Written in the mid-through-late seventies, Blackout was released in the wake of the 1968 moment, which involved a wave of radical students and anti-capitalist workers’ unrest surging throughout Western Europe. But unlike in France, that “moment” lasted in Italy for over a decade. And it is the prolonged endurance and mostly tragic ramifications that inspired Nanni Balestrini to write this outstanding algorithmically-experimental work.
It is perhaps useful to note from the very beginning how Balestrini’s radical allegiance gets in fact filtered through, mixed with, and ultimately shaped by the various cacophonous kinds of discourse he feeds into his algorithmic procedures. He is not the first to inform digital poetics with radicalism—in the US for instance, a father figure of algorithmic/digital poetry, John Cage, had professed Maoism as the ideology consistent with his own “m: writings” and “mesostic”-generating operations as early as the 1960s—but he is indeed a singular case of focusing a whole book of algorithmic writing on a radical movement. Balestrini in this respect is a pioneer, since if 21st century digital poetry can be partly characterized by a radical, anti-capitalistic ethos (albeit diffused by lingering postmodernist reflexes), back in the day digital poetics focused a lot more on the method rather than the political implications of its subjects.
Balestrini’s “how” therefore enacts a remarkably nuanced view on the “what.” Perhaps the most relevant if intriguing paradox of this book is its unrelenting focus on the radical movement and related events, expanded by an inclusive, democratic perspective that invites diversity and a discordance of viewpoints and voices—all of which is eventually turned on its head, political stance included. Radicalism itself thus gets subverted, in the sense that any possible single-minded version of it is blown up by the most uncompromising—and therefore inclusive—radicalism of all: that of the (politically and commercially unsanctioned) algorithm.
In his introduction, Franco “Bifo” Berardi pertinently elucidates the paradoxical nature of Balestrini’s poetics. The poet’s strange detachment from the militant ideology he embraced in “real life,” that remixing of discourses that ultimately (re)gains an overwhelming pathos by means of the language’s own polyglossic rhythms rather than any explicit emotional involvement, is described by Berardi as Balestrini’s singular irony. While the distinction is valid, the term is a bit problematic, for Balestrini’s irony seems to be neither the postmodern political one that C.T. Funkhouser for instance has identified as a feature of the “new directions” in recent (web-based) digital poetry, nor the modernist one that Harold Bloom once pinpointed to be T.S. Eliot’s overarching urban vision, fully realized in the “Preludes.” While delving indeed into the multiplicities of the former, the Italian poet seems to abhor its frivolous dithering (or simply, yes, irony) and at times conformist dissolution, and by comparison to the latter, he consistently eschews any totalizing or centralized vision.
“Bifo” Berardi makes another interesting point in his introduction while further analyzing the multifaceted, paradoxical nature of Balestrini’s poetics. The repetition of the same shreds of discourse in different contexts and consistently different orders is a way of enacting the involvement of the machine in the production process and of expressing an ambivalent attitude towards time and workflows. The “machine” (both in the industrial and algorithmic sense) helps reduce the labor time while being involved in labor, thus redefining literature as “middle ground between labor and refusal of labor.”
Commune Editions, June 2017.
