In his essay, Technologies of Dictation: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group, Darren Wershler-Henry looks beyond the roles of the individuals - in this case bpNichol and Steve McCaffery - toward a fuller understanding of the nature and outcome of their collaboration:
Because my concern is not to determine with which subject the Toronto Research Group writing “actually” originated, or with the establishment of a hard and fast oeuvre (discursive analysis is interested in neither, except as a function of expression, Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language), I’m not particularly concerned with sorting out who occupied which pronominal position at any given time. What interests me instead are the conditions and rules under which typewriting emerges from an always-nebulous assemblage of dictators, typists and machines.
In the Introduction to Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine (the collected reports of the TRG), Steve McCaffery characterizes their typewriting system as a general economy in dialogue. He describes the relationship that makes the TRG composition process possible as a “fragile contract” that binds one person into the role of “enunciator” and the other as “transcriber.” The fragility of this contract stems from “the loss of certainty around independent judgment” In other words, each party assumes that their words will be transcribed faithfully, knowing full well that this is not always the case, but proceeding to dictate nevertheless: “Steve is dictating his thinking, thinking Barrie is typing this dictation. However, Barrie is typing out his own thoughts on the matter and Steve doesn’t know it.” In other cases, this process resulted in a kind of shorthand transcription of what was dictated rather than the verbatim text. As long as the contract receives lip service, it is possible for this relationship to continue producing text.
It’s also worth nothing that the technological component of this assemblage – the typewriter – is not a neutral conduit facilitating the process of dictation. It has its own rules, and requires that the bodies of its users adapt to them to facilitate smooth dictation Failure to comply with these implicit rules results in a change in the process. McCaffery remarks that “Neither Barrie nor myself were touch typists and so dictation resulted in a deceleration in the speed of oral delivery.” McCaffery believes that while the deceleration of dictation brought an overall greater degree of care in terms of the enunciator’s selection of words, that it did not decrease the number of instances where the typist recorded something other than exactly what was spoken, by dint of either error or choice.
From McCaffery’s perspective, the uncertainty surrounding the dictatorial process is a desirable state of affairs, part of an attempt to produce a writing that moves beyond “thought’s proprietary nature.” He describes the whole assemblage – enunciator, machine, typist – as a “synthetic subject based on a We-full, not an I-less paradigm” or a “third ‘ghost’ locator.” The text this synthetic subject produces is never quite the product of one mind; there is always some degree of error, summarization or deliberate deviation at work. At the time of the writing of the introductory material for the TRG book, McCaffery considered his difficulty in assessing which thoughts had originated with which writer as a degree of the project’s overall success.
McCaffery also alludes to nostalgia that is a result of the technological regime change that writing is facing after the demise of the typewriter as the writing tool of choice. “An obvious side effect of the current regime of personal computers has been a quantum leap in material nostalgia. The handwritten manuscript, the hand-corrected typewritten page, the patchwork paste-up, clipped with scissors and Scotch-taped together, are now the valued by-products of an obsolete mode of production, superseded by a mode of writing whose new locus is a hyperspace.” Though bpNichol was an inveterate computer hobbyist,* and produced some of the world’s first animated concrete poems, [including: First Screening: Computer Poems (1984) and The Alchemist (1984)] the TRG never inserted a computer into their compositional process. Had they done so, McCaffery acknowledges, the results of that process would have been entirely different, as the rules governing the text-producing assemblage would have been entirely different.
Darren Wershler-Henry / Technologies of Dictation: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group
*J. R. Carpenter’s note: Christopher Funkhouser describes bpNichol’s computer animated poems in his 2007 book, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms, 1959-1965. In the chapter: “Visual and Kinetic Digital Poems,” Funkhouser writes:
Nichol used several approaches to staging language in First Screening. In some works viewers encounter a transposition or interpretation of physical place on which the poetry is conducted. A graphical performance of activity is illustrated in this three-dimensional concept, using language as a visual descriptor as well as verbal data. […] Nichol’s work emphasizes the interplay between the words on the screen and how such play can establish meaning. […] The works presented in First Screening are often ingenious, while maintaining an appealing simplicity. Nichol’s poems are lively, and they clearly influenced others who immediately followed. His death in 1988 unfortunately prevented a second screening of computer poems plotted by Nichol from being developed; it would be interesting to see, hear and experience what - if any - types of verbal-visual-vocal digital poems Nichol would be developing if he were alive.
other islands in this text-fed stream
