Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Madly normal
In Writing and Difference, Derrida makes this rather remarkable assertion:
It doesn’t matter at all where the text comes from:Just as it is the fact of the sentence that makes it senseful, it is the fact of the poem makes it poetical. It doesn’t matter where it comes from: man, woman, child, sociopath, criminal, dictator, or machine—the poem carries normalcy and poeticalness within itself by way of the very virtue of its being. The language of poetry's what makes it what it is--whether thought or not.
By its essence, the sentence is normal. It carries normality within it, that is, sense, in every sense of the word—Descartes’s in particular. It carries normality and sense within it, and does so whatever the state, whatever the health or madness of him who propounds it, or whom it passes through, on whom, in whom it is articulated.
Machine poetry is not going away. Sooner or later the critical community is going to have to concede its intelligism and accept that artificial intelligence is every bit as deserving of study as their own human intelligence when it comes to the propagation of poetry. Think they'll put up a fight?
# posted by Jim @ 9:25 AM 
