The relationship of the community to the world of things remains that of private property … Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labor-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labor-power of the community.
– Karl Marx1
[I]f language were made either private or public – that is, if large portions of our words, phrases, or parts of speech were subject to private ownership or public authority – then language would lose its powers of expression, creativity, and communication.
– Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri2
Until looking into the mirror just now … I’d never met a Marxist with a sense of humour.
– Steve McCaffery3
The “Toronto Research Group” usually refers to a series of research reports and associated activities conducted by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol from 1972 to 1982, the dates of their first manifesto and the last of their investigations into creative translation, the material production of the book, and non-narrativity.4 Throughout this chapter, the name Toronto Research Group (TRG) will refer to these activities, though one should bear in mind that these investigations did not take place in isolation. TRG research is an important component of a constellation of integrated critical and creative collaborations by several experimental poets during the 1970s. These activities were undertaken both at the local level of a scene within the Toronto literary community and as part of a larger international network of poets with whom McCaffery and Nichol kept in constant contact. At approximately the same time that they began their work together, Nichol and McCaffery formed the sound poetry collective the Four Horsemen with fellow poets Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. McCaffery and Nichol composed several poems together, including “Parallel Texts,” “Collboration” [sic], and “In England Now that Spring,” the title piece of a co-authored book also containing their tandem gestural scores. McCaffery undertook similar projects with Steve Smith (Crown’s Creek, Edge) and with members of the Language Group (Legend), while bpNichol worked on numerous intermedial projects, including the Seripress collaborations with Barbara Caruso. In addition to the more celebrated albums by the Four Horsemen (CaNADAda, Live in the West), McCaffery and Nichol’s experiments with creative translation would occasion several multi-authored projects, most notably Six Fillious (with Robert Filliou, George Brecht, Dieter Roth, and Dick Higgins), but also McCaffery’s 8 × 8: La Traduction à L’Epreuve (a bilingual composition involving Michel Beaulieu, Cécile Cloutier, Michel Gay, Alexander Hutchison, Daphne Marlatt, André Roy, and George Stanley) and Nichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire (a similar translational work that features collaborative sections with McCaffery, Higgins, Karl Young, Hart Broudy, and Richard Truhlar).5
The poet and editor Karl Young would remark of Nichol that “he was Toronto’s most innovative poet at a time when that city could claim more innovative poets than any other in the English speaking world.”6 Perhaps Young exagerates, yet it is likely that readers familiar with mid-century North American writing may have never heard of the TRG, despite the fact that its members made sizeable contributions to sound poetry, visual and concrete poetry, Fluxus, Language writing, and conceptual art. Further attention to the relationship between Fluxus and the TRG is warranted if for no other reason than Dick Higgins was active in both groups. But then, so was McCaffery, who composed the intermedial piece Scenarios (1978) at the “Flux-Wedding” of George Maciunas and Billie Hutchins.7 Many of the ideas McCaffery co-developed with Nichol and Higgins anticipate aspects of Language writing. The TRG occupies a nebulous position in the history of experimental poetics, insofar as its members participated simultaneously in a variety of artistic movements during the 1960s and 1970s. In his role as editor of Ganglia Press, GrOnk, and The Cosmic Chef, Nichol made concerted attempts to expose different literary communities to one another. Unlike the majority of American magazines associated with the “Mimeograph Revolution” of the 1960s, GrOnk brought together British, Czech, American, Canadian, French, and Austrian concrete and experimental practitioners, using a technology for disseminating texts usually associated with smaller scenes of writing and pamphleteering. Although Nichol was the principal editor, editorial control changed hands among several writers, and the mimeo editions were often mailed free of charge to subscribers worldwide.
Despite the interest in such experiments among members of the Toronto literary scene, critical attention to this aspect of their combined practice is noticeably absent beyond preliminary assessments of the Four Horsemen’s sound poetry.8 Certainly Nichol’s role as a facilitator of community during these years receives comment, but such observations are typically relegated to his work as an editor or the consequence of biographical readings of The Martyrology. In his introductory remarks for the Open Letter special issue “bpNichol + 10,” Frank Davey asserts that the critical industry devoted to Nichol’s work had tended to deify the personality of the poet by conflating ‘bp’ the person and the body of texts associated with his name.9 In the same issue, commentators such as Lori Emerson, Darren Wershler-Henry, and Christian Bök echo Davey’s complaint; the latter two indicate that such celebratory criticism has taken The Martyrology as the centrepiece for a largely anecdotal and honorific approach to his oeuvre, precisely because his long poem, Bök argues, “lends his life work an imaginary coherence, unifying his career under the reassuring, but inhibiting, aegis of humanistic legitimacy” (“Nickel Linoleum” 66).10 Bök and Wershler-Henry call for critics to explore the rich heterogeneity of Nichol’s literary practice, finding alternative paths through his early concrete texts in Journeying & the Returns and Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer, the ‘pataphysical experiments collected in the love/zygal/artfacts trilogy, and The Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour. This is not to suggest simply that an alternative set of texts should usurp The Martyrology as the privileged “centre” of Nichol’s canon; rather, these critics indicate that a more comprehensive approach is needed to identify the complex array of practices collected under the proper name known as “bpNichol.” A comparable tendency can be found in the critical attention paid to McCaffery’s literary career. Interest in his work has come mainly from critics of the Language Group, and thus his single-authored texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s such as Panopticon tend to receive disproportionate attention.11 Following from Davey’s assertion, if the goal of earlier criticism had been to distinguish ‘bp’ the person from the “author function” that marks a body of literary texts, then as critics we should insist upon a further step: to acknowledge the frequency with which “bpNichol,” “McCaffery,” Higgins,” “Barreto-Rivera,” and others signify as proper names dispersed and reconstituted as other collective nouns – the Toronto Research Group, the Four Horsemen, or Six Fillious.
In the three previous chapters, I have sought to establish a crucial connection between the social organizations that poets create and the methods of writing they adopt: collaboration at BMC and the development of open form writing, CAM’s anti-racism activism and the history of nation language, consciousness raising in the WLM and a poetic of the common. The TRG’s social poetics by comparison involves a more radical experiment in form, whereby collaboration constitutes the hallmark of their literary practice – in sound poetry, creative translation, collaborative poems, intermedial texts, and conceptualist-inspired performance art. For the sake of clarity, it is possible to extrapolate from the many texts mentioned above a list of four broad and often overlapping areas of work: (1) research (e.g., the TRG reports), (2) textual composition (e.g., “In England Now that Spring”), (3) performance (e.g., the Four Horsemen), and (4) creative translation (e.g., Six Fillious). Some of these practices are dynamic, involving real-time acts of spontaneous exchange, while others are appropriative, insofar as they involve the modification of another poet’s work. Moreover, these four modes involve no implicit sequence from one to the next. The TRG did not precede the Four Horsemen in a fixed trajectory, but instead they were a “community of two alongside of which grew that community of four … extend[ing their] range and interest in collaboration” (McCaffery, “Interview” by Jaeger 91). Although multi-authored poetry is, generally speaking, a marginal practice, it appears with frequency among numerous twentieth-century literary movements including the Dadaists, Surrealists, Beat poets, the New York School, the Oulipo Group, members of the St Mark’s Poetry Project, the Language Group, and Spoken Word poetry, in addition to forms such as Renga or Chaining, and strategies of textual appropriation and sound poetry more generally. One might also point to digital poetries, whose complex algorithms and new media design often occasion collaborations between poets and programmers. Speaking once again to the unacknowledged importance of the TRG, undoubtedly it is the primary poetic forerunner to twenty-first-century digital, flarf, and conceptual poetries. If this is indeed the case, it is because the TRG, more than any other Cold War–era movement, anticipates the pending war over information that will constitute a central feature of what is now dubbed “the knowledge economy.” In the introduction to this book, I list among the Cold War’s chief socio-economic developments the radical transformation and globalization of intellectual property standards. The TRG’s experiments in multi-authorship, I argue, constitute a poetic activism challenging proprietary definitions of authorship.
Reflecting on the importance of collaboration, McCaffery would observe years after his work with the TRG that by the late 1960s Toronto had become a tangible site of “‘community building.’” “With the Vietnam War driving loads of American poets to Canada, Toronto felt something like a 1916 Zurich at the time of the birth of the Dada sound poem” (McCaffery, interview by Ryan Cox). What he also encountered was a resurgent interest, particularly among the youth, in the possibilities of radical leftist action. Bryan D. Palmer observes the “breathtaking explosion” of Trotskyist, Maoist, and revolutionary protest groups that came into being from roughly 1967 to 1977 across the country, but especially in the nation’s largest city (Canada’s 1960s 280–1). A shortlist includes the New Left Caucus, Red Morning, Rising Up Angry!, Canadian Party of Labour, Progressive Worker, Communist Party of Canada/Marxist-Leninist (formerly the Internationalists), Socialist League/Forward Group, Spartacist League (later the Trotskyist League of Canada), Revolutionary Marxist Group, Revolutionary Workers League, En Lutte/In Struggle, and Workers Communist Party. (Keep in mind the population of Canada in 1970 was barely 20 million, and the population of Toronto was just over seven hundred thousand.)12 Invited to speak at a conference arranged by the Student Union for Peace Action in December 1966, Black Mountain expat Paul Goodman expressed his surprise that “in Canada, of all places, there seemed to be a lot of Marxism” (the students apparently grew impatient with Goodman’s “subjective orientation”) (qtd. in Palmer, Canada’s 1960s 274). Writing for the magazine Canadian Dimension, Cy Gonick persuasively argues that the Canadian public was at least marginally more receptive to the possibilities of socialism, lacking the United States’ legacy of anti-communism and its tradition of fierce liberal individualism (evident on both the Left and the Right).13 Yet McCaffery’s injunction, that until peering in the mirror he had never met a Marxist with a sense of humour, registers both an ironic playfulness and a serious reprisal of the intransigent programs of China’s Cultural Revolution and the social realism demanded in Eastern Europe. By the early 1970s, Olson’s provocative allusion to Mao meant something altogether different; not unlike the Cuban socialists Salkey encountered, the TRG’s “Kommunism” sought to advance the principles of an egalitarian economic model with open, local, and playful experiments in artistic collective life.
At the same time, however, the British-born McCaffery, having arrived in Canada in 1968, also encountered a “backward and repressive”14 preoccupation with national identity, one that ironically established continuity between the Diefenbaker and Trudeau eras of Canadian politics. He recounts a humorous but telling anecdote in which the poet Dorothy Livesay poked him in the stomach with an umbrella for taking up space in “Canadian” literary magazines. More disconcerting, however, was the prevalent and polemical ant-Americanism of the period. One commentator indicts the United States as a “sick society,” citing its rampant inequality, lust for profit, and use of violence. The obvious objection is not whether or not evidence of such systemic greed and dispossession exists, but rather how Canada was different.15 Many on the Left in Canada were justifiably opposed to foreign control of industry and the expropriation of natural resources. But this debate might instead have emphasized the threat economic dependency posed to political autonomy, while engaging Canada’s own ruling elite – its growing complicity in exploiting the developing world as well as its labouring classes at home. Invariably, essentialist and moralizing arguments often obfuscated what Marxist commentators insisted was an issue of class amid a distracting nationalist rhetoric.
