Code and Materiality: Bouequet, or A Joke about the Language of Flowers
Language is a method of encryption that translates its outside, however one
chooses to construe it, into a coded, symbolic inside. Both divine and logical languages,
designating as their grail a faultless correlation between these two realms, necessarily
underwrite their code systems with either divine guarantee or rational precision. It could be
said that poetry capitalises on the failure of these systems, while simultaneously mourning
their loss. This, I suggest, is the resurgent dilemma of twentieth century poetics. The
twenty-first century retains the basic form of this dilemma yet its anxieties are intensified,
for its poets are squarely faced with the problem of what language may become in the
wake of the death of both god and the human subject as we conceive of it today.
A hypothesis, then.
If language is code, might it not run wild once the last tethers of human exigency
are cut? Language as mad, self-propagating, non-linear putrescence! A growth that crowds
out every last hope of logical correlation, dissolving the clarity of things in a ubiquitous
mesh, infinitely egged on by its own feedback.
Bouequet is an experimental work-in-progress comprising three short synaesthetic
poems responding to three texts that interrogate poetic abstraction: Stéphane Mallarmé’s
‘Crisis of Verse’, (Mallarmé, 2007); Georges Bataille’s ‘The Language of Flowers’ (Bataille,
1996); and Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology (Bogost, 2012). Following a model of
encryption in which semantics is first defiled by homophony then debased, in turn, by
substance, these three poems gesture towards a hypothesised global contamination of
language by language’s own structural operation: unilateral coding. Each new level of
abstraction multiplies language’s latent ambiguities, engendering a semantic noise that
feeds back into the code system, driving it towards entropy. If the original texts are
suppressed, poems that pass through this system can never be decrypted back to a
definitive form. A persistent cryptographer will find it impossible to go deeper than
homophonic equivocation. Instead, the texts are condemned to flicker eternally between
potential readings, setting in motion an infinite permutation of internal tensions that - in the
case of the three poems presented here - vacillate between the universal and the
particular, the sacred and the profane, and the affirmation and negation of being, the latter
citing the poetic form itself.
Bouequet proffers a Language of Flowers for the linguistic apocalypse in which
missive becomes missile: if it can’t be read, then it might at least be hurled. Who or what
by, remains to be seen.
Poetic line (I. II. II)
Each poem has been generated through a process of encryption devised to guide
language back to matter, beginning as a written text penned in response to the theories of
(poetic) abstraction advanced in Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Crisis of Verse’, (Mallarmé, 2007);
Georges Bataille’s ‘The Language of Flowers’ (Bataille, 1996); and Ian Bogost’s Alien
Phenomenology or What it’s Like to Be a Thing (Bogost, 2012), respectively, and designed
to cycle around a central homophonic ambiguity particular to each one. These three
original texts have then been transposed phonetically, effectively transforming them into
sonic events and consolidating the work’s tendency towards homophonic equivocation,
activating at the same time the latent potential of the trans-word homophony integral to two
of the three poems. Each phoneme has then been paired with a three-dimensional shape
designed to express its sonic and connotative properties and then modeled in three
dimensions using CAD software. The shapes are strung together in an order that
correlates with the phonic representation of each text in an infinite line along the surface of
a sphere. Finally, each poem has been ‘tightened up’, collapsing the materially rendered
phonemes inwards so that the assemblage is almost solid and the resulting object is
printed in three dimensions in synthetic polyamide, informed by the scale and dimensions
of a flower.
When a cipher is provided for the phoneme-to-shape abstraction, it is possible to
‘read’ the poems haptically by matching shapes to sounds. From there, one can infer
backwards from the phonic instantiation to the original, written text. However, if the original
text is suppressed, a poem that passes through this system can never be wholly decrypted
or laid to rest in a definitive form: a persistent cryptographer will find it impossible to go
deeper than homophonic equivocation. Instead, the poems are condemned to flicker
eternally between potential readings, setting in motion an infinite permutation of internal
tensions that - in the case of the three poems presented here - vacillate between the
universal and the particular, the sacred and the profane, and the affirmation and negation
of being, the latter citing the poetic form itself.
References:
Bataille, G 1996, ‘The Language of Flowers’, in A Stoekl (ed & trans), Visions of Excess:
Selected Writings 1927-1939, 7th edn, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp.
10-16.
Bogost, I 2012, Alien Phenomenology or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Mallarmé, S 2007, ‘Crisis of Verse’, in B Johnson (trans), Divagations, The Belknap Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp. 199-211.