Yet the role played by time in Blackout might be a more complex than that. In current theory, temporality in electronic literature and digital art is seen as three and sometimes four-fold: there is user time (time spent by user/reader engaging with the work), discourse time (the amount of time needed for the “machine”/algorithm/text to deliver its content), story time (temporality as represented in the work itself), and last but not least, system time (the time the machine or medium needs to run various phases of the code or algorithm). In Blackout Balestrini toys shrewdly with system time, in ways that actually relevantly impact user time as well. The mashup of recurrent fragments popping up every now and then in various contexts and variable orders represents the iterations of a specific kind of algorithmic procedures, which “Bifo” calls “recombination,” but which according to C.T. Funkhouser’s established categorization would in fact fall in both combinatory and permutational digital poetry subgenres. Yet Balestrini short-circuits that part of the system time with the help of another time, a more locally relevant one. While a fragment might follow a certain pace when occurring across various sections, it also collides once in a while with other fragments in certain close contextual proximities, which both interrupts the overall system time and branches it out in unexpected directions. Here is an example:
each day it’s necessary to completely wash away the blood
as someone said it was a performance that broke through the current
communication gap
the things I do are spoken about by everyone
sing with the voice to liberate it from the conditioning of a cultural prison
an attempt to free ourselves from the condition of listener and viewer to which culture
and politics have accustomed us
when the lights went out the niggers raged boasted a black youth
after a few minutes the night was illuminated by fires the streets invaded by looters(emphasis mine),
and on the next page:
hospitalized since April 25th in critical condition at Memorial Hospital
in New York with bone marrow aplasia
an attempt to free ourselves from the condition of listener and viewer to which culture and politics have accustomed us
who considers every expressive frontier impoverished and ventures
beyond without fear
each day it’s necessary to completely wash away the blood
this work should not be assumed a listening that suffers passively
transplanting the spinal chord is a most difficult operation
bonfires in the streets an explosion of Afro-Latin vitality a torchlight
procession to lofty Broadway
the music was drowned out by the howling of alarms and the sound of
broken glass
for the vast majority in the streets it is a festival a Christmas night a New
Years in July
after a few minutes the night was illuminated by fires the streets invaded by looters…
(Emphasis mine)
Lines such as “each day it’s necessary to completely wash away the blood” or “after a few minutes the night was illuminated by fires the streets invaded by looters” (appearing in both quotes above) keep reoccurring at a pace and within contexts dictated by the system time, and so does “an attempt to free ourselves from the condition of listener and viewer to which culture.” These lines interact in significant ways with those that “happen” to appear before and/or after them in each particular context, and that is how actually system time shapes story time in the poem. “An attempt to free ourselves from the condition of listener and viewer to which culture” for instance, in the first excerpt above, relevantly echoes the line preceding it, “sing with the voice to liberate it from the conditioning of a cultural prison,” while the line after it, “and politics have accustomed us” interacts nicely with the ones following it, “when the lights went out the niggers raged boasted a black youth/ after a few minutes the night was illuminated by fires the streets invaded by looters.” But there is obviously something else going on here—two of these lines could in fact also be read as one and the same, and indeed, the two fuse in the second excerpt making up a single new line: “an attempt to free ourselves from the condition of listener and viewer to which culture and politics have accustomed us.”
This is a breach of system time related conventions, which suddenly affects not only story but also user time. The “user”/reader will therefore have to re-read everything now with a fresh eye as they just realized those fragmentary statements are also part of a new kind of traversal and local (contextual or page-based) temporality. And this new temporality is engendered by a multilayered kind of space, one both expanding freely across various sections of the text and being articulated locally, as particular and unmistakable textual place. It is perhaps this one-of-a-kind place (with its musical architecture and dynamism) that renders Balestrini and his paradoxes—in Peter Valente’s excellent translation—so relevant to this day, to an age in which radicalisms, migration, and often cynical geopolitical-historical redrawings hardly seem to ever strike a balance.
The defining and prevailing trope behind such poetics is not irony, but what I would call “asymptotic hyperbole.” Balestrini’s method involves hyperbolic crescendos and accumulations, but these are qualified by the ever-sought and never-attained singular focus on a certain political ideology, movement and age. Beyond the rhetoric, the gradual expansion of inclusive algorithmic procedures becomes a geometrical hyperbole, converging with the asymptotic itinerary of space itself as it approaches multidimensional time. And indeed this is our own contemporary time of the cybernetic and the interconnection between the human and the machine.
MARGENTO (Chris Tănăsescu) is Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova. He is a poet, academic, translator, and poetry performer whose pen-name is also the name of his poetry/action-painting/jazz-rock band, and the winner of a number of significant national and international awards. See his work in Asymptote here.
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