Marshal McLuhan nearly predicts this contradictory milieu years earlier in a remarkable self-published manifesto entitled Counterblast (1954):
B L A S T
england ancient GHOST of culture
POACHING the EYES of the
canadian HAMLETS
COLOSSUS of the South, horizontal
HEAVYWEIGHTS flattening the
canadian imagination
…
B L A S T (for kindly reasons)
C A N A D A
The indefensible canadian border
The SCOTTISH FUR-TRADERS who haunt
the trade routes and Folkways of the
canadian psyche
B L A S T all FURRY thoughts
The canadian BEAVER,
submarine symbol of the
SLOW
UNHAPPY
subintelligentsias.
…
Oh BLAST
The MASSEY REPORT damp cultural igloo
for canadian devotees of
T I M E
&
L I F E
…
B L E S S
The MASSEY REPORT,
HUGE RED HERRING for
derailing Canadian kulcha while it is
absorbed by American ART & Technology.
(2, 3, 4–5)
McLuhan republished a greatly expanded version of this obscure mimeographed volume in 1969 with Toronto press McClelland and Stewart (making it likely that Steve McCaffery and bpNichol encountered it). Historian Bryan D. Palmer describes the text as “almost Beat-like” in its “countercultural anticipation of the 1960s” (147), although the title makes it clear the new media theorist had Futurist-Vorticist typography and Dadaist collage centrally in mind. McLuhan explains in the preface to the 1969 edition: “the term COUNTERBLAST does not imply any attempt to erode or explode [Lewis’s] BLAST. Rather it indicates the need for a counter-environment as a means of perceiving the dominant one” (5). McLuhan’s explanatory note aside, “counterblasting” preserves Lewis’s violent masculinization of artistic discourse. Such bombastic language resonates with Olson’s rhetorical “projectiles,” along with others among the American post-war avant-garde. Arguably, however, analysis of Cold War masculinity plays out slightly differently in the Canadian context. McLuhan’s missive to blast (in precise order) England and then the United States lists English Canada’s two principal cultural-economic influences over the course of the nation’s history. Yet so too McLuhan sets his sights on the Massey Report of 1951 (more formally, the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences). The government-appointed commission made recommendations for state patronage, leading to, among other things, the formation of the National Library of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts. Blasting the Massey Report meant challenging Canadian cultural nationalism, since the commission’s endorsement for state support was largely a gesture of independence from the United States’ formative influence. In turn, McLuhan objects to nationalism in both its imperialist and indigenous-reactionary forms, one based on colonial exploitation, the other on a collective “psyche” linking the land to a single ethnic or racial history (e.g., “Scottish”).
For the British-born McCaffery, none of this was particularly interesting. He and Nichol shared a deep suspicion of nationalism. Their collaborations with poets such as Dick Higgins, Robert Filliou, and Dieter Roth traversed not only national but linguistic borders, countering such parochialism with their transnational literary commitments. One should not conclude, however, that the TRG promoted a vague conception of cosmopolitanism at the expense of locality and place. The name chosen for their research site was the Toronto Research Group; Four Horsemen albums featured the titles Live in the West and CaNADAda; while McCaffery’s major collection of essays is cleverly titled North of Intention. Not only does this collection playfully reference the neighbour to the south, it also applies large portions of Continental philosophy to anglophone Canadian writers (a fusion of French theory and English poetry not lost on Canadian audiences). The playful subversion of CaNADAda surely conjures McLuhan’s Counterblast, opening up a “counter-environment” within the nation (“NADA”). The TRG’s linked localities will present a better framework for understanding the digital public spheres it anticipates, namely, by demonstrating that communication technologies supplement rather than replace tangible sites of community building.
Their Fluxus co-collaborators Filliou and Brecht jointly developed the concept of the Eternal Network16 with similar ideas in mind. Conceived, according to Filliou, as a “more useful concept than the avantgarde,” he offers the following definition:
There is always someone asleep and someone awake
someone dreaming asleep, someone dreaming awake
someone eating, someone hungry
someone fighting, someone loving
someone making money, someone broke
someone traveling, someone staying put
someone helping, someone hindering
someone enjoying, someone suffering
someone indifferent
someone starting, someone stopping
The Network is Eternal (Everlasting)[.]
(“Research” [c. 1970] 1–11)
The two poets conceived of the Eternal Network during the late 1960s as an international community of artists working together by way of correspondence. The idea grew out of their “non-shop” in the south of France, the “Cédille qui Sourit,” “an international center of permanent creation,” where the two “played games, invented and disinvented objects, corresponded with the humble and mighty, drank and talked with [their] neighbors, manufactured and sold by correspondence suspense poems and rebuses” (Teaching and Learning 198). According to Filliou and Brecht, art should be collaborative and egalitarian, it should challenge the distinction between art and daily life, and it should emphasize process over product. Since the initial formation of Filliou and Brecht’s Eternal Network, critics in art circles have arguably applied the term too narrowly to a tradition of correspondence or “mail art” codified in collections such as Chuck Welch’s edited collection Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology (1995), and Michael Crane and Mary Stofflet’s Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art Activity (1984). Filliou and Brecht’s initial purpose hints at a broader usage. The works circulating through the Eternal Network tend to be the ephemeral materials of Fluxus multiples, mail art, language-focused conceptual art, and a large body of poetry increasingly incapable of definition via traditional generic distinctions: sound, visual and concrete, creative translation, and procedural verse. What is more, the two men proclaimed that an art network should have no final autonomy, that such collectives are connected with yet other aesthetic and political assemblages: “we have thought of advocating an International Nuisance Network, composed of people from any walk of life, regardless of nationality.” They might demand a new deal for artists and non-artists alike, housing for the poor, “access to Parks and other public places – free time on radio, television, [and] newspapers” (204). Hence, the Eternal Network was not merely to be a system of correspondence but a political community – one focused on promoting public access, collective ownership, and a transgeographic commons of interaction and shared resources.
One of McCaffery and Nichol’s most important collaborators, Dick Higgins, frequently referred to their group practice as the Institute of Creative Misunderstanding. Higgins expands upon this notion in an interview:
To broaden my perspective I conceived of a community of artists and thinkers who could take conceptual models and, with good will (my assumption, like Kant’s in his ethics), transform these models – evoking not simply intellectual discourse but humor or lyrical effects which would otherwise not be possible. This is, of course, my Institute of Creative Misunderstanding … I would not describe the Institute for [sic] Creative Misunderstanding as a “fake institute” … so much as an abstract entity and process of existence which creates a paradigm of community of like-minded people by its very name and mentioning.17
Higgins, like McCaffery and Nichol, conflates community with practice. More than simply a “likeminded group of authors,” Higgins has in mind the communal development of a common “conceptual model” – echoing his Exemplativist manifesto, in which the poet states that art is always a process of “model-making and model-using” (“Six Trivial” 114). In their introduction to Open Letter’s special issue on Canadian “Pataphysics,18 McCaffery and Nichol remark that their investigations had spawned several institutes of advanced poetic study: l’Institut Onto-Genetique, the Institute of Hmmrian Studies, and (borrowed from Dick Higgins) the Institute of Creative Misunderstanding. The authors also hint playfully the “pending existence of a Centre for Marginal Studies” and the possible formation of a “non-College of Epistemological Myopia” (8). Like Jarry’s ‘pataphysical19 science of imaginary solutions, their intended goals are both playful and parodic. Yet the idea of an institute was something that Higgins, McCaffery, and others used quite seriously to think through the social production of their poetics – what the former in a letter to his friend calls their common “investigat[ions]” into “methods and implied processes” (Dick Higgins Papers, Box 21, Folder 41).20 Their co-developed notion of social space and shared ideas applied to material sites as well: the laboratory settings of the TRG and the rehearsal sessions of the Four Horsemen.
The etymology of the term “institute” helps to clarify their dual use of the word as conceptual space and physical place. As a verb, the word dates to at least c. 1325, meaning “to set up” or “cause to stand,” while the term’s meaning as a type of “organization” dates to the founding of the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts in France. Proposed during the revolutionary Convention Nationale on 8 August 1793 and established two years later in 1795, the “Institut National” was conceived as an alternative to the academies and learned societies endowed by the monarchy as a site of advanced training in science, politics, and literature. There is likely also an element of parodic disenchantment here directed at the unsustainability of the May 1968 revolution, and perhaps also the Cultural Revolution in China, which had taken aim at cosmopolitan intellectualism. Ultimately, Higgins, McCaffery, and Nichol found the concept useful for conceptualizing a poetic laboratory free of the avant-garde’s militarist and nationalist connotations; in both its verb and noun senses, the institute is a concept that, for the TRG, combines sustainable collective organization and the experimental production of literary techniques.
In their 1973 manifesto, TRG members make two principal claims about the nature of research: first, “research is symbiotic” (RG 23). That is, research is the product of an interdependent relationship between persons or groups, although Nichol and McCaffery may have in mind the stricter scientific definition: “the living together of two dissimilar organisms,” their interaction and adaptation within a shared environment (OED). Second, “[R]esearch can function to discover new uses for potentially outdated forms and techniques” (23). Echoing Adrienne Rich’s “writing as re-vision,” their reports involve re-searching the past. McCaffery and Nichol eschew the myth of pure innovation. They advocate a poetics predicated not on the “new” but on “new uses” for pre-existent literatures. Hence, by the title of their collected reports, Rational Geomancy, they mean “a mastery of, or at least familiarity with a multiplicity of techniques[,] an acceptance of the past that we inherit as the earth we realign, the macrosyntax from which we foreground … In ancient China,” they explain, “one form of geomancy involved the actual realignment of topographies, the construction or removal of whole hills to assist the flow of telluric currents” (153–4). Since “geomancy” is an art of divination, Caroline Bayard argues that the TRG erroneously sutures two incompatible models of thought: one that is animistic and the other indebted to a deconstructive reading practice (via Barthes and Derrida).21 Like many North American poets of the 1960s and 1970s (the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, and Naropa), the TRG often naïvely celebrated Eastern cultures, particularly as an alternative model to Western capitalism. Although accusations of exoticism are justifiable, their point here has to do with a critique of the modern book, and the narrow definitions of “author” and “text” it has produced. An example offered in D.F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts provides an instructive point of comparison. He cites the Australian Arunta Aborigines, for whom the landscape serves a “textual function.” He inquires “if there is any sense in which the land – not even a representation of it on a map, but the land itself – might be a text” (31). Both McKenzie, and the TRG more than ten years earlier, argue that the book is but one type of textual artefact. As McKenzie states concisely: “[t]he argument that a rock in Arunta country is a text subject to bibliographical exposition is absurd only if one thinks of arranging such rocks on a shelf and giving them classmarks” (33). By analogy, Chinese geomancy suggests a topographical approach to history, whereby literary tradition is conceived as a plane of surfaces which authors appropriate, “realign,” and reuse. The writer is always confined by a literary tradition she inherits, but can reconfigure its elements to forge adaptive practices. The practice of geomancy and the Institute of Creative Misunderstanding – as concepts used by the TRG – both suggest that literature is a history of techniques and materials, and the common “property” of all poets. That which is brought into the institute, into poetry’s laboratory, must be made available to all.
As Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault both argue in their foundational studies of authorship, the notion of an author as the sole creator of a work is a fairly recent formation, as are the attendant institutions that codify this prevailing definition into laws of copyright. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi argue that the legal category of the author is “informed by the Romantic belief that long and intense legal protection is the due of creative genius” and that “the notion that the writer is a special participant in the production process – the only one worthy of attention – is of recent provenience” (The Construction 5, 16).22 Their definition of romanticism is not without problems, but the radical changes to intellectual property standards during the years of McCaffery and Nichol’s creative output is undeniable. The U.S. congress extended what had been a modest term of protection (twenty-eight years plus an optional twenty-eight-year term of renewal) several times during the 1960s and early 1970s, culminating in the Copyright Act of 1976, at which point the term of protection now covered the life of the author plus an additional fifty years (a term that has since been extended to seventy years).23 Echoing Barthes’s assertion that the author is the “epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology,” one legal scholar explains that “unrewarded authorial genius was used as a rhetorical distraction,” as courts and corporations colluded in undermining an approximately two-hundred-year-old system that had sought to balance the concerns of authors, publishers, and the general public (Barthes, “Death” 143; Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights 11). It is no coincidence that by the 1970s powerful lobby groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) began focusing their efforts on intellectual property regulation.
Canada would not pass similar legislation until the 1980s, but it was clear that the United States and other rich countries were moving towards a global standard designed to commodify and police a newly emerging information economy. If the “singular genius” model of authorship codified into law conceals the social production of literature, then the TRG insists that such a logic is built into “[o]ur current books”; by relegating reference to the text’s appendix, we “have converted context into index … where what is ‘old’ is buried beneath what is ‘new’” (RG 132). It is with this emphasis on an approach to the book that foregrounds its own collective modes of production that the TRG gives the avant-garde renewed purpose: “avant-garde work,” McCaffery and Nichol insist, does not consist of the “push towards chaos and oblivion it is so often seen as, but rather the drive towards a reassertion of context” (132).
A qualification is necessary: if the TRG broadly distrusts a “Romantic” theory of the isolated genius, then which romanticism is this? Olson knew better than to generalize in this way, indicating that an egoless poetics would find a useful starting point in Keats’s notion of “negative capability” as an alternative to the Wordsworthian “egotistical sublime.” Moreover, if the lyrical self is the object of disdain, then McCaffery and Nichol might also have begun with Shelley’s conception of poems as “episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world” (“Defence” 493). Despite the sometimes haphazardly conceived effort to “get away from that romantic ideologeme of the lyric self,” McCaffery and Nichol’s creative texts often suggest a more complex engagement with romanticism.24 McCaffery produced a series of textual appropriations of Wordsworth’s poems, for instance, calling them “performance transforms,” “extractions,” and “treatments.” The purpose is ably summarized in a poem entitled “An Afterthought” (1978):
… go to
the remains of
Form
in the eye
the elements
of future Function, Form
a brave something in the hands
or a stream to guide
this hand in the act of that
hand.
(1–10)
The point is not merely to insist on the inherent instability of a text’s meaning, but also actively to morph past traditions, choosing not to denounce but rather to redeploy the latent possibilities of canonical texts. Wordsworth’s enthusiastic promotion of copyright law aside,25 his understanding of the writing subject was never as rarefied as McCaffery assumes, as this well-known sonnet indicates:
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
…
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
(“Nuns Fret Not” [1804] 1–3, 8–14)
There is no doubt that Wordsworth mythologizes the author’s work as a labour of solitude, despite the collaborative nature of his own work with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his sister Dorothy.26 Indeed, the writer – like the nun, hermit, and student – is isolated, but not unencumbered by material or formal constraints. Nor are these constraints irrevocably detrimental to the poem. Wordsworth’s gesture is more than just a metaphorical connection between the room and the formal constraints of the sonnet; he is acknowledging the material, if not the social, conditions of artistic work. In the introductory essay of their third research report, “The Language of Performance of Language,” the TRG asserts: “[w]e are entering this room as if it were an inner ear; a hollow space, cavernous, labyrinthine, in which certain intronuclearities might participate” (RG 227). One might choose to think of the TRG’s practice as an attempt to make communes and institutes of Wordsworth’s cells and convents.
With this qualification in mind, it is nonetheless significant that the prevalence of collaborative authorship among many twentieth-century avant-garde poets has gone largely unnoticed, despite significant experiments with collaboration as a means to subvert conventional theories of authorship. Intriguingly, both Foucault and Barthes mention this phenomenon, the latter stating that the Surrealists, seeking the “desacrilization of the image of the Author[,] … accept the principle and the experience of several people writing together” (Barthes, “Death” 14). Barthes has nothing more to say about collaborative writing, only that it problematizes the author’s deification; yet his allusions to the “exquisite corpse” games and co-authored automatic writings of André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Philippe Soupault invite comparison with the TRG. In a short piece entitled “Notes on a Collaboration,” Breton and Eluard seem to confirm Barthes’s assumption by stating that “to be two together … is as good as being everyone, being the other ad infinitum and no longer oneself” (159). Contrast this assertion with an interview conducted by Pierre Coupey, Dwight Gardiner, Gladys Hindmarch, and Daphne Marlatt, in which bpNichol describes the initial response to the performances of the Four Horsemen:
When, for instance, The Four Horsemen started, the first thing we had to overcome was that everybody knew my name and nobody knew the rest of the group’s names. Okay, so what you have is ‘bpNichol and The Four Horsemen.’ It sounds like I got this back-up group of Motown singers tapping their toes … no way – group, group, group, group, you know, think of it as a group. This was a very hard process. People don’t want to think of writers as groups. They’re fixed on writers as the single consciousness[.] (“Interview” Coupey et al., 148)27
The collaborative dynamic of performance differs from the automatic writing of the Surrealists, but notably both groups reject the author as a “single consciousness.” Yet, whereas Breton and Eluard want to obliterate the writer altogether, Nichol is more interested in foregrounding the presence of a plurality of writing subjects perpetually interacting. In their TRG reports, McCaffery and Nichol contend that their research is the product of a “We-full, not an I-less paradigm” (RG 11, 149). The former insists elsewhere that collaboration involves a “therapeutic antidote to the private, writing self. It demands interaction and renunciating single control” (“Annotated” 74). Such tactics disturb the supremacy of univocality, problematize intentionality, and discredit the proprietary nature of authorship. Nichol and McCaffery’s “we-full” (not “I-less”) paradigm, however, stops short of a wholesale erasure of the author, advancing instead a poetics of authorial assemblage and synthesis. Rather than eradicate the writing subject, McCaffery, Nichol, and their various collaborators foreground a mode of writing that announces its own communal process.
One should, however, be wary of sentimentalizing community and communal writing. It is enticing to remark, as one commentator does regarding the Four Horsemen’s performances, that its members worked in “absolute trust and awareness of each other” (Scobie, bpNichol 19). On the contrary, Barreto-Rivera recalls the group’s initial naïveté and the gradual recognition that “the process of understanding one another might take ostensibly longer than [they] had expected” (CaNADAda, n.p.). McCaffery is far less euphemistic. Objecting to the opinion that their performances were the product of a harmonious synthesis, he observes in an interview with Peter Jaeger: “[t]he workshops and practices were the sites of tremendous labor and disagreement; there were extreme differences in personality and opinions” (McCaffery, “Interview” by Jaeger 90–1). Akin to the processes adopted by radical feminists, members of the TRG quickly learned of the “tyranny of structurelessness.” Their work almost always employs some strategy of collaborative research, writing, and performance that consciously foregrounds the organizational principles enabling their multi-authorial experiments.
But if his contention is that collaboration is a formally radical redefinition of authorship and an affront to intellectual property regimes, then one need only cite corporate and legal writing, TV and film scripts, advertising copy, pulp fiction, and romance novels as contemporary examples of multi-authorship that are not only stylistically conventional, but which also perpetuate notions of intellectual property. Authors of these cultural artefacts are no less “alienated” from the object of their labour, according to Marx’s definition. Moreover, is factory labour a form of collaboration? If so, the assembly line – the apotheosis of the industrial mode of production – rather than disrupting property ownership, merely renders it more efficient. Collaboration has only the sort of political merit that the TRG hopes to ascribe to if it constructs non-alienated modes of communal labour.
Whether in his early writings on alienated labour in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, or later in Capital, Marx is most distressed by the erosion of labour’s social function, and the relation of this phenomenon to private property. Capitalism subjects labour to continuously greater and more rigidly demarcated “separations”: the worker is separated from the product of her work, from other workers, and from the capitalist who appropriates her work, just as capital is separated from labour and different classes from one another. “Man – and this is the basic presupposition of private property – only produces in order to have. The aim of production is possession.” Marx continues,
I have produced for myself and not for you, as you have produced for yourself and not for me. You are as little concerned by the result of my production in itself as I am directly concerned by the result of your production. That is, our production is not a production of men for men as such, that is, social production. Thus, as a man none of us is in a position to be able to enjoy the product of another. (“On James Mill” 129–30)
Labour production is inexorably bound up with the production of communal relations. In his work with Engels, he asserts that the production of all activity, labour or otherwise, is generated through social relationships: “it follows from this that a certain mode of production … is always combined with a certain mode of cooperation” (The German Ideology 157). In effect, capitalist modes of production create modes of cooperation that paradoxically isolate human subjects, subordinating their own existence to the objects they create.
The question of writing and community is typically brought to bear on issues of publication and dissemination of literary works. Like many other writers during the twentieth century, the TRG created alternative presses to evade the restrictive markets of mainstream publishing, enabled in part by the affordability of mimeograph and photocopying technologies. A magazine like GrOnk, with its alternating editorial staff, sought to create community on paper. The TRG was imagining ways to apply the same principles to writing itself. For this to work, they would have to develop modes of poetic writing in step with Marx’s communist axiom: a practicable form of organization based on the free association of producers that eliminates divisions of labour and private appropriation of wealth. Hence, the Toronto Research Group had to commit itself to a poetics of open and non-proprietary appropriation.
The Toronto Research Group began with impromptu conversations between Steve McCaffery and bpNichol that materialized into written reports addressing a variety of issues. In particular, the two poets privileged three areas of investigation: the materiality of the book, non-linear narrative, and the process of translation. (One should add to this list of concerns a crucial contribution to the study of non-canonical twentieth-century writers.) The TRG research sessions functioned as testing sites for a number of co-developed poetic experiments, including homolinguistic translation, the post-semiotic poem, gestural semiotics, ’pataphysical poetics, and conceptualist and intermedial performance. Some involved language in performance, some used handwritten notation and visual scoring, while others required unbound pages and irregular materials for their construction.
The TRG’s multivalent approach to poetic experimentation reflexively challenges the boundaries of the book as traditionally conceived. I hold on to Jerome McGann’s definition of the poetic: “to display the textual condition … [as] language that calls attention to itself, that takes its own textual activities as its ground subject” (Textual Condition 10). Thinking of the poem as a textual activity – and not an autonomous artefact – helps to determine its various functions in an era of artistic experimentation increasingly dominated by what Dick Higgins calls “intermedia.” Once the critic accepts that any poem belongs to a context of social production and reception, a more pertinent question presents itself: how does the poetic operate within a particular context of writing, one that may include other forms of artistic, cultural, and social commitments.
