Conceptual Fusion Coleridge, Higgins, And the Intermedium

7/25/2019 Conceptual Fusion Coleridge, Higgins, And the Intermedium

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Conceptual Fusion

Coleridge, Higgins, and the intermedium

J U L A I N N E S . S U M I C H

DOCTOR OF FINE ARTS

EXPERIMENTAL FILM & VIDEO ARTIST, THEORIST, EDUCATOR, WRITER

AUCKLAND

NEW ZEALAND

www.intermedia.ac.nz

2007

ISBN 978-0-473-12269-0


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CONTENTS

A CHEMISTRY OF AFFECTION 3

CONFUSION 5

CONCEPTUAL FUSION 10

PROCESSING NOVELTY 16

CONCLUSION: A NOOSIGN 23

EPILOGUE TIS MINE AND IT IS LIKEWISE YOURS 25

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 25


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A CHEMISTRY OF AFFECTION

The scientist Alfred I. Tauber has written of the tension between art and science as

a longstanding preoccupation in Western thought, in the sense that it captures the

ancient conflict of Apollo and Dionysus over what deserves to order our thought

and serve as the aspiration of our cultural efforts. 1The intermedium between art

and science is a healthy antagonism that gives leverage to thinking. It finds a

resonance with self-organizing processes in the human nervous system where

opposing forces work autonomously in unison with each other as progenitors of

action. I write of the intermedium as an agency of affect between the opposing

forces of any mediums. My understanding of the term affect corresponds to Brian

Massumis notes on its translation in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism &

Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari. Laffect is the ability to

affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage

from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or

diminution in that bodys capacity to act(with body taken in its broadest possible

sense to include mental or ideal bodies).2While beyond our conscious capacity

to decide its merit in ordering our thought, affect is crucial to the genesisof thought

and deserves our attention in the study of the intermedial arts. The potential affect

1 Tauber, A. I. (ed.) 1996, The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science in BostonStudies in the Philosophy of Science Dordrecht, Boston; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol.182, p. vii

2 Brian Massumi, Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments in A ThousandPlateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 (1980),xvi


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of the intermedium in oscillation between the arts, philosophy, and science, is a

conceptual fusion borne of their confusion.

My initial research had been concerned with the degree to which the term

intermediumas used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (17721834) affected the thought

and work of Richard Carter Higgins (1938-1998). They were the protagonists of the

term in the arts and, by association, intermedial thought in a broader sense. In the

historical account of intermedia as an art form, disagreement over the initial source

and date of the term, and its subsequent use has been a subject of controversy.

However, through discovery of material from Coleridges criticism associated with

experimental chemistry, hitherto absent from this context, I attempt to expand on

both Coleridges and Higgins use of the intermedium to disentangle the confusion,

and to introduce a new complexity of conceptual fusion to the discourse on the

intermedial arts; a fusion characterized as a chemistry of affection.


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CONFUSION

Higgins states that Coleridge used the term only once in Lecture III [on the poet

Edmund Spenser]. He is referring to the passage Narrative allegory is

distinguished from mythology as reality from symbol: it is, in short, the proper

intermedium between person and personification.3 Higgins remarks: Here we

have it - Coleridge uses the term to signify exactly what I have done. What I might

have known of it or not before having created it myself is subject to controversy.4

Although forthcoming about acknowledging Coleridge, Higgins for many years did

so without citing the literary source, or the context of how Coleridges use of the

intermedium lined up so precisely with his own. My quotations from Higgins

advance aspects of confusion held by some writing on intermedia art: that his use of

the term was original and that Coleridge used it only once.5Yet Higgins inference

of its mutual significance calls this opinion into question. In Looking Back, while

discussing poetic synthesis between the arts, Nicholas Zurbrugg suggests its

relation to one of your key terms: intermediato which Higgins responds:

3Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Thomas Middleton Raysor, (ed.) Coleridge's MiscellaneousCriticismLondon: Constable & Co Ltd. 1936, p.3 Lecture III Tuesday evening, February 3.Chaucer and Spenser; of Petrarch; of Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. 1818; see p. 28 note 1(watermark of first draft 1817); p.32 n. 4

4 Interview with Dick Higgins, 1998, in Lesditions Intervention Inter, Canada, Quebec: Inter diteur, Le Lieu, Centre en Art Actuel, 73, Juin

1999 p. 5 >. (I translate)5 Ken Friedman, Ken Friedman's contribution to FLUXLIST and SILENCE Celebrate

Dick Higgins http://www.fluxus.org/higgins/ken.htm 1998 (accessed 29 December 2004) Higginscoined the term "intermedia" in the mid-sixties [] Higgins noted that Samuel Taylor Coleridge hadused the term over a century and a half before he himself independently rediscovered it. Higgins wastoo modest. Coleridge used the term "intermedium" once --apparently once only - to refer to aspecific issue in the work of Edmund Spenser.


