coText
Aryanil Mukherjee
“Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a “subject” (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.” – Roland Barthes
A need to visit Conceptual Poetry recently arose while preparing to articulate the idea of coText in a Bengali essay. I had heard about Conceptual Poetry (CP), as a freshly brewing idea, a new poetry movement with some side rumors of the criticism it attracted in certain US avant-garde poetry circles about CP’s hobnobbing with power centers in the political and academic establishments, but I didn’t know what Conceptual Poetry was really about.
Since this note is not about Conceptual Poetry but about the “circumcontentive” coText, let’s banish it for a while. The coText, which I must first address, was initially mentioned in the off-white paper on Circumcontentive Poetry (CcP) [পরিবিষয়ী কবিতা]1,2 when we discussed the need for an “assembly language” and proclaimed what we then called Nabalipi [নবলিপি]1 or the New Text. The New Text, evident quite abundantly in the poetry of this group, is a composite or compound text, more like a bricolage attempting to collate idea-tensors sourced on multiple cultures, disciplines, traditions, art and epistemes. Parallely, we talked about another idea - a meta-concept to which we gave many names – idolizer-text, derivative-text, helper-text, shadow-text etc.
Today we set out to articulate that secondary, often unseen text which with a new term – coText.
So, what is a coText?
If we, letting ourselves to be self-aware post-colonists for the time being, choose to objectify the text as a “thing”, then coText is like its shadow. The shadow, when compared to the well known Foucaultian heterotopian3 metaphor of an image seen in a mirror, which is “in an unreal space that opens up potentially beyond its (mirror’s) surface”, differs in its type and level of abstraction. The shadow is not an unreal image, neither does it exist in an unreal space. The shadow has real roots, the mirror image doesn’t. The shadow is always rooted to its parent object – something we’ll from now on refer to as the “object of origin”. It can be seen by all standing around the object of origin although to each viewer the shadow presents itself in a different shape and size. It is an impression of the real object which it casts, but an impression which is completely unavailable to all other senses but the eye, which signifies one level of its abstraction. Shadow fall is inaudible, the thing is lost to touch, smell and taste. The space a shadow occupies is also real space unlike that of a mirror-image as it is borne by all objects that fall in its path unlike a reflection which only the mirror embodies. However, this space is abstract too in that it appears different to each observer. A second degree of abstraction about the shadow is that its existence, shape and size are a pure function of surround light. By changing the primary, secondary and tertiary sources of light, shadow-control of a static object of origin can be exercised to an extreme proportion when it can even cease to exist. This “inexistence” of the shadow is also abstract in the sense that it is a hidden existence – when it cannot be seen anymore, the shadow actually still exists by assuming the footprint of the object of origin upon which the latter sits.
The shadow, however, is still like the mirror image and thus very much an example (extended) of Foucaultian heterotopia in the sense that it is simultaneously essential, ideal, immeasurable and removed. Foucault states in his third principle of the heterotopia 3 that it “has the power of juxtaposing in a single real space different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other”. This “juxtaposition” can be explained and perceived in very real ways as one focuses on the difficulties of measuring the reflected/cast images. The image on the mirror has real physical dimensions, however, it cannot be measured by the object of origin because as soon as one tries to measure it, the origin itself is displaced and distorted and so is the mirror image. More complex overlaps and juxtapositions occur when a second person different from the object of origin attempts to measure the image. This difficulty could be paralleled to the “observer effect” described in association with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle 4 where parameters of a system cannot be measured without altering the system. The shadow is exactly similar to the mirror image in terms of these uncertainties.
The coText is a shadow in the way it relates itself to the text as the object of origin. Our idea of the coText is also heterotopic. It can, however, in a more complex and confusing mode of dependency, switch positions with the text as we would discuss later. To elucidate the many roles of a coText, a taxonomy must follow. The coText can exist as a trinity –
proText
paraText &
postText.
proText
The proText is preparatory, prolusory, coming into being sometimes without much planning, design or formulation, more like staging a pre-production. The proText typically comprises notes, moorings and rough drafts, sketches, diagrams, calculations, survey-texts, photographs, videos, screenings etc. Such proTexts are usually digressive, discursive and finally unseen as they are left-out from publication. In some rare cases these proTexts are published either as the main text or as adjoinments, previews or precursors depending on their level of integrity.