In a rather inconspicuous footnote to the preface of Black Riders, McGann insists that “[a]n indispensable point of departure for investigating the future of the book in the age of media and electronics is the Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research group” (181). Between The Textual Condition (1991) and Black Riders (1993), studies that investigate the effects of modern printing technologies on the practice of reading and the presentation, transmission, and distribution of texts, and Radiant Textuality (2001), the first comprehensive analysis of “literature after the world wide web,” there is no other mention of the TRG reports. Where does one situate the self-styled “kids of the book-machine” in the history of print culture? Surprisingly little has been said about the TRG in relation to the history of the book, even among excellent scholars like McGann, Johanna Drucker, and Marjorie Perloff, who otherwise afford considerable attention to McCaffery’s single-authored works. Perloff, for instance, astutely argues for Carnival (1967–70) as a benchmark example of a poem that “challenges the sequentiality of the normal book” (“Signs” 111). Yet the co-authored reports helped to fashion these activities; they constitute an integral part of the same scene of collaboration. The TRG itself claims in its 1973 manifesto that “all theory” comes “after the fact of writing” (RG 23). This proclamation is one of the few wrong-headed assertions made by the group, and it misrepresents McCaffery and Nichol’s own contribution to twentieth-century poetics. According to their approach to writing as the recontextualization of literary resources, traditions, and techniques, theory and research are coextensive with creative practice. There is no act of writing independent of an approach to or re-searched history of texts.
More than a decade before the critic D.F. McKenzie pronounced that bibliographic analysis should be synonymous with the “sociology of texts,”28 McCaffery and Nichol had undertaken their research into “non-book texts” (McKenzie’s term), not for the purpose of bibliographic study, but as a means to enlarge the arena of literary experimentation beyond the constraints of the book proper. McGann argues that “textual studies remain largely under the spell of romantic hermeneutics. In such a view texts, and in particular imaginative texts, are not imagined as certain kinds of social acts.” One “breaks the spell,” he argues, “by socializing the study of texts at the most radical levels” (Textual Condition 12). Indeed, the TRG had this very project in mind for its creative practice. Although their work might be understood as poetic acts designed to give textual critics severe headaches, their intent is to forge a materialist hermeneutics that foregrounds the social act of all writing. To do so, they argue, one needs to expand and transform the material features of the book itself.
In part 1 of the second report, “The Book as Machine,” McCaffery and Nichol address the physicality of the book and its implications for the experience of writing and reading. By “book-machine” the authors mean its “capacity and method” of linguistic information storage and retrieval; a book activates when a reader opens it and begins to read (RG 60). The conventional book, they argue, features three “modules” that predate even Gutenberg’s printing press: the “lateral flow of the line,” the “vertical or columnar build up” of lines on a page, and a linear movement “organized through depth” (by which they mean the sequential ordering of “pages upon pages”) (60).29 Of course, these are socially constructed conventions that have since fixed and normalized reading practices. That texts departing from linearity are typically called “typographic experiments” indicates as much. It is the kind of reading the traditional book manufactures that is precisely what the TRG contests. McCaffery and Nichol observe a dichotomy in readerly reception: the book as “machine of reference” and the “book as a commodity to be acquired, consumed, and discarded” (62). It should be clear which of the two the TRG privileges, yet their rationale bears spelling out. The conventional book-machine, argue Nichol and McCaffery, essentially replicates an oral activity. Although for reasons of practicality a book is organized into lines, columns, and pages, it imagines a single line of text that “reconstitutes the duration of a ‘listening’” (62). The book as reference-machine, on the other hand, reimagines the page as a site that accommodates a “reader’s free, non-lineal eye movements” across its “multi-activating surface” (62).
In their research, the TRG privileges a trajectory of writing that explodes the imposed linearity of the traditional book, their antecedents and contemporaries including Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), Madeline Gins’s Word Rain (1969), B.S. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates (1969), Ferdinend Kriwet’s architectural poetics, John Furnival’s language constructs, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s textual landscapes, and McCaffery’s own visual works. This shortlist of avant-gardists, concretists, and conceptual artists certainly suggests the TRG’s non-canonical proclivities, but it is important to remember that they also cite the newspaper, demotic forms such as the comic strip, and pop cultural genres such as board games as examples of artefacts that condition very different practices of reading. Their research into unconventional material production and narrativity constitutes a rejection of the conventional book’s teleological unfolding in favour of texts that explore the book-machine’s spatial and temporal possibilities. This approach to the book’s materiality refuses the implicit assumption that the page is a neutral surface upon which a content is expressed, conceiving of it instead as “a spatially interacting region”: the “[p]age becomes an active space, a meaningful element in the compositional process and the size and shape of it become significant variables” (RG 65). Hence, the book becomes a significant aspect of narrative presentation, reflexively alerting the reader to the labour involved in its construction and the reader’s participation in its building. By reworking the bibliographic and textual codes involved in conventional techniques of narrative presentation, the reader is forced to generate new methods of reading, becoming a participant, indeed a collaborator, in semantic production.
In an interview with Caroline Bayard and Jack David, Nichol describes the TRG’s symbiotic approach to writing:
We’ve always typed. We type with maybe one of us typing what’s in our mind and then we kick an idea around. And then maybe I dictate to Steve while he types. And maybe I’m typing, and he’s dictating to me. And I’m adding something as I think of it. And then we go over it, and go over it. So it happens at the time of writing. And part of it is just getting that moment together. (“Interview” 31)
A frequent consequence of this synthesis is the introduction of errancy and spontaneity into their discourse – what both men refer to in the reports as the “particle drift” between a “mini-community of two” (144). Just as one records the thoughts of the other, the writer might deviate into his own personal discourse, unbeknownst to the speaker. Thus, their technique involves elements of indeterminacy and playfulness that generate a final postulation based on approximations that belong exclusively to neither. Yet the function of indeterminacy in the TRG reports is decidedly different than, say, the “writing through” procedures of John Cage or Jackson Mac Low, writers who diminish authorial intention through aleatoric operations. Instead, Nichol and McCaffery’s method seeks to preserve in print the provisional event of thought and discussion between them.
Critics typically gloss over the implications of this process for reading the reports. Caroline Bayard briefly mentions “the peculiar quality of being a tightly structured text in which neither contributor is identifiable” (The New Poetics 60). Susan E. Billingham concedes that their method of transcription “constitutes a dialectical dialogue” that explores “the interpersonal relations” involved in group activity, yet their co-authored research merely provides her with a convenient point of division between their divergent “theoretical positions” in later writings (Language and the Sacred 98).30
Regardless of any prior knowledge of their method of dictation, the reader encounters no less than four identifiable strategies of co-authorship. Some reports feature an ostensibly unified voice: the earliest report on translation (1973), for example, employs a conventional essay format. Based on these preliminary research sessions, it became clear to both writers that a crucial element of their collaboration should be “to stretch the formal parameters” of the reports (RG 10). In subsequent sessions, Nichol and McCaffery introduce unattributable voices in dialogue as a means to mark disagreement or to steer their research in a particular direction (e.g., “The Book as Machine” [1973] and “Interlude: Heavy Company” [1976]).31 In other reports, such as “Rational Geomancy: A Re-Alignment of Kinship (II)” (1978),32 a double-band structure separates two discrete texts in juxtaposition, reorganizing the page to accommodate multiple systems of inscription.33 The dialogic and heteroglossic structure of the page is clearly indebted to Bakhtin. The two bands alternate positions of master and supporting discourses, exploiting points of convergence and interplay. The reader invariably undergoes an experience of cognitive disorientation, an affliction the TRG refers to as “paralirium”: the state of being “paralysed … beside a reading” (RG 169). The reader is confronted with a choice: though she cannot activate the bands simultaneously, she can read them successively (in any order) or she can read the pages continuously, whereby the bands are woven like a double helix. The authors contend the “bands” function as discursive “binds” and writerly “bonds” (168), evoking a notion of the page not as linear sequence but as a paratextual space of interaction. Adeena Karasick remarks that “[f]rom 1970–1976, concern shifts … from (‘work’ to ‘text’) decipherable machine to a polysemic plurality” (“Tract Marks” 94). Certainly this is true, but the TRG would later expand the report into more performative activities, including a collaboratively produced photo comic strip, a series of ’pataphysical games, while the third report (“Language of Performance of Language” [1978–82]) features an assemblage of collaborative writing, conceptualist performance, and intermedia composition.
The four discursive modes I refer to as (1) unified, (2) dialogic, (3) paratextual, and (4) performative each (to varying degrees) transforms the expository function of the essay-report into a dialogic event, so that the page is conceived as a space of multiple inscriptions. These investigations provide a platform on which Nichol and McCaffery devise several techniques that extend writing beyond the conventional structure of the book. Consider two examples: “Collboration No. 2” [sic] (c. 1978), a conceptual-intermedia work, and “The Body: In Light” (1980), a gestural text.
In “Collboration No. 2,” the first of sixteen “performed essays” forming the third of the TRG reports, performers are instructed to sit facing one another at identical typewriters. A roll of paper is “fed through the carriages of both machines forming a connected paper chain,” after which, “[e]ach performer types the phrase ‘WHAT ARE THE LIMITS OF COLLABORATION?’ At the completion of each phrase the typewriter carriage is returned and the phrase is repeated on a new line. The piece ends when the roll of paper tightens and snaps in two” (RG 228). One might take this single piece to homologize the principal concerns of the TRG reports: while the page is wrested from the constraints of the codex, the movement of text proceeds in opposite directions simultaneously. The page is both shared and torn. Rather than characterize their efforts as the symbiosis of an ideal community of writing subjects, the page is conceived as an intensive field of action, a performative site of divergent inscriptions dramatized by their coming together and moving apart. A single page might accommodate a unified assertion; it might also feature disagreement. The missing “a” of the title succinctly expresses this point on a micro-poetic level: all collaboration functions within an economy of addition and loss. An integrative writing generates a productive third space of creativity, but only insofar as one is prepared to relinquish authorial control. In this sense, McCaffery and Nichol suggest that collaboration takes on ethical and political dimensions, as they conceptualize the page as a shared space where in the labour process is understood as a practice of intersubjective exchange.
In a brief essay entitled “Performed Paragrammatism,” McCaffery describes a “hybrid” of visual and textual materials he and Nichol use to complicate the formal purity of a work. “[T]he tracing of a hand, a drawn letter, comic strip balloon, or cloud,” for example, work “to interrupt techno-typographic layout with a kind of gestural semiotics. The presence of two different … writing systems inaugurate a dialogue that complicates the spatio-temporal dimension in reading” (361). The purpose of this practice is not a Luddite’s suspicion of technology but rather an attempt to disrupt the “social neutrality of type” by way of a chirographic intervention (361). In “The Body: In Light,” Nichol and McCaffery employ physical interference as a collaborative technique.34 Requiring two “composers,” the first begins to write a letter as the second interrupts and “distorts” it; as a result, “any intentional gesture” is “thwarted and rerouted into a different mark” (RG 245). Next, the piece undergoes a second deformation during performance as one performer coerces the other’s body in order to transform the sound she produces – for instance, by “a bending of A’s mouth by B, a hammering on B’s back by A … designed to delay, accelerate or reshape the sound” (245).
Consequently, both grapheme and phoneme undergo a process of disfigurement by gestural intervention. So why bother to do this? Clearly Nichol and McCaffery accentuate the role of physical bodies in the process of language making, but this is in no way a notion of the “natural” body in opposition to the technology of writing. Instead, theirs is a materialist poetics calling attention to the configuration of bodies, performance space, page, writing instrument, and sign system constituting a complex machine of language production. Emphasis on “coercion” and “disfigurement” reinforces the notion that the speaking subject is never free from social intervention by external discursive and material forces that inform the process of writing/speaking. The reader confronts a pen forming a linguistic sign, produced through the tension between the writing subject and the multiplicity of force relations that inform the mark of her writing.