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I revived this term from Coleridge. He used it in a lecture that he wrote in 1814 and whichhe published in 1816, and used it only once as far as I know. But it was such a strikingnotion that when I came across it, it was easy to pick up. I must have come across it when Iwas a language student in Yale or Columbia in the late fifties 6

What was such a striking notionin Coleridges use of the intermedium that

took so easily in Higgins imagination? Thomas Drehers research on action art and

intermedia has cited the source of Higgins use of the term as Coleridges

Miscellaneous Criticism, and suggests the more likely date of 1818.7Higgins had

previously given 18128as its date, whereas in theCriticismColeridges Lecture III

on Spenser is authenticated as 1818.

9

The pair of different dates given by Higgins inthe Zurbrugg interview suggested Coleridge might have used the term more than

once. Internet searches linked to an article containing a passage from Coleridges

Biographia Literaria where the intermedium is related to technical chemistry: 10

[] whatever else is combined with metre must, though it be not itself essentially

poetic, have nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium

6Nicholas Zurbrugg, Looking Back [an interview with Dick Higgins, 1993] in: PAJ: AJournal of Performance and Arthttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/paj/v021/21.2zurbrugg.html. 21.2, p.24. Hereafter, references to this article will be indicated by: (LB, page number) in the body of thetext.

7Thomas Dreher, http://mitglied.lycos.de/ThomasDreher/1 Aktions-u.Konzeptkunst.html2001 (accessed 11 June 2004) n.1.


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of affinity, a sort, (if I may borrow a well-known phrase from technical chemistry),

of mordaunt between it and the super-added metre. 11 Coleridge began work on

Biographia Literaria in1815, and published in July 1817. (BL I, lxv) In February

1818, he delivers his lecture on Spenser. Higgins had referred to Coleridges use of

the intermedium in a lecture, giving dates only a year out on the Biographias

writing and publication. (LB, 24) I suggest that, in his recollection, Higgins fuses

both instances of the term; and that if in fact he did recall just theIM1818 12passage

as a once only use by Coleridge, in that instance the intermedium is in-formed by

its use just seven months earlier i.e. in the sense of its chemical agency. For

example, in his lecture Coleridge alludes to the transformative and conceptual

power of such agency in thought processes, describing allegorical writing to be the

employment of one set of agents and images to convey in disguise a moral

meaning, with a likeness to the imagination, but with a difference to the

understanding, [...] in an allegory there may be that which is new and not previously

admitted.13

Higgins understanding of the intermedium as both a physical and conceptual

process of fusion between discrete media elements14 is supported by the Oxford

11James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (eds.)Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches

of My Literary Life and Opinions, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1983, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 7, II. p. 71. Hereafter,references to this book will be indicated by: (BL, volume and page number) in the body of the text.

12intermedium: Hereafter, Coleridges uses of the term are indicated by (IM, date).13Raysor, p. 32-3314Dick Higgins, 1984,Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale

and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press p. 138 Hereafter, references to this book will beindicated by: (HH, page number) in the body of the text


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English Dictionary15 definition - intermedium: an intermediate agent,

intermediary, medium; esp. in earlier Chemistry and Physics, a substance serving as

a means of some natural action or process; b) with a mixture of the sense of an

intervening medium serving to transmit energy through space.

Given their different cultural and temporal contexts, and also given the

absence of intermediums connection to chemistry, the argument that Coleridges

use of the term differed from Higgins is to be expected. For example, in Ken

Friedmans opinion Coleridge's use of the word "intermedium" in Lecture Three:

'On Spenser' suggests a distant kinship to Higgins' construction of the term

intermedia. Nevertheless, Coleridge's usage was different in meaning and in

form. 16 On the other hand, Lisa Morens research paper on Dick Higgins and

Intermedia art touches on Coleridges relationship with the experimental chemist,

Humphry Davy, and although unaware of Coleridges earlier use of the term, she

comes close to it by suggesting a connection between the chemical etymology of

intermedium and its agency in binding together discrete technical elements.17

A closer intertextual relationship, such as Moren indicates, I suggest is

confirmed when taking the aspect of an experimental chemistry into fuller account.

15The Oxford English DictionarySecond Edition 1989: Oxford University Press http://0-dictionary.oed.com. www.elgar.govt.nz:80/entrance.dtl 2006. Hereafter references to this site will beindicated by acronym OED.

