Contini, by Filippo de Pisis
“Il paradosso del poema sacro in una lingua peritura.”
Gianfranco Contini, ‘Dante Come Personaggio-Poeta’, in Un’ idea di Dante: saggi danteschi (1976: 42).
This section will be permanently under construction. Here’s my first attempt. With the caveat that trying to extend theories from one field into another is always fraught with difficulties (linked with language, perspective and motivation or end objective, to name just three), here is my first attempt to begin to structure a definition of generativity for textual poetics. I hope to be able to keep updating this section as a result of feedback and further research. Please get in touch!
Generativity in textual poetics, definition 1.0 (15 April 2014)
Generativity in textual poetics may be defined as when a work both invites and supports a creative action (including a new work, or a new behaviour) that engages at a level of deep structure or with the underlying ‘spirit’ of the original, and which action (or creative output), in turn, does the same.
To deconstruct a bit:
invites – I’m not necessarily suggesting that the potential for a generative response is consciously programmed in (although in the case of Dante’s Comedy I hope to suggest that it is), but the work must be sufficiently open (rather than sterile or closed) to allow polysemy in reading/interpretation
supports – essentially, the work functions at the level of system, allowing the recipient to engage with a form of deep structure, structural grammar, rules or protocols, as well as with a surface meaning or enunciation
creative – something original, requiring a non-automatic or non-habitual engagement of the imagination or other cognitive faculties, as different from the mechanistic execution of an algorithm. The opposite of promoting automatism in perception, a generative engagement will defamiliarise and prompt a more lucid mode of seeing
action – possibly a new work, possibly a new mental or physical behaviour (Statius, for example, began to write poetry in response to Virgil’s texts, and then became a Christian because of the Aeneid specifically). The important thing is that the receiver is inspired to act – be active, interactive – rather than simply to passively receive and assimilate. I like Eno’s point about the necessity of judgment, that it is not necessarily what you do, but what you choose to do in response
does the same – a creative action which does not in turn go on to engender the same response of creative action is, I would argue, an hommage, a reproduction, an intertext, a remix, a sample…
Initial checklist of characteristics of generativity in textual poetics
A generative text:
– makes you do something – receiver becomes creator
– promotes new ways of seeing
– (probably) embraces authorship as a form of mediation rather than a form of ownership, recognising that all art is essentially about recombination of existing semiotic units (of varying sizes) rather than creating from nothing
– functions at the level of deep structure (system/set of rules) as well as surface structure (enunciation) – i.e. the artwork can be offered as a system as well as an enunciation (as with Eno & Chilvers’ Scape, for example)
– is open (generative) rather than closed (sterile)
– has the capacity to function eternally rather than being fixed in time
A generative response:
– is active
– is collaborative
– is communicative
– is creative, not solely mechanistic
– is different every time (in real or virtual terms)
– is about transforming rather than reproducing
– is based on intimate knowledge of the source text, and engages with the whole work, and the (apparent) idea behind the work
At the moment probably the most obvious missing element for me in my first definition is something to do with an unconscious engagement with the operation of the text at the level of deep structure; that there is something implicit in the under-workings of the text that speak to something in the sensitive receiver’s unconscious processes of cognition. Perhaps this is to do with an understanding of narrative cognition or some other form of cognitive processing. I’ll go and research this soon.
Generative composition cycle, after Eno (2012)
And here’s a final (for now) observation I’ve borrowed from Brian Eno, in Meet the Developers (2012) that might help with working out how the digital environment can support artistic creativity without burying everything under an algorithm. Asked by an audience member about the balance of the rational mind and the creative instinct, he describes a generative cycle, in which both are in balance. He says, “resistance to artistic articulacy is self-defeating […]. The more you think about it [the work], the stronger your next starting point is”, and goes on to discuss the importance of finding ways to disorientate yourself in order to keep shocking the brain out of habitual patterns.
A tag cloud generator such as this one gives a quick and unashamedly mechanical insight into the words most commonly used in this site (excluding the Italian citations and the Play artworks), as at 15 April 2014. Perhaps most interesting for now (other than the lack of theory terminology!) is the prominence of the word engagement, with its suggestion of action and collaboration.
generating dante 