The book is transformed from an artefact that replicates the “duration of a listening” (RG 62) to an interactive and multiplicitous zone – a machine generated by authors and activated by readers. If the production of the modern book, its gradual displacement of contextual knowledge to the text’s index, replicates a process whereby the author comes front and centre as the sole inventor of an original idea, then the TRG’s poetic techniques explode the book’s linear design to reveal the multifaceted contributions of editors, collaborators, disseminators, and so on.
Fig. 2. The Toronto Research Group, “The Body: In Light,” performed on 10 March 1980, Vancouver, British Columbia, RG (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992) 246, 251. Used with permission.
In “A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry,” Dick Higgins defines the genre in its broadest terms as “poetry in which the sound is the focus, more than any other aspect of the work” (40).35 Such an intractable definition might include the non-semantic choruses of Aristophanes’s plays, nineteenth-century nonsense verse, or the chant structures and incantations of numerous indigenous peoples of Asia, North America, and Africa, in addition to the avant-garde traditions typically associated with the genre. Among practitioners of post-war sound poetry, a stricter definition seems appropriate: “it is no longer de rigeur [sic] that a poem must attempt to be powerful, meaningful or even necessarily communicative (a main assumption of the 18th and 19th century poetries)” (“A Taxonomy” 43). The zaum poems of the Russian Futurists, the brutist poems of the Dadaists, and the simultaneous poems of the Italian Futurists had disturbed conventional expressive and mimetic theories of literature. By the 1950s, many sound poets had sought to emphasize the most radical suggestion of early twentieth-century practice: a poetics divorced from the referential function of literature.36 McCaffery is one of the most vocal proponents of this conception of sound poetry, while Richard Kostelanetz offers perhaps its most cogent definition as “language whose principal means of coherence is sound, rather than syntax or semantics” (“Text-Sound Art” 14).
Although Higgins’s broad assessment of the genre ultimately points to this more strict definition, he prefers an encompassing taxonomy of “classes”: (1) works in an invented language (“purely without reference to any known language,” e.g., Iliazd’s “zaum” poems); (2) near-nonsense works (those involving the “interplay between semantically meaningful lines” and “nonsense,” e.g., Kurt Schwitters’s “To Anna Blume”); (3) phatic poems (“poems in which semantic meaning, if any, is subordinate to expression of intonation,” e.g., Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God”); (4) un-written-out poems (a sound poem that is improvised, e.g., Henri Chopin’s tape-recorder pieces); (5) notated ones (a sound poem that is notated, e.g., Kurt Schwitters’s Ur Sonata).37 A historian of sound poetics might take issue with certain aspects of this list. For instance, it is perhaps more accurate to describe these not as “classes” but as modes, since several pieces involve these features in combination. And while the first three categories cite stylistic differences, the last two consider methods of transcription. This is not a problem per se, but the examples he cites in order to differentiate between notated and unnotated sound performance falters for the simple reason that the tape recorder is a system of information storage. Magnetic tape is in fact another form of inscription, reproducing a phonetic rather than a graphematic signifier.38 It would perhaps be more accurate to distinguish – as musicologists do – between “free” and “structured” improvisation; the former denotes unplanned performance, while the latter usually employs a loose form of notation within which a performer is free to improvise as he chooses. Aside from these specific issues, however, Higgins draws a coherent and accurate trajectory from the historical avant-gardes to post-war practitioners, bearing in mind also the more explicit resonations with pre-twentieth-century precursors.
Taken in conjunction, Higgins’s taxonomy and the stricter McCaffery/Kostelanetz definition of sound poetry as verse divorced from its semantic function provide a useful framework in which to situate the poetics of the Four Horsemen. Ironically, by McCaffery’s own postulation many Four Horsemen pieces are not “sound poetry” properly speaking. A poem such as “Matthew’s Line” (1972) affords an example. During the performance, McCaffery reads the nineteenth-century poet John Clare’s “I Am”; Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera alternate readings of an incantatory phrase borrowed from a “groovy” three-year-old, “My shoes are dead, oh microphone” (Dutton in English, Rivera in Spanish); while Nichol verbalizes an abstract and undulating “eeeee” sound. Leaving aside for now the relationship between these elements, according to Higgins’s taxonomy this single poem employs no fewer than four of his delineated categories. McCaffery’s appropriation of Clare’s poem involves a sound collage of found materials; the chant-like repetition of a three-year-old’s phrase, although absurd, consists of comprehensible words that subsequently undergo a phatic expulsion of meaning; while Nichol’s more abstract vocalizations conform more readily to the strict definition of sound poetry that McCaffery and others advance. Furthermore, not only are some Four Horsemen texts improvised (“Stage Lost,” “In the Middle of a Blue Balloon”) while others are notated (“Seasons,” “Matthew’s Line”), but some involve elements of both notated and improvised components (e.g., “Mischievous Eve”). The Four Horsemen’s oeuvre is difficult to categorize precisely because it combines postmodernist strategies of appropriation and non-Western chant structures, manifesto-like axioms and non-referential grunts, improvised texts and pre-transcribed materials. If one prefers a stricter definition of sound poetry, then the Four Horsemen are better understood as a performance ensemble.
Yet perhaps the most significant distinction – one left unconsidered in Higgins’s survey – is the function of the sound poetry ensemble or collective. Within the tradition of sound poetry, multi-voice improvisation is infrequent but can be traced to Dadaist simultaneous works such as Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janko, and Tristan Tzara’s “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer” (1916).39 The practice gained popularity during the 1970s, mainly in Britain and North America. In addition to the Four Horsemen, several collectives explored the collaborative possibilities of the genre: in Canada, the ensemble Owen Sound; in New York, the simultaneous works of Jackson Mac Low and the multi-voice texts of Jerome Rothenberg; and in Britain, the group performances of Koncrete Canticle and JGJGJGJG. Multi-voice performance introduced the possibility of dialogism, polyphony, and a mode of improvisation closer to musical models and intermedial practices like that of Fluxus happenings. The Four Horsemen, in particular, conceived of their practice from the outset as an experiment in collectivity, whereby multi-voice composition articulates community at the level of the poem’s performance.
Nichol describes the laboratory conditions that enabled the creation of their pieces: members of the group would “bring fragmentary lines, half-formed ideas, dreams, works in progress … out of which, thru [sic] a kind of bricolage, the compositions take shape” (Four Horsemen, Prose Tattoo 3). Echoing Barreto-Rivera’s account of the group’s inaugural activities, Nichol recalls that the preliminary workshop sessions mainly consisted of the four poets improvising. Only after early pieces such as Seasons (c. 1971) – the first of their jointly conceived works – did they begin to conceptualize the poem as a “consciously group-conceived, group-written composition … the idea of the poem as product of a community” (CaNADAda, n.p.). Their first performance together on 23 May 1970 at the Poetry and Things reading series illustrates this transition. The reading comprised solo-composed pieces by each performer, while the other three members of the group provided improvisational accompaniment. This form of interaction preserves the status of a single author, while relegating the group to a secondary and corollary role. Shortly thereafter, the group shifted their focus to a process that would eliminate the latent privileging of a single speaker in favour of a practice that explores the collective energies of the group.
A significant development to emerge from their rehearsals is the construction of a system of inscription. Not unlike John Cage’s use of time brackets for his proto-Fluxus performance at Black Mountain (see chapter 2), the Four Horsemen employed a four-part “grid” that operated like a set of “traffic lights” within a performance, indicating “transition points … [that] define who’s doing what when, with whom, & what elements they have to work with” (3). Within this structuring frame, however, elements such as pitch, rhythm, duration, and colouration remained unstable and unrepeatable. In a certain sense, the transition that Nichol describes from an ad hoc method of group performance towards a form of flexible systematization of group pieces provides an excellent example of the problem of community formation applied to aesthetic practice. The group began with a somewhat utopian idea of collaboration as a series of direct and spontaneous relations unencumbered by organizational structures (gemeinschaft). They determined thereafter that an organizing system need not crystallize into a rigid formula ordering and regimenting their performance (gesellschaft). By adopting a method of structured improvisation, certain flexible constraints frame a field of action, wherein, paradoxically, spontaneity is permitted to take place. Whereas in their first reading, the group used a solo piece to anchor their collective performance, the grid operates by decentring the individual and redistributing the poem’s collective labour.
Nichol insists that the group wrote no central text; “the center,” rather, “is an ongoing compositional workshop” that integrates the labour of four writer-performers (Prose Tattoo 4). In some cases, the group created pieces communally from the beginning; other times, a piece might develop by reworking an individual contributor’s solo composition. The example of “In the Middle of a Blue Balloon” (1972) is instructive. This piece began as Barreto-Rivera’s solo-authored text, which was then adapted by the group into a multi-voice performance. The piece was recorded several times and then subsequently transformed once again, this time replete with props: “in the most recent version … Rafael, its originator, stand[s] silently (almost invisibly) in the background as bp & Paul fight in the foreground & Steve appears to be attempting to watch the original piece on a television whose back is toward the audience” (3–4). In a sense, this anecdote exemplifies a key element of their process. By the end of the piece, its originator is the one furthest removed from its execution; in the foreground, the other members jostle ceaselessly to modify and transform it. The workshop operates as a site of exchange, in which the subject both exerts power and relinquishes it. McCaffery’s part in the performance playfully calls attention to the unrepeatability of the original: even the television, a technological means of visual reproduction, remediates and thus alters the original live performance.
In an important manifesto from the late 1970s, “Discussion … Genesis … Continuity,” McCaffery expands on Barreto-Rivera’s contention that the poem is a communal product, suggesting further that the poem-in-performance imitates certain communal formations: “We structure our pieces very much along the lines of a piece of string containing a series of knots. The knots,” he explains, “have a double function as both points of coherence (where everything comes together) and as points of transition (where everything changes)” (34). The audience member of a Four Horsemen piece negotiates the interaction of its morphing elements; these “knots” or clusters fuse provisionally in “collectivizing structure[s]” – each time in different multiplicities of bodies, sounds, and sign systems that disperse and re-assemble. Hence, McCaffery argues, their aesthetic practice “homologizes” certain states of collectivity: “the movement from isolation into community, the problematics of community … [and] the collectivization of the self” (33). The metaphor of a piece of string is only partly successful, since it suggests a monolinear image. Each Four Horsemen performance might be thought of in terms of an assemblage, as a particular sort of social formation involving actors, networks, and technologies.
This last observation is more obvious when applied to “In the Middle of a Blue Balloon,” but each Four Horsemen piece foregrounds a process of elements assembling. It is instructive to consider “Matthew’s Line” once more. The poem that McCaffery reads, John Clare’s “I Am” (c. 1864), was composed while Clare was incarcerated in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum:
I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes –
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host
Like shadows in love-frenzied stifled throes –
And yet I am and live – like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams
Where there is neither sense of life or joys
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I love the best
Are strange – nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept,
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below – above, the vaulted sky.
(1–18)
Fig. 3. The Four Horsemen, “Seasons,” c. 1971, The Prose Tattoo: Selected Performance Scores (Milwaukee: Membrane P, 1983) 25. Used with permission.