16Friedman, 199817Lisa Moren, The Wind is a Medium of the Sky, monograph on Richard Carter Higgins

and Intermedia www.research.umbc.edu/~lmoren/pdf/wind.pdf .2003 p.2 (Accessed 3 Nov 2005)


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Higgins had read almost all the writings by Coleridge during his time at

Yale. 18A few years later, in his influential publication Intermedia, he uses the

singular form, intermedium,five times. In a variety of contexts yet common to each

use is the sense of the intermedium as an autonomous agency in the transformation

of objects and/or events into forms of conceptual experience.19From his discourse I

draw the opinion that the affect of the intermedium on Higgins led him to

understand the term scientifically and poetically as the fusion of particular elements

in the experimental mix between combined mediums, occurring internally in the

processes of the nervous system, and externally in the production/performance of

the intermedial arts.

18, p. 5 (I translate)

19 Dick Higgins, (1965), Intermedia in Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries: Notestowards a Theory of the New Arts. New York & Barton, Vermont Printed Editions, 1978 pp. 12-17:Hereafter, references to this book will be indicated by: (HDC, page number) in the body of the text.


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CONCEPTUAL FUSION

Concurrent with his reading of Coleridge, Higgins was taking courses in

experimental forms of composition with the avant-garde musician, John Cage.20

These combined interests in poetry and music suggest the likelihood of Higgins

attraction to Coleridges theoretical critique on the role of metre in poetry. In

Biographia Literaria, discussing language of metrical composition, Coleridge

traces the originof metre to that balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous

effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion and how this

balance of antagonists became organized into metre(in the usual acceptation of that

term) by a supervening act of the will and judgement, consciously and for the

foreseen purpose of pleasure. (BL II, 64) These principles Coleridge uses to

determine two conditions that the critic is entitled to expect in every metrical

work: the natural language of excitement and a voluntary act that artificially

forms these elements of excitement into metre. (BL II, 65) In other words,

Coleridge requires that metre meetthe balanced operations of mental processes. He

goes on to give examples of how the action of metre corresponds to the chemical

affect of ready-made stimuli, such as good company and alcohol, when combined

in body and brain become considerable in their aggregate influence. (BLV. II:

65) A correspondent mode of thought to Coleridges expression of metres

20, p. 2 So it was that during thesummer 1958 I took two courses with John Cage, music during the week and mushrooms in theweekends. (I translate); p.13 Yale College (New Haven, Connecticut), Columbia University (NewYork, BS in English, 1960); Musical studies with John Cage 1958-9.


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autonomous aggregate influence is found in Higgins notion of conceptual fusion as

the interaction between media elements so combined as to form from the aggregate

of those stimuli an experience distinct from its component elements: To me, the

difference between intermedia and multimedia is that with intermedia there is a

conceptual fusion, and you can't really separate out the different media in an

integral way. They all have to go together, or you simply do not get the

aggregate experience. (LB, 24)

Just as Coleridge induces the affects of metre by intensifying21 the

antagonistic processes between mental and physical processes, Higgins

Intermedia gives a dramatic account of early intermedial affects culminating in

his theatre piece, Stacked Deck(Higgins, 1958) He sees the ready-made, in a sense

an intermedium since it was not intended to conform to the pure medium, as

situated between the general area of art media and those of life media. He holds

the readers engagement as the intermediums agency is generated in collages of

incongruous objects or combines, and the inclusion of live people as part of

the collage. (HDC, 12-16) Employing what might for Coleridge be supervening

acts of the will, Higgins induces the intermedial dynamics of a situation to happen;

to take according to the nature of interacting elements, thereby taking his work

into a conceptual dimension, just as one forms a new compound by fusing different

chemical elements together. In 1958 I wrote a piece, Stacked Deck, in which any

21OED. intensify1. a.trans. To render intense, to give intensity to; to augment, strengthen, heighten,deepen, etc. [coined by Coleridge, 1817]


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event can take place at any time, as long as its cue appears. The cues are produced

by colored lights. Since the coloured lights could be used wherever they were put

and audiences reactions were also cuing situations, the performance-audience

separation was removed... (HDC, 15-16) Figure 1.

