ABSTRACT
Any attempt at discussing the future of English would need to first acknowledge the impossibility and hilarity of such a task. For if we are able to discuss what is to happen with any kind of accuracy, then what we forecast is already in the present and not the future. This paradox presented by Derrida as outlined in the quote presented earlier in the text is a radical challenge to the project here of attempting to describe the future of English. An event, Derrida reminds us, “implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable” (2007: 441). Nonetheless, a book such as this is important because it signals the awareness of the impending sense of the event in the history and present of English. The project of mapping the future of English is a courageous one, and this is what makes it so critical: we are, in the end, addressing the present in the guise of looking into the future, with the knowledge that the future is something else. For now, given the ubiquity of the Internet at present, it is not contentious to say that the future of English is inextricably linked to the future of the medium. The future has already happened – what remains to be written is its micro-history from the point of view of a situated individual reader or writer. This is what this chapter is about. I readily acknowledge the provisional nature of this chapter: we are at present still figuring out the implications, tracing the emergent tendencies of literary work as a function of social media and the Internet. With that provisional nature in mind, I would like to begin with the following passage by Marjorie Perloff:
There is today no landscape uncontaminated by sound bytes or computer chips, no mountain peak or lonely valley beyond the reach of the cellular phone and the microcassette player. Increasingly, then, the poet’s arena is the electronic world – the world of the Donahue Show and MTV, of People magazine and the National Enquirer, of Internet and MCI mail relayed
around the world by modem, as in the case of the new journal (Postmodern Culture), which publishes fiction, literary and cultural criticism via electronic mail. (1991: xiii)
If Perloff ’s reference to the microcassette player and MCI mail seems somewhat archaic, it is because her book, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, was published in 1991, before the rise of Google, Facebook and smartphones. Perloff ’s call for us to consider the production and reception of literary works alongside media discourses is still relevant today. Her point is that Language poetry, because of its formal difficulty at the level of syntax and word choice, because of its general suspicion of poems that continue to work with naturalized lyricism associated with the image, resists the dominant, unthinking discourse of advertising and electronic media in general that engulfs and shapes us. Slightly less than two decades later, with the publication of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, Perloff (2010) updates her argument, making the point that the rise of conceptual poetry – poetry which cites, appropriates, quotes, which veers away from expressing subjective experience and “inner life” – occurs in tandem with “an environment of hyperinformation” brought about by Internet technologies such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (xi). In both Radical Artifice and Unoriginal Genius, Perloff posits Language and conceptual poetry as responses to as well as functions of electronic media, much in the same way that the work of Marcel Duchamp was a function of as well as reaction against what he calls a culture of “retinal art” (2010: 163).