The poem features several prominent romantic tropes: an outcast figure (“the self-consumer of my woes”); Blake-like apocalyptic imagery (“oblivion’s host”); a “sweetly” and “untroubling” childhood (echoing Wordsworth’s “simple creed / of Childhood … Delight and liberty” [“Intimations” 136–7]); and a preoccupation with the divine properties of nature. In the vein of Wordsworth’s ode “Intimations of Immortality,” the poet’s isolation and the dissipating genius give way to the potential consolation of transcendence, or as Stephen Scobie remarks, the speaker’s transition “into a pantheistic unity of Nature” (bpNichol 73). Yet the TRG’s expressed objection to the “romantic ideologeme of the lyric self” begs the question: why would the Four Horsemen use a poem such as this, and how is it transformed in the group performance? Pausing at the title “I Am,” perhaps the Four Horsemen seek to enact the obliteration of the speaking “I,” bringing together a convergence of voices into a perfect transcendent unity. Given McCaffery and Nichol’s claims elsewhere for a “we-full paradigm,” one that neither erases the subject nor treats the group as a fixed, totalizing structure, this argument seems unconvincing. What happens next in “Matthew’s Line” helps to resolve this conflict. At no point do the four voices align, but instead they remain a polyphonic medley of sounds that explode the “I am” that Clare’s poem enunciates. McCaffery’s reading, Dutton and Barreto-Rivera’s repetition of a nonsense phrase, and Nichol’s non-semantic hum advance simultaneously, until the penultimate line of the Clare poem, at which point Nichol repeats after McCaffery in a series of echoes: “so let me lie,” “the grass below,” “the vaulted sky.” The singular poetic voice bifurcates and multiplies. McCaffery stretches the final word “sky,” as three of four voices blend as a hybrid of abstract yet discernibly different undulations and reverberations, while Dutton repeats the word “dead” until the end of the piece. Instead of launching into “the vaulted sky,” the performers remain on “the grass below.” The individual’s death is announced, as the communion undertaken is not with a divine “Creator,” but a movement from isolation into community, just as a text is transformed and reconstituted.
As a further illustration, “Mischievous Eve” (1977) from the Live in the West album provides a very different type of social formation. The piece begins with a cacophony of laughs that gradually grows to a harmonic cohesion of chant-like rhythms. Just as the incantation reaches a fever pitch, McCaffery interrupts loudly by shouting the conspicuously gendered word “Gentlemen.” After a moment of silence, he then delivers a speech entitled “History of North American Respiration” in a didactic tone, as Barreto-Rivera and Dutton begin to chant a phrase with increasing speed. The phrase becomes perceptible only halfway through the speech, gradually overpowering all other sounds: “one voice alone saying many things still cannot say what two voices together saying one thing can.” The chant gradually hushes and the listener can once again make out the speech in progress. By this time, McCaffery has begun a similar credo: “get them speaking your way.” He repeats this line and the four performers once again explode semantic meaning with uncontrolled laughter.
The title of the piece introduces several possible readings of one of the Four Horsemen’s most challenging works. “Mischief Eve” takes place on the night before “Guy Fawkes Day,” a British holiday commemorating the failure of a plot by Catholic dissidents to blow up the House of Parliament on 5 November 1605. On the night before the festival, youths play pranks and vandalize property in what would seem a counter-tradition that reverses the spectacle of nationalism that marks the official celebration. Implicit in this reading of the title is a dialectic between performances of the dominant culture and pockets of resistance to its official mandates. Yet the title intimates an alternative meaning. The grammatical form of the word “mischievous” is adjectival, and since the word typically describes human behaviour, there is reason to believe it modifies a proper noun. “Mischievous Eve” might then be a reference to Eve’s transgression in Genesis. The two readings collude in significant ways: both involve a transgression against property by figures whose traditional status as villains is challenged. Like Prometheus’s theft of fire, Eve’s choice to consume the fruit of the tree (and thus the knowledge it contains) effectively allegorizes an act of appropriation by rejecting God’s proprietorship over meaning. If Adam names the objects of the world, securing, in turn, each sign its referent, then Eve prefigures the public domain, infringing heroically against Adam’s right to exclusivity.
To this point, one encounters a truly dizzying array of mutative practices variously called geomantic research, collaborative scores, performance transforms, extractions, treatments, intermedia, and gestural works. From the shared conceptual models of an Eternal Network, texts appear only to be disfigured, transformed, and playfully adapted. The TRG’s geomantic analogy is fitting: the reader encounters a text’s continuous realignment, its energies redirected and its tactics put to new uses. One rightly locates the TRG at the intersection of many important mid-century experimental groups: Fluxus, language-based conceptual work, sound and visual poetries, and the origins of Language writing, yet the post-structuralist model of authorship typically offered to account for the respective practices of these groups fails to account for McCaffery and Nichol’s “we-full, not I-less” mode of writing. One witnesses not authorial erasure but the communalization of literary artefacts. The reader becomes part of this network of actors, intertexts, technologies, and spaces engaged in the production process of a culture.
Tell a thing.
Translate it. Let others translate it too.
Destroy the original.
What have you destroyed? What remains?
– Dick Higgins40
– what happens here?
– a translation? or an allusion?
– perhaps the translation of translation itself?
– Steve McCaffery41
The TRG’s first research report on translation advances the following proposition: “[i]f we no longer consider translation as being necessarily an information service – the one tongue’s access to other tongues – then it can become a creative endeavour in its own right” (RG 32). Translation might be thought of as a point of departure from the original, rather than its exact reiteration in a foreign sign system. Nichol and McCaffery produced a sizeable body of translational works;42 many were conceived as collaborative projects, in which a single text was subject to multiple translations by several poets. Given the sparse critical attention to this aspect of their work, it will be useful to describe the normative concept of translation they oppose and a taxonomy of the alternative translational methods they invent. Principal among these procedures are homolinguistic, allusive-referential, and post-semiotic translation.
The basic distinction between literal (“word for word”) and free (“sense for sense”) translation dates to the theoretical writings of Cicero and Horace,43 although it is Saint Jerome who famously coins the phrase in a defence of his Latin translation of the Greek Septuagint Old Testament: “[n]ow I not only admit but freely announce that in translating from the Greek … I render not word-for-word but sense-for-sense” (“The Best Kind of Translator” 25). A literal approach to translation involves a one-to-one substitution of words in the source text with its closest equivalent in the target language. Citing Cicero’s earlier efforts to replace “word for word” translation with an approach that attempts to capture the “general style and force” (“The Best Kind of Orator” 364) of the original, Jerome argues that the unavoidable syntactical incongruities of literal translation produce awkward and nonsensical texts. Employing a military metaphor, “like a conqueror,” the translator marches “the meaning of his originals … into his own tongue” (115).
Later theorists of translation would expand on the “literal versus free” translation debate. Dryden, for instance, constructs a tripartite model of methods – metaphrase: “word by word, and line by line”; paraphrase: “translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator … but his words are not so strictly follow’d as his sense”; and imitation: “the translator … assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion: and taking only some general hints from the original” (“Preface to Ovid’s Epistles” 38). Dryden’s concepts of metaphrase and paraphrase are largely recapitulations of the literal and free methods of translation outlined by previous classical orators and religious scholars. His additional category of imitation, however, is formulated in response to his contemporary, Abraham Cowley, who in his preface to Pindaric Odes (1656) endorses a mode of translation that reaches far beyond paraphrase or free translation to invest the target text with the “wit or invention” of the translator, importing the source text and its author into the cultural and historical moment of the target language. In reference to his own translation of Pindar’s odes, Cowley freely admits that he has “taken, left out, and added what [he] please[s]” (“Preface to Pindarique Odes” 175). Dryden rebukes both the extreme literalism of metaphrase and the “forsaking” of sense by imitation; the former method makes a “verbal copier” of the translator, while the latter’s tactics of derivation obfuscates the original. Opting for paraphrase as the appropriate approach, Dryden provides a more elaborate taxonomy of translational practices; although fully aware of the particular problem for poetry to convey both form and sense, he ultimately reinforces the same approach advanced by his predecessors.44 The same might be said for the imperialist project underscoring Jerome’s “sense-for-sense model.” Lesley Higgins observes that Victorian scholars Matthew Arnold, Benjamin Jowett, Edward Fitzgerald, and Walter Pater were involved in “an intense intellectual and ideological struggle for control over the Platonic canon [and Greek classics]”; translation was yet another activity bound up with “imperialist praxis” (Higgins. “Jowett and Pater” 44). Although Fitzgerald’s racist view of Persian poets is an extreme case,45 Arnold certainly shares his elitism, distrusting both the “ordinary English reader” and the critic’s “individual caprices” (On Translating Homer 4). If there is a “touchstone” to be found in a translation, he argues, it will be discerned by “ask[ing] how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry” – namely, his equally well-educated contemporaries (4).
A twentieth-century linguist such as Roman Jakobson makes similar assumptions about the intent of translation as the maximal transference of sense. In “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” Jakobson admits that comparative analysis of languages often reveals incomplete or partial “equivalence between code-units,” or definable terms within the lexicon of a sign system. He offers as an example the Russian word for “cheese.” Because its Russian heteronym, “cЫp,” includes only those foods made from compressed curds that are also fermented, the Russian definition excludes cottage cheese. This example, albeit prosaic, expresses the intimate relationship between the discursive production of language and the systematization of objective phenomena specific to any linguistic community. Yet, despite the cultural specificity of the “code-units” that constitute a given language, Jakobson nonetheless insists that the function of translation must be to locate equivalence between messages in distinct sign systems:
Translation from one language into another substitutes messages in one language not for separate code-units but for entire messages in some other language. Such a translation is a reported speech; the translator recodes and transmits a message received from another source. Thus translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes. (“On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” 139)
Jakobson’s structuralist approach affords greater descriptive rigour, but the function of translation is effectively the same as that of Dryden, advocating a translational approach that decodes and recodes at the level of holistic sense. Theories of translation, from Cicero to the prevailing models of the 1970s, tend to debate the most effective approach to transfer the maximum retention of meaning from the source text to the target language. In each case, translation as a theoretical problem addresses the signified, with only varying degrees of attention to the signifier as a secondary matter of importance. But what is more, each theorist colludes in the assumption of an ultimate Signified; the role of the translator is thus to reach behind the linguistic sign to a universal and fixed meaning.
Despite this recapitulation of classical translation theory, Jakobson usefully extends translation beyond a properly linguistic domain. Consider his instructive typology – Intralingual: “interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language”; Interlingual: “interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language”; Intersemiotic: “interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (“On Linguistic” 139). According to his classification, translation occurs within a single language, between different languages, and between verbal and non-verbal sign systems. Like George Steiner, Jakobson observes the crucial epistemological affinity between translation and interpretation, namely, that any interpretative act involves a translational one, even within the same language. To interpret a poem, for instance, might involve a translation of a figurative economy of linguistic signs into a metacritical one. It is likely that McCaffery and Nichol read Jakobson’s essay, given the similarity of their own terminology, although the two poets modify his terms somewhat, replacing intralingual and interlingual translation with homolinguistic and heterolinguistic translation.46 Likewise, it is Jakobson’s notion of intersemiotic translation that informs their notion of the post-semiotic poem. I shall discuss the TRG’s use of these translational methods momentarily; for now, it suffices that although McCaffery and Nichol borrow Jakobson’s terminology, they reject his imperative of message retention.
In the first of their research reports, the TRG expose the Judaeo-Christian presuppositions that underlie normative theories of translation. They point to its origins in the story of Babel, whereby linguistic diversity replaces a singular, universal language in order to prevent the perceived threat of humanity’s usurpation of heaven. Traditional theories of translation, argue Nichol and McCaffery, hinge upon a principle of semantic similitude – that behind any signifier, in any number of sign systems, there exists a common, stable meaning that a translator seeks to reveal and transfix. Though specifically a parody of Chomskean grammar trees, McCaffery’s poem ably dramatizes this approach:
Fig. 4. Steve McCaffery, “The Letter ‘a’ According to Chomsky,” 1975, Seven Pages Missing: Volume Two: Previously Uncollected Texts (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2002) 54. Used with permission.