I’d like to cite two rare examples of complete proTexts here that exist without but as the main text, written centuries apart in two different languages in two opposing hemispheres. The first one is a body of work. Varahamihir, the great Indian scholar, wrote a compound, encyclopedic text that included heavy notes on Gandhayukti in 9th century AD along with Gangadhar’s Gandhasara and the anonymous Gandhavada – probably the first texts on cosmetics and perfumery 5. Gandhasastra can be translated as ‘science of cosmetics and perfumery’ while Gandhayukti is about ‘the art of preparing cosmetics and perfumery”. These consanguine texts, written in Sanskrit, present a body of work that gathers around perfumes and cosmetics whole worlds of science, art, sociology, literature, religion, politics and aesthetics binding together many many sub-texts that might be seen today as “notes”. One might argue on whether these texts should be seen as complete works or as a compilation of notes. They’re all integrated nonetheless and written in a fluently poetic language. All ancient Indian texts were written in verse-form and although these texts may not have been meant to be read like poems, they’re more akin to be read like poetry today.
The second example from the more recent times is Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (1927-1940, incomplete) - an incomplete 13-year long musing on the Paris Arcades 6. A mammoth modern work that transcended its era, it included notes, drawings, photographs, essays, montages, poems etc.
Generally speaking however, and unlike the rare examples discussed above, the proText is unpublished and serve as an ideal example of an unseen heterotopia. The CcP poets have been trying to revive and publish these texts alongside the main, leveraging alt-text or other optional text serving features of the hypertext mark-up language (html) of the web as an “optionally unseen helper-text” to open up readability and establish more fluent channels of communication with readers.
paraText
The paraText is one that develops in simultaneity with the main text. It is either part of the poem or words/lines/sections left out for a plethora of reasons. Typically, the paraText is a shredded leftover from a poem-writing experience that is either preserved for making a hearty meal tomorrow or presented as a side dish or just trashed. At times the paraText becomes a main text developed in a parallel effort, weaving out of the text at task - the object of origin, and weaving in to a separate main text. The writer’s primary task at hand in such scenarios, at some intermediate point, is to separate the two main texts like Siamese twins.
Sabyasachi Sanyal’s genre-ravaging text Aprilata 7 (Aprilness) began partly as a travelogue and partly as a review of Shankar Lahiri’s book of poems, Mukherjee Kusum (Mukherjee Flower). Soon a paraText spun off, in this case, as the main text that diffused a memoir, poem, philosophical treatise, cultural travelogue and book review into a single seamless text which was later published as a part-book. Much of the original texts – the travelogue and the book review ended up as incomplete and were discarded. If one considers Mukherjee Kusum to be the main source, should Aprilata be seen as a paraText? Or is it the discarded original texts that sourced the main text of Aprilata.
Fig 1. Two examples from Tagore manuscripts showing his doodle-art developed while editing the original poem
The simultaneity of the paraText may not always lead to another literary text, but other art. This idea can be most wonderfully exemplified by Rabindranath Tagore (Thakur)’s doodle-art (Fig. 1). Tagore, also a major international painter, was in the habit of creating doodlings on the page out of correction marks while editing/composing poetry. He would begin by joining the marks and deleted text into a single sketched-shape which he later filled in with more ink and additional sketch-lines. The art, thus, arose from the constantly edited poem, salvaging and recycling all waste-text into new abstract art. Most often these abstract shapes of faces and bodies of humans and animals had no relation with the poem. At other times, however, the doodle-art did relate to the poem’s topic in an abstract way. This revisionist art is an example of paraText at its edgy best.
postText
The postText or afterText, usually evolves either as a secondary (sometimes called sub-text) body accompanying the main text or as a main text itself developed in response to another. Two contemporary examples of such response, reaction or bi-productized text come from Russian poet Alexandr Yeremenko and French poet and artist Claude Royet-Journoud. Many of Yeremenkos poems are written in response to quotations which act as the source of the poem’s thoughtstream 8. In contrast, Royet-Journoud, a prolific prose writer, devises extraction techniques by means of which he sieves out the poem from his prose, sometimes completely discarding the prose like how an ore is rubbished after the metal is separated from it 9 . A lot of conceptual poems, written as “unoriginal texts” by reusing the language of existing texts would probably qualify as the circumcontentive afterText. The latter, however, is not intended to be “unoriginal” but deemed as creative texts done in the spirit of works by Yeremenko and Royet-Journoud.
