Database Poetry
by and published in Edition Eight of Pomegranate
For the young, contemporary poet it is both a challenge and a thrill to scour all possible resources at hand in search for that elusive, fatuous object of desire we have come to know as ‘inspiration’. Usually nothing more than a convenient umbrella term, a catch-word for whatever piece of information our communicating channels happen to stumble upon, inspiration is known to be found in the most unlikely of recesses: daily chores; late night jogging sessions ‘round the neighbourhood; political speeches (yes, it does happen from time to time); and, as unlikely as it might sound, within academic debates. Such is the case of this brief article, which collects a few more or less ordinate thoughts (plus a petty poetic challenge) elicited by the reading of a very recent academic study which happens to have, as a matter of fact, nothing to do with poetry: Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals.
Hiroki Azuma is one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary philosophers and popular culture scholars, and Otaku… (originally written in 2001 and translated for UofM press in 2009) is a compelling insight not only into the contemporary Japanese otaku phenomena, but also into the larger post-modern mind-frame that shapes and is shaped by such unusual, yet more and more relevant cultural models. Much more surprisingly, Azuma’s study offers, I hope to show, quite a few pointers the budding poet could take as indicators of how to let one’s own work be fully engaged with our contemporary (global perhaps, at least English Ð speaking) cultural context.
In discussing such pointers, it should be noted that I do not claim to present revolutionary, or entirely new concepts to the reader; even less, I desire to present such ideas as the only framework upon which a poetic practice might be based. There are as many paths through poetry as there are poets: no path is better or worse than the other, but some are undoubtedly more engaged and contemporary than others. If my discussion here might serve at least as a reminder of one of such possible paths, I have achieved my goal.
Azuma’s book-length essay takes as a departure point of its discussion of post-modernity the inherently Japanese, yet rapidly internationalising figure of the otaku, the compulsive, maniacal consumer and producer of culture connected to a certain interest, often times Japanese comic books (manga), animation (anime) or dating games (eroge). Azuma identifies some behaviours of the otaku, such as the compulsive need to consume with equal drive both original and derivative works from a certain franchise (regardless of original authorship or originality), or the identification of a certain item as interesting because of its possessing a specific set of discrete, indexed qualities which are present and interchangeable among characters (moe characters) as a radical manifestation of a larger phenomenon that, for better or worse, signalled the end of the modern era and our entrance into the post-modern cultural age: the passage from a ‘grand narrative’ mode of understanding cultural products to a ‘database’ model of consuming and elaborating visual, literary and popular culture elements.
In the modern era (to be understood as ending somewhere between the 60s and the 70s) a specific piece of work, let’s say a photograph, was intellectually understood and framed by its relating to a larger, deeper and more pervasive narrative, a ‘world-view’ shared by other works which constituted, so to say, the larger picture whose presence justified the image’s existence as a relevant and appreciated piece of culture in the first place; our photograph could, perhaps, take importance as a symbol of ‘family’, ‘death’, ‘freedom’, ‘revolution’ and so on. The grand narrative was a ‘mother of invention’, essentially a Platonic ideal which manifested itself through the products of our culture.
According to Azuma, this is no longer the case in post-modernity. The postwar context and the progressive fragmentation of culture from larger trends to smaller isolates dictated the end of the grand narrative; its place has been taken, instead, by a grand non-narrative, a fragmented ideological humus that Azuma defines as ‘the database’. The database possesses a structure that is radically different from that of the grand narrative: the latter’s unity and all-encompassing nature is superseded by the infinite plurality and fragmentation of the former, which keeps within itself an array of fragmented narratives. This shift has a radical effect on the products of human culture: while these, in a modern context, could find justification in the overarching system of the grand narrative, now we find a structure that is as plural as the works themselves: the narrative no longer embraces, but rather it mirrors the single work, which in its turn becomes a self-referential narrative. A work of art, a piece of music, a poem is no longer a manifestation of a universal (within a culture) idea, but rather a pastiche-like assemblage of singular emergent parts that have no reason to be but their temporary, interchangeable and shifting interconnections; there is, ultimately, no ‘idea behind’ the work to speak of, but only a sum of elements held together by their presence in the same place at the same time.
While this concept is nothing new, for example, in the world of contemporary art theory, it has been explored very little in the realm of poetry. The Language poets of the 60s and 70s have played extensively with the fracture or erasing of grand narratives by their ‘meaning-free’ use of language; still, exactly because of their refusal of meaning, they do not involve a database-oriented gnoseological model, whose inherent fragmentation does not imply lack of meaning, but only a radically post-modern re-aggregation of it.
Outside of the Language movement, and perhaps a few sparse Dada experiments, I am not aware of any systematic attempt to create poetry by relying not even upon a database model, but upon any model other than the ‘grand narrative’. Poetry has always had a tendency to lag behind other art forms with regard to discussing and evolving its own gnoseological and epistemological basis, a fault that has brought not only little advancement in the medium, but has done nothing to augment the poetic tradition’s cultural currency as well. Here, I would like to propose a few practical pointers to how one could devise a way of creating poetry by relying on a database Ð oriented model of knowledge.
A necessary first step is the shedding of the grand narrative. The database poem must not refer to anything other than itself as the sum of its own parts: metaphors, similes, allusions, allegories, symbols, as well as any other artifice that attempts to make of a object more than it means on a superficial, self-referential level have no place in it.
Quite literally, the poem should be an assemblage, a pastiche of database elements, unified by a superimposed formal structure. This structure, of course, does not necessarily have to be a sonnet, a ballad or any other established schema: the level of form is perhaps the only where the grand narrative has the least chance to be present anyway. One could, for example, establish first relationships between words, by constructing a formal cage of conjunctions, prepositions and articles with dummies ( _____ ) for nouns / verbs / adjectives, and the inserting in the blanks elements taken from a small or large pool of possibilities compatible with the database.
What could these ‘possibilities compatible with the database’ be? Ideally, they should be what moe is to the otaku: objects, characteristics, ideas that, when associated, take for a certain subgroup a compelling nature that is more than the sum of its parts, but does not call into cause anything hierarchically higher than each tiny building block. One could, I supposed, create an actual database in which to insert lists of terms that are horizontally associated by whatever quality the poet sees fit, and the proceed to insert in the previously built cage terms taken from such database.
While such a system to create poetry might seem unimaginative, mechanical and denying poets their right to express unique ideas on the meaning of life, death and so on, this is exactly the point: the post-modern (in which we, for better or worse, move and act) is identified by and fully embraces the demise of the author, the defiance of world systems, the fragmentation and indexing of the self and reality, the fiction and the artifice as a substitute for imagination. As I said before, I do not assume this to be an exclusive, or even an ego – satisfying method to create poetry: nonetheless it is a method, which might come handy to the poet looking for a way to write outside the even more constricting cages of having to fake ‘depth’, ‘originality’ and ‘voice’ at all costs.
Cristiano Montanari
Cristiano Montanari (Modena, 1985) is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Art History in Edinburgh, UK. His work has been published in Indian Bay Press’ Poesia, Rose and Thorn Literary e-zine, Bijou Poetry Review, Angelic Dynamo and is forthcoming on Counterexample Poetics. Other interests include progressive rock, comics reading, tea drinking and tarots.