse'' for word permutation poems in
his 1561 \emph{Poetices}, and made them a canonical poetical form for the
century to come.\footnote{\cite{scaliger:poetices}, no pagination} 

Scaliger's example line, ``Perfide sperasti divos te fallere Proteu''
(``Wickedly you hoped to deceive the gods, Proteus''), was the prototype
of countless poems in the 17th century whose lines, written either in
Latin or in one of the new national languages, contained words to be
shuffled. Not unlike Optatianus' \emph{Carmen XXV} whose permutability
was restrained through the fixed words in its fifth column, Scaliger's
line can not be jumbled at will if the hexameter is paid attention to.
The poetical permutation of the six words therefore doesn't map the
mathematical permutation of six (\begin{math}6! = 720\end{math}). The
difference between poetical and mathematical laws of permutation was
abolished in the 17th century when the perception of Scaliger coincided
with a renewed interest in the ''ars`` of Raimundus Lullus and the
Christian Kabbalah. While Lullus used combinatorics to generate
ontological and theological statements, 17th century science rewrote
Lullism into a generative systematics of encyclopedic knowledge. Thomas
Lansius, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Quirinus Kuhlmann were
at once scholars, language researchers and writers of Proteus
poetry. 

Aside from two Proteus poems (both of which are adapted in
\emph{Permutations}), the 17th century poet Georg Philipp Harsdörffer
wrote a morphological word generation machine he called ``Fünffacher
Denckring der teutschen Sprache'' (``Fivefold Thought Ring of the German
Language'').\footnote{\cite{harsdoerffer:erquickstunden}, vol.2, p.517}
Each of its five concentric circles contained at set of morphemes which,
in their combination, were supposed to cover all existing and potential words of
the German language. Harsdörffer's ``Denckring'' not only expands on Lullus,
but also on the 17th century linguist Justus Georg Schottelius who
considered the combinatorics of one-syllable ``base words''
(``Stammwörter'') the principle of the German language. Schottelius
anti-nominalistically conceived of them as words which ``mean
their thing right away'' and believed them to be derived immediately from the
Hebrew and divine language.

While the Proteus poetry of the 17th century employed combinatorics as a
means of calculation and control, the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th
century reinvented same or similar poetic forms as part of a poetics of
indeterminacy and chance. Tristan Tzara proposed to create Dada poetry
by cutting out the words of a newspaper article, shuffling them in a bag
and writing them down in the accidental order they had been pulled
out.\footnote{\cite{tzara:poeme-dadaiste}} Despite the anti-art gesture,
Tzara's instruction to select, break up and permute a group of words
exactly conforms to Julius Caesar Scaliger's definition of the Proteus
verse. Between Scaliger and Tzara, there however is not only a shift
from determination to chance, but also from closure to openness of the
system.  All pre-20th century permutation poems shuffle a fixed set of
data directly inscribed -- hard-coded -- into themselves, but Tzara's
Dada poem merely denotes a process which can be fed with arbitrary data.
By allowing to take any Web page as the input data, the computer
adaption of the poem even radicalizes this difference; the process now
involves a bigger repository of text, happens in real time and, by
algorithmic automation, doesn't require any manual work or skills on
behalf of the reader.

\emph{Permutations} finally include some self-invented automata, such as
``Here Comes Everybody'', a processor of James Joyce's ``Finnegans
Wake'' which algorithmically mimics the portmanteau word poetics of the
novel. Hyphenating its text and recombining the syllables according to
stochastic probability, the program perpetually creates new texts with
newly generated portmanteau words from the novel. John Cage's radio play
``Roarotorio. An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake'' formally processes the
novel in order not to expand, but to reduce the volume of
text.\footnote{The method to expand text through stochastic algorithms
has been frequently used since the 1950s when Theo Lutz and Max Bense
produced computer-generated variations of Kafka's prose (as described by
Reinhard Döhl in \cite{doehl:zuse}). Markov chains have been prominently
used in poetry by the literary scholar Hugh Kenner and the British poet
Charles O. Hartman. They are also used in MS/DOS program \emph{POE} by
the Austrian poet Franz Josef Czernin (\cite{czernin:poe}) and in Ray
Kurzweil's \emph{Cybernetic Poet}.}


\section{Language combinatorics and computer text}

Without doubt, it is philologically incorrect or problematic at least to
rewrite pre-digital combinatory poetry into computer programs. The
transcription potentially blurs the difference between an
anti-nominalist, theologically and hermetically influenced linguistic
thinking of the Renaissance on the one hand and the concept of language
as arbitrary material in avant-garde modernism on the other. Juxtaposing
both discourses, the website however shows that any contemporary
perception of the Renaissance texts is inevitably triggered and filtered
through the knowledge of avant-garde literature, computer poetry and
literary theory. If both traditions therefore influence each other, the
opposite conclusion must be drawn as well: Any concept of digital
literature which does not reflect language combinatorics and
algorithmically processed language is severely restrained.  

On a purely formal level, the combinatory poetry of both the Renaissance
and the 20th century has a common set of features which as well seem to
be relevant for a poetics of literature in computer networks: 

\begin{enumerate}

\item Densification 

An compact source code (instruction set) generates an abundance of text.

