Elodie Laugt: Poetical Intelligence, Thinking Artificiality and Usefulness GRCDI Research Seminar

Why are we increasingly turning to poetry? This talk will suggest that it is because poetry constitutes a version of artificiality based in a kind of calculation different from that used by technologies and, in particular, by Artificial Intelligence. We know that the kinds of calculation at work in the tools we use inform our relationship to the world. The calculation of the poem consists in creating particular effects by means of formal and stylistic means. But the strategies that poets use in their search for absolute precision (the poet's specific ambition being to find the right word), are premised on a fundamental and structural uncertainty: the impossibility to know for certain how readers will read or hear the poem. The calculation of the poem makes space, necessarily, for the alterity of the reader. In other words, it accounts for the incalculable. The community formed by the readers, including the poet, is thereby a community of alterities. It is the spacing between subjectivities and the possibility for them to identify always only intermittently with what the poem expresses that makes possible their being together. The poetic community is a community of syncopation because something in the poem resists calculation and predictability. That which is incalculable is essential to human society. In the wake of Christophe Tarkos's declaration — a declaration full of playful irony: ‘Poetry is an intelligence', what I propose to call ‘Poetical Intelligence' is partly conceived as that which interrupts the myth of calculability. It refers to the possibility of signifying the incalculable as incalculable, as opposed to that which has not been calculated yet. Not only that but, following poet Philippe Beck, what is at stake is not simply the consideration of the usefulness of poetry or of poems as tools to think, but it is also and first of all the possibility to use poetry in order to question our very conception of usefulness. It is precisely because it allows us to think about, and even redefine, the notion of usefulness that poetry today necessarily plays a critical role in thinking about technology, at a time when usefulness is in many cases no longer indexed to anything other than economic and financial production or ‘growth'.

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