[-empyre-] electronic poetry and lurking materiality

[susan ballard <suba@clear.net.nz>]

> Is electronic poetry a monster? Embodied in the digital?  Delicious and
> strange thoughts: Jim continues,
>
>> We are embodied and it is essential to our world view, to our joy, our pain,
>> our vulnerability, our hopes, life, and death. If we lose 'touch' with our
>> embodiment we lose touch with ourselves and with others and their pain and
>> joys, and hopes and aspirations, our shared mortality. And thereby also our
>> wisdom, empathy, self understanding, and breath.
>
> Programming, language, poetics, forcefields of touch: go for it.
>


One of the joys of intermittent lurking is playing catch up. I find myself
reading selecting copying and then forgetting exactly who said what, but
aware that a conversation has occurred, you know I have participated all the
way through, you just couldn't see me do it. and I have began to wonder if
it is actually the imagined voice of the lurker that is heard more than that
of the poster (is that what this is called?). and then I saw mention of the
phenomenology of the computer, or its/ our program, and i began to think,
maybe what happens is that sometimes lists loose touch with their
materiality/ their embodiment - yep i'll deal to that in a minute - and then
fear, worry, flames creep in.

Someone (sorry i really have destroyed all the necessary info), a voice,
said something about the problematcis of connecting materiality to
embodiment, and i thought about the things proposed  by Judith Butler on
performativity, and how they often determine the way I approach something,
and I started to think that  maybe a way out of the phenomenological bind of
materiality to embodiment, is to think of embodiment being a performance of
materiality. the way we actually experience (so hard to get away from that
word) materiality might have something to do with how we conceptualise
embodiment,

and then,

maybe we can move, shuffle between embodiments. Suddenly as i write this my
lurker self is getting pretty nervous, (I wonder if she should know more
about digital poetics for a start),

and then,

i thought maybe the lurker is the materiality of the list. Not in a kind of
cartesian binary of spoken/ silent, but in a more complex loop, of reading,
thinking, and absorption, i know i have often got to class on monday
morning, and found my self talking about something i have read at the
weekend.
Lurkers are not silent, they are material.
.
x
su