Translation is predicated on a paradoxical double gesture: as it diversifies it homogenizes, as it reproduces a linguistic artefact in another language, it nonetheless mobilizes meaning back towards a purported universal origin. In “Unposted Correspondence,” composed in 1981, McCaffery states that his research with Nichol sought to expose the “pathology of translation … its mythic support of an ultimate signified that acts as the source text’s transported truth” (355). The various translational techniques that McCaffery and Nichol employ “take as a central concern the elimination or limitation of this problem: the post-Babel condition of man that so many mythologies reflect” (RG 31–2).
Granted, McCaffery and Nichol do not suggest that normative modes of translation are outdated or unadvisable; they fully admit that conventional translations often succeed in reproducing sense. It is that poetry’s foregrounding of sound shape and verbal rhythm, its emotional as well as propositional function, and its tendency towards semantic multiplicity, make the efficacy of normative translation not only unfeasible but misapplied as well. Between the extreme view held by Benedetto Croce, for instance, that poetry is untranslatable, and those who erroneously elide the problem of semantic and formal reproduction, translation might serve a different function.47 The role of the translator, rather than to preserve and fix a poem’s semantic content, might involve augmenting and multiplying a text’s potential. Like their experiments altering the textual codes of the book in order to reveal its communal artistry, McCaffery and Nichol assert that the translator, rather than look to make her work invisible, should be understood as a participant in a work’s linguistic migration. Translation then becomes the work of community, one that acknowledges its transformation of sense and intercultural exchange.
(I) Homolinguistic / Heterolinguistic / Homophonic. In their first research report, Nichol and McCaffery introduce their terms “heterolinguistic” and “homolinguistic” – which broadly correspond to Jakobson’s distinction between interlingual and intralingual translation – or translation between different languages and translation within a single language. A third term requires definition, however. In order to contest normative translation’s privileging of meaning retention as the major function of translation, Nichol, McCaffery, Dick Higgins, and others employ translation homophonically. Homophonic translation involves a process in which the poet translates the sound of a language instead of its sense (privileging the signifier instead of the signified). The following lines of Catullus’s poem, when transformed homophonically from Latin into English by Nichol, generate humorous results: “Pisonis comites, cohors inanis, / aptis sarcinulis et expeditis” becomes “Piss on his committees, cohorts in inanities / apt as sarcasm & as expeditious” (Green, Poems of Catullus, 72; Nichol, “from Catullus XXVIII” [1984] 1–2). Peter Green translates these lines to read: “Piso’s flacks, poor empty-handed staffers / loaded up with your piddling little backpacks” (Poems of Catullus 73). The poem is addressed to Catullus’s long-time friends Veranius and Fabullus, who likely had enlisted in Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus’s regiment. Catullus inquires whether they have encountered the same thrift and negligence that he himself had endured as an aid to Memmius, propraetor of Bithynia (both he and Piso were notorious for their profiteering and corruption). Critics of Catullus frequently contrast this poem with “XXIX,” in which he reprimands Mamurra, Caesar’s chief engineer, who was infamous for his lavish expenditures. Green and others point out that Catullus seems only to object to such government corruption when members of staff are not given a just share of the takings. Nichol’s homophonic transformation of the poem’s material sound seems to distil the poem to pure expletive and sarcasm. It is likely that Nichol’s choice of Catullus’s verse is playfully satiric. Catallus will sanction Rome’s imperial exploits provided he gets his share; Nichol plunders the textual riches of the Latin poet’s work in turn. Albeit Nichol’s purpose is altogether different. Just as radical feminists were claiming at approximately the same time, language must be, for the poet, a shared resource.
The following is a homolinguistic example from McCaffery’s reworking of Shakespeare’s 105th sonnet, “Let Not My Love Be Called Idolatry” (1972):
lay it in hot
mile of a beak
all died
hollowtree …
(1–4)
Phonetic literalizations of certain words and recombinations of syllable clusters create playful misreadings: “my love” becomes “mile of” while the vowel combination “ie” and the second “d” in “died” blends into “hollowtree,” echoing the word “idolatry.” Nichol and McCaffery’s translation method shares an affinity with a tradition of literary appropriation that includes Tom Phillips’s A Humument (1980), Ronald Johnson’s Radi os (1977), and Burroughs and Gysin’s cut-up methods. But whereas Phillips employs a technique of concealment, Johnson proceeds by deletion, and Burroughs and Gysin permutation, Nichol and McCaffery’s translational procedures are best described as mutations.48 As the source text travels to its target language, it undergoes the corruption of authorial contamination; the result is a hybrid of written readings. A work such as Six Fillious (1978) implies this trope of (per)mutation by its very title. A limit case of translation as cross-cultural collaboration, the text consists of five translations of Robert Filliou’s 14 Chansons et 1 Charade (1968) by George Brecht, Dieter Roth, Nichol, McCaffery, and Dick Higgins, composed in three languages using normative, homophonic, and homo-heterolinguistic techniques.49 Here is an example from the poem’s opening interlude:
McCaffery’s contribution consists of a homolinguistic transformation of Brecht’s normative translation of Filliou’s poem. The refrain repeated throughout Filliou’s version, which Brecht translates literally to read either “here’s” or “it’s an homage in dance,” is repurposed by McCaffery seven times: “air song imagine dense,” “it’s sane imagining a dunce,” “hits a numb urge intense,” “hats on oh midget ants,” “i’d sign him agendas hence,” “eats sand or margined hens,” and “hitch a name merge intense” (18–19). This multi-authored experiment treats Filliou’s poem as public property, creating wild permutations that destabilize and mutate its original meaning. The author becomes one in a series of filters through which the poem’s sound/meaning travels and transforms. Unlike the authors’ methods of research and performative collaboration, both of which unfold in real time and involve a mutually conceived act of community formation, creative translation is more properly an appropriative strategy. Six Fillious is composed of discrete contributions by several authors and thus fails to achieve the same level of subjective integration. That said, the title might be read one of two ways. Either the translator provisionally embodies the author whose work he translates (hence each translator becomes a distinct version of “Filliou”), or Filliou, a proper name signifying a body of work, becomes a different sign each time his poem is translated into another sign system. If these two readings are conjoined, then translation is understood to collectivize the writing subject/text, multiplied at the moment of intercultural contact. A new language creates a new Filliou. The text invites the reader to reconsider appropriative strategies as collaborative writing, dramatizing the communal production of meaning involved in such practices.
(II) Allusive referential. It is clear from Higgins’s letters to McCaffery that his practice is informed in part by his readings of the TRG reports on translation, and conceived, according to McCaffery, as a key element of their Institute of Creative Misunderstanding.50 Variously referred to as “fractured translations” or “transforms,” Higgins offers the following description of the processual act involved in allusive referentialist writing:
1) I think a. Let us call a my “object.” 2) As artist, I observe that though I try to think a simply, I find that my mind moves on to b. I could fight this and insist upon mentioning a only … Instead I accept the displacement. B now becomes the new object, which I will call a “referential.” 3) But I find that when I refer to b in my original context, that the sense of a, if the intuition has been a close one, remains. (“Towards an Allusive Referential” 68–9)
There is certainly overlap between homophonic procedures and allusive referential ones. In fact, Higgins provides a homolinguistic translation as one of several examples of his method. There are, however, key differences. Though both exploit the aleatoric possibilities of translating the sound of the material signifier instead of the signified, allusive referentialist procedures function according to broader associations at the level of sense and, more specifically, the slippage or displacement of thought that generates a new text that nonetheless bears the trace of its source. In Classic Plays (1976), for instance, Higgins takes as his source text the Persephone story from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Rather than recount the narrative content of the myth, Higgins instead transforms the principal figures of the story – Persephone, Demeter, and Hades – into complexes of signs:
per se
phone
is sound(ed by)
per se
phony
is bound(ed by)
per sé
fun
is phone(d by)
persephone
phonos
phone
us
phone
us
persephone[.]
(Classic Plays 1–15)
Forced to travel between the company of the gods and the underworld, Persephone occupies a liminal space between two realms. The reader of Higgins’s text encounters not a proper noun so much as a site of multiple significations achieved through homophony, pun, and permutation. Higgins suggests that words “might be taken as … radicals with great polyvalence, capable of entering into a vast variety of identities which are, presumably, difficult to explain hierarchically” (“Towards” 68). Isolated into phonetic units, “per se” (by itself) and “phone”(from the Greek meaning “sound, voice” and phonetos, “to be spoken, utterable”) are suggestive of the one that forms speech, a reading reinforced by the pun on “se/say.” Like the goddess that moves between worlds, “Persephone” the signifier occupies multiple realms of meaning, never resting at one for very long. Given that the goddess is associated with nature and her abduction functions as an origin myth accounting for seasonal change, it must also be concluded that Higgins unavoidably genders language, associating mutability and polyvalence symbolically with the female body. Although these are positive qualities for Higgins, the “transform” of the myth involves an ideological move that in part stresses the liberation of meaning from a fixed sign, while it, too, abducts a female-gendered sign, previously associated with nature. Ultimately, this strategy liberates the signifier from a fixed chain of signification, while it still bares the faint traces of Saint Jerome’s imperialist project, in which translation is a form of abduction.
In an exchange of letters during the summer of 1977, McCaffery expresses his interest in the concept as a more “embracing” economy of metaphoricity (Dick Higgins Papers, Box 21, folder 41), although he also partially rejects the “a to b” associational model Higgins advances as being too Aristotelian in its preservation of the metaphor’s structural integrity.51 That is, implicit in Higgins’s formulation (and the Persephone myth as well) is a dyadic structure that regulates the interplay between the literal and the figurative, between surface and depth. Instead, he likens the concept to Derrida’s notion of the trace, insisting that allusive referentiality functions by a “chain of deferrals and postponements” that “deflects one signifier into a second signifier and that way by-passes the ideationality of the signified” (Box 21, Folder 41). An example elucidates McCaffery’s claim:
“23” |
“Twenty Three” |
And their feet move |
the move(meant) of the foot from Crete in rhythm, not |
Rhythmically, as tender feet of Cretan girls danced once around an |
in a tender rhythm but intending rhythm crush |
altar of love, crushing a circle in the soft smooth flowering grass[.] |
a soft calligraphy of O’s |
(Barnard, Sappho, 1–7) |
into the grass[.] (McCaffery, Intimate Distortions, 1–7) |
McCaffery’s poem is one in a book-length sequence entitled Intimate Distortions: A Displacement of Sappho (1979), a text he dutifully dedicates to Higgins (the “allusive referentialist”) and for which he takes as his source text not the original Greek but Mary Barnard’s 1958 English translation of Sappho. In McCaffery’s text, proper nouns such as “Cretan girls” and “altar” are deleted; although the words “Crete” and “grass” provide the reader with a sense of place, given the position of the former in the poem’s first line, it is likely that the “move(meant) of the foot from Crete / in rhythm” puns instead on a “cretic” line. The emphasis is shifted from the static thing to the rhythm of movement. McCaffery’s revision is potentially jarring for the reader because he mainly refuses to allow a signifier its corresponding signified, occupying instead a nebulous zone of signification. A combination of alliterative “o” sounds in the final stanza of Sappho/Barnard’s text (“love,” “soft,” “smooth,” “flow-”) and the image of a “circle” becomes a “calligraphy / of O’s,” at once suggesting a fixation on the material letters and the form of one’s lips expelling breath. McCaffery’s title – with its explicit use of the word “displacement” – emphasizes that aspect of Higgins’s practice that foregrounds the “deferring action of signs in movement, to the actual leap from being one thing to another” (Box 21, Folder 41). The metaphor is apt: McCaffery defines Higgins’s “transforms” as the leaping of signifiers. Therefore, a more open concept of metaphoricity is proposed: one unconfined by the dyadic structure that restricts the two figurative terms in conventional theories of metaphor to a two-way association, a practice that encourages further adaptations, making the translated text the source for yet another creative translation.