Interesting examples of the circumcontentive postText or afterText occur in other arts too. Let’s take the garden, for example. It is cited by Foucault as a fine example of a heterotopia of contradictory spaces 3 – “Let us not forget that this astounding and age-old creation had very profound meanings in the East, and that these seemed to be superimposed. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to unite four separate parts within its rectangle, representing the four parts of the world, as well as one space still more sacred than the others, a space that was like the navel, the center of the world brought into the garden (it was here that the basin and jet of water were located). All the vegetation was concentrated in this zone, as if in a sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they originally set out to reproduce gardens, since the garden was a carpet where the world in its entirety achieved symbolic perfection, and the carpet a sort of movable garden in space. The garden is the smallest fragment of the world and, at the same time, represents its totality, forming right from the remotest times a sort of felicitous and universal heterotopia (from which are derived our own zoological gardens).”
American artist, sculptor and creative landscapist James Mason created in the late 1980s in Columbus, Ohio the Topiary Park as “a landscape of a painting of a landscape”. The 7-acre park was landscaped after George Seurat’s pointillist painting titled “Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte” ( A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte, 1884, Fig. 2) where treeforms were used to represent human and animal figures in the drawing. This creative landscapist postText, done in 3D (Fig. 3) versus the original 2D painting, offers many more two-dimensional vistas of the arrangement described in the painting standing in an open, public space through all seasons.
Fig. 2 George Seurat’s 1884 pointillist painting - Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte
Fig. 3 Two 3D views of James Mason’s Topiary Park in Columbus, Ohio
A fascinating example of one such postText of dimensional transformation is a derivative/idolizer text written by Santanu Bandopadhyay, done as review of my second collection of poetry hAwAmorager man 10 (Weathercock Mind). In that review, Santanu never used my name, did not quote any line from the book, did not include a line of critical assessment of my work. Instead, it was a six-page creative text inspired by his reading of Weathercock Mind. Santanu’s book review could be read as a collection of short stories or as a continuously responsive prose-poem.
In a similar vein, Runa Bandopadhyay writes her book AntarbartE Pangkti 11 (Meta-Lines), a collection of non-academic, creative book reviews where she borrows the tonalities and modalities of the specific poetic language of the book being reviewed to discuss the book itself. In the process, a new literary language evolves with each book review. Should Runa’s postTexts be read as reviews? Or should it be seen as a gradual evolution of a new language of non-linear literary criticism where the critical text is itself a function of the one it attempts to review.
[ The author is grateful to Pat Clifford for sharing fertile ideas, suggestions, resources, and engaging in many hours of fruitful discussions in Arthur’s Café, Hyde Park, Cincinnati.]
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Works Cited
1. Circumcontentive Poetry, An Offwhite Paper, Jacket2, May 21, 2012,
URL: http://jacket2.org/article/circumcontentive-poetry
2. Circumcontentive Poetry Issue, Kaurab No.111, Kolkata, India, Feb, 2011.
3. Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, Michel Foucault, Rethinking Architecture:
A Reader in Cultural Theory. Edited by Neil Leach. NYC: Routledge. 1997. pp.330-336.
4. The circumcontent of science and poetry, Sukanta Ghosh, Jacket2, May 21, 2012.
URL: http://jacket2.org/article/circumcontent-science-and-poetry
5. Studies in Indian Cultural History, P.K. Gode, Visveshvaranand Vedic Research Institute Press, India, Vol1. 1961.
6. unoriginal genius: poetry by other means in the new century, Marjorie Perloff, U.Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2012.
7. Aprilata (Aprilness)/Panu, Sabyasachi Sanyal, Kaurab, Kolkata, India. 2011.
8. Bengali poet Jibanananda Das; his poem about running into a cat all day
9. scenes from many of Charlie Chaplin’s films with Eric Campbell as co-actor
10. Hawamorager Man (Weathercock Mind), Aryanil Mukopadhyay, Kaurab, Kolkatam India, 2004.
11. AntarbartE Pangkti (Meta-lines), Runa Bandopadhyay, Kaurab, Kolkata, India, 2011.
Copyright © 2015 Aryanil Mukherjee
Published: 31st, March 2015
আর্যনীল মুখোপাধ্যায়, ৩১শে মার্চ, ২০১৫