\item Micro-grammar

Reproducing the linguistic mechanisms of word and sentence creation,
combinatory poetry is a generative reflection of language.

\item Filtering

Combinatory poetry uses formal methods to process language and transform
text. It thereby shows that the poetic potential of computing
machines is not limited to transmitting ready-made signs. Computers
are not merely a transport devices, but potential senders and receivers,
writers and readers of text as well. 

\end{enumerate}

Since a computer can act at any point of the communicative process, it
is not simply a medium  -- i.e. an instance \emph{between} a sender and a
receiver --, but a universal semiotic machine. Misreading the
computer as a mere medium, humanities have wrongly assumed 
that their studies of the computer have to be ``media studies''
(instead of semiotics). Likewise, computer art was misunderstood as
so-called ``media art.'' A result of this misreading is, as it
seems, that concepts and methods developed by media studies since
Kracauer and McLuhan for analyzing film, television, radio and
video were plainly reapplied to computers and the Internet.
As a consequence, notions like ``multimedia,'' ``interactivity'' and
``nonlinearity'' have been mapped from TV and video onto digital
literature. While it is of course useful to distinguish a movie as
linear form (of a reel whose time and sequence of display can be
exactly determined) from a computer game as a nonlinear form, the same
distinction fails to describe a literary text whose perception might be
rather linear or rather not depending on the way an individual reads it.
While ``new media'' notions derived from film, TV and video made little
to no sense in literary theory and studies of digital code, the
conceptual confusion they left still persists and continues to obstruct 
critical debates. 

From the viewpoint of a computer programmer, the text generators that
make up \emph{Permutations} may be primitive.  But making their
algorithms transparent, they make readers pay attention to the fact that
any digital text -- and any digital poetry -- is potentially
machine-executable, a sequence of signifiers which, beyond merely
relying on computer systems, actually sets them up. I thus consider the
website a modest statement against equating network computers with
simple transmission media and typographical interfaces, against
mistaking the web browser for the net and against restraining computer
network literature to so-called ``hypertext'' and so-called
``multimedia.'' While it might seem that, in comparison to the latter,
generative text has remained a marginal form of digital literature, a
more thorough consideration should take into account, for example,
machine-generated invoices, automated bank statements and official
letters, Internet search engines, ``personalized'' portals and
home-order catalogues, not to speak of fully automated control and
regulation systems in industry production, aviation and on the stock
market. They all exemplify how efficaciously algorithmically manipulated
writing has intervened into everyday language and culture; a status quo
which the concepts of ``hypertext''and ``multimedia'' don't reflect at
all. Instead, computer viruses like \emph{Melissa} and \emph{I LOVE
YOU}, small bits of text written in computer control code, strike me as
perhaps the most dense and interesting examples of contemporary
literature in the Internet.  Viruses at once follow and extend the
combinatory design principle to create an abundance out of few
signifiers by infection, self-replication and mutation of code. They
could make other writers in the Internet aware that the the mere syntax
of the code they use is of explosive virulence, all the more when global
technical infrastructures depend on it.  

This should make it clear why ``hypertext'' is anything but an
exhaustive or general concept of digital textuality. Nevertheless,
``hypertext'' used to be both the coded format and the aesthetic program
of much if not most literature in the Internet.\footnote{The implication
of ``hypertext'' as a hypertrophy of ``text'' is not only questionable,
it all the more contradicts the fact that the ``hypertextual'' World
Wide Web just forms the utmost and least general code level of the
Internet.} While it would be aesthetically naive of course to expect all
digital literature to be written in program code, it seems reasonable to
expect from net literature that it conceptually and aesthetically
reflects the semiotic and technological conditions of the system in
which its signifiers flow. Until recently, this expectation was rather
met by poets who didn't call themselves poets, but ``Net.artists'',
rooting themselves in conceptual art rather than in
literature.\footnote{Such as \emph{jodi.org}, \emph{I/O/D},
\emph{Mongrel}, Heath Bunting, the \emph{ASCII Art Ensemble} and
\emph{0100101110101101.org}. Comprehensive material about Net.art is
available in \cite{baumgaertel:netart} and \cite{net-condition}.}

Recently, the ``codeworks'' poetry of mez (Mary Ann Breeze), Alan
Sondheim, Ted Warnell and others has taken up impulses from Net.art by
incorporating ready-made bits and syntax from programming languages,
binary machine code, network protocols and markup conventions of
interpersonal network communication.\footnote{The term ``codeworks'' was
coined by Alan Sondheim. The September 2001 issue of the American Book
Review will feature a number of critical essays on codeworks.} Contrary
to expectations that net literature would increasingly become
multimedia, these codeworks circulate as plain E-Mail. Not being
algorithmic in a strict sense, they nevertheless play with the fact that
they might be read as (potentially harmful) machine code, and achieve
densification, micro-grammar and filtering by hybridizing human and
machine languages. If codeworks could thus be called a post-combinatory
poetry, I hope the gay philology of \emph{Permutations} provides material 
against which the ``post'' prefix may be matched.



\bibliographystyle{alpha}
\bibliography{diss}


\end{document}
