Introduction:
"There is no there there."
-- Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography, 1937
Preface:
Gertrude 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 set in a domestic interior populated with everyday things. The poems' titles, usually nouns and noun phrases, present before the eyes as in a magic lantern show an array of objects. 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.")One way to understand Tender Buttons is to consider it as 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.
Indeed, Stein described her poems about objects as "portraits" (Stein, Writings 1932-1946, p. 301) in the tradition of "still lives" (302). However, if they are portraits, they distort as much as they clarify. Stein would later describe her "portraits" as "complicated" by sound and movement as well as the reciprocity of listening and talking:
Like sculptors and painters who know that art is at once additive and subtractive, Stein was as likely to detail what something was not like as she was to describe what something is like:"I began to make portraits of things and enclosures that is rooms and places because I needed to completely face the difficulty of how to include what is seen with hearing and listening and at first if I were to include a complicated listening and talking it would be too difficult to do. That is why painters paint still lives…. So I began to do this thing, I tried to include color and movement… Lectures in America 189
Tender Buttons is a dynamic, shifting field.Stein eschews equivalences, and allows her refractory depictions of everydayliness to be "strange (TB 77) and "stranger" (77). with the goal of unleashing what Stein describes as “a violent kind of delightfulness” (10)."What is the sash like. The sash is not like anything mustard it is not like a same thing that has stripes, it is not even more hurt than that, it has a little top" (Tender Buttons 11).
Surfaces glimmer and fade. Colors change into other colors. Objects resemble other objects, and cease to resemble themselves. Things are broken, cut, packed, pounded, opened, closed, taken out, and inserted into one another, and they are arranged and rearranged. Out of "silence" and "stillness" erupt movement and sound. There is "dancing," "ringing," "singing," "wailing," "clatter," and "crackling." There are smells and textures and temperatures. All of these qualities seem at once to belong to the objects, to the observer, and to the room itself. “[I]n there behind the door,” what should be itself becomes another thing; what exists in one state occupies another; what feels like one thing starts to feel like another things.
It is easy to become lost and disoriented in the poem’s busy space. Pointing words lead nowhere. Qualifiers—percepts, and affects—operate independently of the objects they qualify. Language ceases to navigate. Sentences drive forward, unimpeded by punctuation or English syntax. They stall, stuttering with staccato repetitions, or spin around vertiginously circular constructions.
It's precisely in the strangeness of her work that its intellectual value lies. 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 presents a digital deformance (Samuels and McGann) of Tender Buttons using Large Language Models in order to iteratively reveal her poetics as a dense intertextual crossroads, where logical structures, philosophical concepts, a history of media, and the history of art interilluminate.
"Our machines are working on our thoughts." -- Nietzsche, in Kittler, 1999
My central proposition is this: using Stein's language in the experimental generation of media works using text-to-sound, -image, and -video LLMs opens a number of doors:
- an understanding of Stein's poetry of interest to Stein scholars
- an understanding of LLMs as an "experimental artefact" (Pasquellini 77) of interest to people working in Critical AI studies
- an understanding of research-creation methods that supplement and subvert traditional scholarly inquiry
How to read this work:
There are two primary through-lines in this work that intersects modes of experimentation with modes of interpretation:1) Exhibition: Deformances of Stein's Tender Buttons:
A digital remediation and deformance of a selection of poems from one section of Tender Buttons – OBJECTS – through sound-, text-, image-, and video-generating AI. The deformances are not illustrations of Stein's text, but rather demonstrations – thought experiments – of the still-radical strategies of repetition and variation that Stein practiced and theorized.Each still or moving image, and each sound work in this exhibition generated by a Large Language Model is "plunging to deep recesses of textual and artifactual forms" (Samuels and McGann 35-36). Experimenting with these uncanny archives of cultural memory, these generators of the past through the distorting lens of the present, exposes the operations of her syntax, her puns and imagery, as well as her understanding of media, materiality, and style, in ways that reveal the "there there".
2) Scholarship: Reading Backwards:
As Samuels and McGann write:A scholarly apparatus explains Samuels and McGann's idea of "deformance" and annotations "read" the deformances as re/"[i]nterpretive moments" that "stand in nonuniform relations with each other so that the interpretation unfolds in fractal patterns of continuities and discontinuities" (Samuels and McGann 48). These are designed to tease out "what we did not know we knew," and also lead "into imaginations of what we had not known at all" (Samuels and McGann 48)."deformance does not banish interpretation. The reversed text is still subject to, still giving of, interpretive readings. Deformance does want to show that the poems intelligibility is not a function of the interpretation, but that all interpretation is a function of the poem's systemic intelligibility. Interpreting a poem after it has been deformed clarifies the secondary status of the interpretation. Perhaps even more crucially, deformance reveals the special inner resources that texts have when they are constituted poetically" (Samuels and McGann 40)