(III) Post-semiotic. Jakobson’s observation that translation occurs between verbal and non-verbal sign systems occasioned a number of experiments in intermedial poetics. In their first research report, Nichol and McCaffery acknowledge Decio Pigniatari and Luiz Angelo Pinto, members of the Brazilian Noigandres literary collective, as the inventors of the semiotic or “code” poem. Their aim, the TRG notes, is a universal language that seeks to “bypass the need for translation” by employing “non-verbal pragmatic sign formula[s]” (RG 34). An example clarifies their otherwise abstract definition (see figure 5).
The weakness of this type of poem is its unavoidable recourse to a lexical grammar in which to decode its non-verbal function. There is, of course, an implicit translation process – “from words into semiotic signs back into words” (RG 34). What is more, the authors’ wish to “bypass” translation altogether merely echoes a nostalgia for a pre-Babel Adamic language, naïvely thought to have been achieved through the universality of visual signs. There is also a certain closure in this method, a complementary entrapment of meaning within two corresponding sign systems. During the summer of 1970, the TRG jointly conceived of a “post-semiotic” poem, in which the “lexical conversion of non-verbal code back into words is eliminated.” A procedure of “semantic suggestion” (35) replaces the search for a metatranslational text. McCaffery’s “A Translation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Sonnet XXXI from ‘Astrophel and Stella’” (1972) provides a useful example:
Fig. 5. bpNichol, “Bilingual Poem,” 1967, in “Research Report 1: Translation,” Open Letter 2, no. 4 (Spring 1973): 85. Used with permission.
Fig. 6. Steve McCaffery, “A Translation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Sonnet XXXI from ‘Astrophel and Stella,’” 1972, Seven Pages Missing: Volume Two: Previously Uncollected Texts (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2002) 163. Used with permission.
The original poem is not a direct address to the beloved, but rather an invocation to the moon, whose “sad steps” across the sky and pale “face” prompts the speaker to “read” in “thy looks” a familiar experience of unrequited love. The moon, too, he conjectures, has been struck by cupid’s arrow, but to no avail; thus, the speaker concludes, in heaven as in earth, “beauties … love to be lov’d, and yet / Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess” (“Sonnet XXXI” 1–2, 11–13).52 Comparing the “vocabulary” of the post-semiotic translation, the reader should be struck by its visual synecdoche, its sexual fixation on bodily apertures, and the voyeuristic subject position of the speaker/viewer. The moon, in McCaffery’s version, comes to signify the body as pure surface upon which the lover projects his own perceptions on a “beloved” never empowered to speak. McCaffery’s choice to remediate his translation as a comic strip – a demotic genre - comments on the popularity of Sidney’s subject matter and the courtly love tradition itself as a “cartoonish” overembellishment of sensual desire. Yet the organization of comic frames is more diagrammatic than cartoon-like. Cupid’s arrows become those in a diagram mapping modes of perception and cognition, speaking perhaps to the procedural nature of the sonnet form and the conventions of courtly love.53 The post-semiotic poem establishes an intertextual connection between a source text and its adaptation. But instead of a closed relationship between the two, one finds a remediation executed to adapt while it permits – perhaps invites – further adaptation.
Among the dominant theories of translation I discussed previously, the problem of the translator’s status is simply elided by ignoring her contribution to the creative act. The translator is understood as a transparent medium, through which the sense of one language enters the form of another. McCaffery and Nichol insist, conversely, that the translator becomes a “living force within the work” (RG 29) and a collaborator in its augmentation and modification, as reading itself becomes a writerly activity. That is, the translator becomes another writer in the multivalent and social production of texts. In a conversation recorded in the pages of Open Letter, both authors agree that translation and collaboration share a governing logic:
B: … collaboration is also a way of bringing a kind of readerly activity into the writing process … It certainly relates nicely to what you and i have talked about for years in terms of homolinguistic translations and, too, what i’ve ended up calling ‘conversations with the dead’ (viz your Sappho displacements and my Catullus ‘translations’).
S: Yes, both translation and collaboration suggest that creativity is not integral / expressive but dialogic / relational. (Nichol, “The Annotated” 75)
Not only are many of their pieces multi-authored, several of the strategies they invent are as well. The post-semiotic poem, McCaffery recounts, was a concept Nichol and he “arrive[d] at together (I can almost remember the brand of wine we drunk [sic] that evening rapping together)” (McCaffery, “Interview” by Jaeger 80). Dick Higgins’s notion of the allusive referential is partly adapted from his readings of the TRG reports and his correspondence with McCaffery during the mid-1970s. McCaffery’s homolinguistic rewriting of the Communist Manifesto (see below) into the dialect of his native West Riding of Yorkshire was the suggestion of Robert Filliou, during a trip he, McCaffery, and Allan Kaprow had taken to Roberts Creek, British Columbia (Wot We Wukkerz Want, n.p.).54 In accordance with the principles of the Institute of Creative Misunderstanding, these authors were building and adapting “conceptual models” for communal use.
McCaffery, Nichol, and Higgins worked to shift emphasis from object to process, defining the poem as a unit in the continuous mutation and infinite proliferation of a sign’s semantic content. All objects instead become provisional points in an infinite series, emphasizing not its being as such but its continuous potential for transmutation into or as part of another object. The title Six Fillious elegantly expresses this mutant proliferation of an object’s infinite possibility. Yet the Eternal Network is also meant as a model of communal interaction, calling for a similar approach to community formation as a continued openness to transformation. This principle is evident in their communication network, the Four Horsemen’s “ongoing compositional workshops,” and the TRG’s “we-full (not I-less) paradigm.” Appropriative activities as diverse as collage and montage, mash-ups and machinema, found art and sampling, creative translation and theatrical adaptation, occur within marginal communities of avant-gardes, activists, and sub-cultures. There are several reasons for the relationship between appropriation and communal art production, but if artistic appropriation operates by effacing property ownership, it follows that the cultural objects they create can no more be owned than the objects they take. Prevailing explanations of appropriation highlight concepts of piracy, theft, and plagiarism, a gesture that inadvertently criminalizes such practices. The TRG instead proposes a model of shared culture, in a sense seeking to realize Rich’s “dream of a common language.” An integral part of artistic appropriation involves an ethic of sharing, of making one’s cultural production infinitely available to others for use.
The political undertones of this practice are brought forward in McCaffery’s Wot We Wukkerz Want (1977). This is the opening section of Samuel Moore’s 1888 English translation of The Communist Manifesto followed by McCaffery’s version in Yorkshire dialect:
Two things result from this fact:
1. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
2. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish, and Danish languages. (78)
Nahthuzzuh coupler points ahm goointer chuckaht frum awl thisseer stuffidge:
Wun: Thadeelin wear reight proper biggun inthiseer kommunizum.
Too: It’s abaht bluddy time thut kommunizum spoouk its orn mind, unwarritsehbaht, un edder reight set-too we awl this youngunz stuff ehbaht booergy-misters, wee uh bitter straight tawkin onnitsoowun.
Un soourt kommiz frum awlort place uv snugged it up dahn in Lundun, un poowildahl the buk lernin tehgither un cummupwithisser Manifesto, unnitz innuzoowun un int’ froggy, unt’ jerry, un i-ti, unt flemmy unt dayunish.
(171)
In the liner note of the 1979 audio tape, MyCaffery explains his rationale for accepting Filliou’s proposal to write the poem. “How,” he inquires, “can a manifesto designed to inspire the working class to a world revolution be effectively conveyed in Stunted Victorian English prose?” (373). What he and Filliou imagine instead is a “dialect materialism” (liner note) specific to the varied historical conditions of numerous working communities – a “soft manifesto” malleable enough to mutate into Jamaican patois, Nuyorican Spanglish, or English cockney. McCaffery suggests that this movement across geography and across nation state requires a similar transition into the language and dialect specific to language users. Amid their discussions at Roberts Creek, Filliou, Kaprow, and McCaffery agreed that such a translation would be a poetic realization of the Eternal Network. Wot We Wukkerz Want imagines that the propositions contained in its content belong to a social continuance – an everlasting network or infinite series. Thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou insist that the truth of communism can be found in its axiomatic “hypothesis”: that class subjugation is not inevitable, that a form of collective organization based on the freely associated labour of producers is possible. Drawing many of the same conclusions as CAM members after attending the Havana Congress, in moving from “communist” to “Kommunist,” the eternal status of this claim is never universal in the liberal-humanist sense of an abstract generality applied to any situation, but universally transferable, in that it may be taken up and reinvented infinitely by a community according to the specifications of its culture, language, and history.
McCaffery understands that at the core of Marxist discourse are competing notions of appropriation: one that appropriates the labour of the other for himself and a communal sharing of resources produced and redistributed for the good of the community. The text of the Communist Manifesto itself should be understood as such. Unalienated labour is that which is mutually appropriatable by a community of members who understand their production as a production for the other. T.S. Eliot’s witty observation that immature poets borrow and mature poets steal makes no sense within this poetic economy. To borrow implies a predetermined condition of return. No such precondition exists within an infinite series, in which the “borrowed” phrase is always already “borrowed” from elsewhere. The Eternal Network, then, should be understood as an approach to aesthetics and sociality: the poem and the community as the unpropertied resource of all.
Practices of appropriation have become an increasingly dominant feature of recent experimental verse, for instance, in constraint poetry, conceptual writing, Flarf, and digital poetries – all of which, I would argue, productively appropriate from the TRG. Whether its members were collaborating in the tactile, real-time environments of performance spaces, workshops, and research labs, or whether these activities happened as a part of a transgeographic institute of shared conceptual models and techniques, the principal value of the TRG is its practice of appropriation, understood not merely as the transgressive act of censorial concealment to which Bloom gives the name “anxiety of influence,” but instead a poetic economy of mutual use, a view of the text’s value being its capacity for adaptation, modification, reframing, amplifying, and repurposing. Darren Wershler has coined the term “conceptualism in the wild” to denote popular cultural practices that (often unknowingly) appropriate and disperse ideas drawn from the avant-garde.55 Such tactics become memes perpetually adapted and recontextualized elsewhere. It is often said of McCaffery and Nichol that their overlapping bodies of work resist generic classification. Their practice drifts in and out of visual, sound, performance, procedural verse, Language writing, Fluxus practice, and conceptualism. That said, we should be wary of celebrating such diversity for its own sake. McCaffery’s translation, and the Eternal Network from which it arises, invites us to imagine the texts produced within the Toronto Research Group as memes that install, replicate, and proliferate the communist hypothesis as an imperative of literature. The motley patchwork of experiments they undertook should not distract us from the unwavering political project underscoring the TRG’s activities. Let us even call it unabashedly the truth of the TRG’s oeuvre: to defend a public cultural domain from proprietary enclosure.
