Introduction to the Exhibition
Introduction
In There, Behind the Door offers a deformance (Samuels and McGann) of a selection of poems from one section of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Objects - Food - Rooms (1914) using sound-, text-, image-, and video-generating AI. The deformances are not illustrations of Stein's text, but rather demonstrations of the types of thought experimentation that Stein practiced and theorized. This exhibition is part of a larger project that uses large language models to investigate Stein's poetics and, reciprocally, uses Stein's poetics to investigate large language models.Stein's Tender Buttons
Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) marks one of literary modernism's most radical breaks with the poetic tradition. Organized in three sections titled “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” Tender Buttons is a loving map of the geography of her intimate everyday life at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, where she and Alice B. Toklas entertained the leading young poets and painters of the day, and later at night, where she sat reflecting and writing.More specifically, the poems would seem to take place "in there, behind the door" of Stein's well-photographed study which was full of what would become the most famous artworks of the 20th century, whose position on the walls frequently shifted as her private collection grew and shrank, and where her friends like Man Ray, Matisse, Dora Maar, and Picasso would gather for conversations about art, literature, philosophy, and the adjacent rooms where she and Alice B. Toklas lived their private lives, cooked food, and wrote (Stein, TB, 64). Read this way, Tender Buttons depicts an intellectual and cultural crossroads. It is a text that renders other texts.
The poems bring before our eyes a magic lantern show of an array of ordinary items, though she later called them "still lives" that "include[d] color and movement" ("Lectures in America "189.) There are eyeglasses, chairs, cups and saucers, and carafes; petticoats, a hat, and a handkerchief; butter, mutton, and roast beef. On occasion, the poem's logical template morphs, and the slideshow turns from objects to affects ("A FRIGHTFUL RELIEF"); cognitive processes ("SUPPOSE AN EYES"); and occasionally, to non-sense ("IT WAS BLACK, BLACK TOOK"; "A LITTLE CALLED PAULINE.") Her depictions of everydayliness are, in other words, made "strange (77) and even "stranger" (77), with the goal of unleashing what Stein describes as “a violent kind of delightfulness” (10). It is in this process of making strange that the LLM-generated uncanny deformances pick up and amplify.
Why approach Stein through deformance?
There are many ways to approach Stein's poetics in this work. Scholars have contextualized Tender Buttons in relation to cubism, dadaism, surrealism, pragmatism, feminism, and lesbianism. However, Stein's poetics frequently invite a more active, and more disruptive engagement. Joining other projects that have taken up Stein's spirit of experimentation and drive to "keep a strange, estrange on it" (TB 52), In There Behind the Door deforms and performs her syntax, lexicon, and logical structures by operationalizing them in order to lay bare her philosophical concepts, a history of media, and the history of art.The idea of deformance was first formulated in 1999, when Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann proposed an approach to literature that countered traditional methods of interpretation. Reading "backward" (26), against the work's "original grain" (28), through what they describe as "fields of experiment" (28), they asked "not 'what does the poem mean?' but 'how do we release or expose the poem's possibilities of meaning'" (28). Their own examples of deformance are highly bookish. They cite Dante and Emily Dickinson as models for their approach. However, it is noteworthy that they turned to electronic and computational metaphors to explain what a deformance does to the source text:
"Reading Backward is a highly regulated method for disordering the senses of a text. It turns off the controls that organize the poetic system at some of its most general levels. When we run the deformative program through a particular work we cannot predict the results....and we are brought to a critical position in which we can imagine things about the text that we did not and perhaps could not otherwise know." (Samuels and McGann, 36, my emphasis)
For Samuels and McGann, deformance resists hermeneutic frameworks by being rooted in the ordinary. In fact, they connect it to everyday life in ways that reverberate with Stein's own practice of "see[ing]a fine substance strangely" (TB 11):"Reading Backward short circuits the sign of prose transparency and reinstalls the text-any text, prose or verse-as a performative event, a made thing." (Samuels and McGann 30, my emphasis)
"The alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations a practice of everyday imaginative life" (Samuels and McGann 26, my emphasis)
Why LLMs?
Text-generating -image and -sound Large Language Model (at least those available in 2023 and 2024) are "experimental artefacts" (Pasquellini 77) that "perform" and "deform" cultural memory. Entering a text prompt initiates a "peformative operation" (Samuels and McGann 26) that lets us plunge to "deep recesses of textual and artifactual forms" (Samuels and McGann 35-36). A LLM cannot distinguish between sense and non-sense. Rather, it is trained to detect patterns of language, which include logical operators such as conjunctions, conditionals, and negations. These experiments using text prompts taken from Stein's poems activate these digital archives of cultural memory in ways that expose the operations of Stein's syntax; puns and imagery; as well as her understanding of media, materiality, and style. They are designed to tease out "what we did not know we knew," and lead "into imaginations of what we had not known at all" (Samuels and McGann 48). Together, the deformances put on offer re/"[i]nterpretive moments" that "unfold in fractal patterns of continuities and discontinuities" (Samuels and McGann 48).
How to experience this exhibition
Experience the deformances from OBJECTS | OBJECTS before reading the source passage from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons that was inputted into the image- or sound-generator.Users are invited to employ the comments button at the bottom of each piece to log their observations.