Figure 1 Still image from Stacked Deck by Dick Higgins (1958)Performed 1960 at the YMHA Kaufman Auditorium, NYC.Courtesy of the Estate of Dick Higgins

It was during this period of the late fifties that Higgins first came across the

intermedium in Coleridges criticism. I suggest he was struck by the coincidence

and resonance that Coleridges technical notion held in relation to his own thought

processes, and which, easily picked up, becomes evident in the dynamics of StackedDeck. The affect generated between the medium of people and the medium of light


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corresponds to the intermedium of affinity22, the agent of conceptual fusions

fundamental condition. When two or more discrete media are conceptually fused,

they become intermedia. They differ from mixed media in being inseparable in the

essence of an artwork.(HH, 138) These aggregates of experience occur in the flux

of time, forming new compounds of this unthought within thought.23

For Coleridge, his experience of striking phenomena that became the

catalyst for new connections in his work came through his relationship with

Humphry Davy, the experimental chemist. They had become acquainted in 1799,

during a period of impetus for much of later Coleridges literary work. Besides

taking part in Davys early experiments he had later attended some of his lectures.

I attend Davys lectures to increase my stock of metaphors Coleridge is said to

have replied when asked what attractions he could find in a study so unconnected

with his known pursuits.24The attraction that he felt toward Davy dated from the

shared experience of breathing nitrous oxide in Bristol. 25In 1800 he had supplied

Davy with a detailed account of the experience, including its affect on his heart:

My eyes felt distended, and towards the last, my heart beat as if it were leaping up

and down Figure 2

22OED, affinity9. esp. Chemical attraction; the tendency which certain elementarysubstances or their compounds have to unite with other elements and form new compounds.

23Gilles Deleuze, (1985) Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert

Galeta, (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press) The Athlone Press, 1989 p.278 Hereafter,references to this book will be indicated by: (DC2, page number) in the body of the text.24Nicholas Roe (ed.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of LifeOxford, England:

Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 12. Hereafter, references to this book will be indicated by: (SL,page number) in the body of the text.

25Jan Golinski Humphry Davy's Sexual Chemistry in ConfigurationsThe Johns HopkinsUniversity Press and the Society for Literature and Science, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/ v007/7.1golinski.html#REF49 1999, 7.1 p. 15-41 p. 32 (Accessed 28 July 2006)


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Figure 2 Detail of Mr. Coleridge in Humphry DavyResearches180026

The physical intensity of this experience and Coleridges spontaneous expression of

excitement would lead, I suggest, to the form of poetic transliteration in his poem

Christabel where he evokes a similar state of mind and checking of emotions by

the phrase:Hush, beating heart of Christabel!27It is an example of the convergence

between life media and art media where methods employed in ones art, knowingly

26

Humphry Davy, Researches, chemical and philosophical, chiefly concerning nitrousoxide, or dephlogisticated nitrous air, and its respiration, London, 1800. Based on information fromESTC Number T112164 British Library English Short Title Catalogue. http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/servlet/ECCOGale Document Number CW106792973

27Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel (1816) in J. C. C. Mays (ed.) Poetical Works I:Poems (Reading Text), (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge -16) Princeton UniversityPress p. 485. Hereafter references to this book will be indicated by: (C, page no.) in the body of thetext.


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or not, draw on intense affects of life experience. I will argue that in further aspects

of this scenario from Christabel Coleridge, I suggest cognisant of such affect,

fuses these media together to give form to a language that might describe the

experience he found so gripping. When he writes: Metre in itself is simply a

stimulant of the attention, and therefore excites the question: Why is the attention to

be thus stimulated? the only reason he can give himself is that I write in metre,

because I am about to use a language different from that of prose. (BL, VII: 69) He

is preparing the reader for his allusion to an intermedium of affinity, a sort, (if I

may borrow a well-known phrase from technical chemistry), of mordaunt. (BL,

VII: 71) He fuses linguistic terms essentially different in style from prose 28to rouse

the passions (BL, VII: 71-2) and induce the audiences attention on metres binding

affect, its mordaunt; the chemistry of affection that colours the imagination.29

28BL, VII, p. 69; and J. C. McKusick, Coleridges Philosophy of Language(New Havenand London) Yale University Press, 1986, p. 113 - 118

29 OED, mordaunt: any substance which fixes or holds a colorant in the material to bedyed.


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PROCESSING NOVELTY

Coleridge requires that metre meet the balanced operations of mental processes. His

description of the minds capacity for self-organization and the role of

consciousness in measuring the value of stimuli bring to mind current research on

the brains processing of novelty. The neuroscientist, David Friedman has described

the operations of the brain in its orienting response to novel events as follows:

Orienting is a rapid response to new (never experienced before), unexpected (out

of context) or unpredictable stimuli, which essentially functions as a what-is-it

detector. If the novelty is sufficiently deviant or unfamiliar it engenders the

involuntary capture of attention, enabling the event to enter consciousness thus

permitting an evaluation of the stimulus. This could lead, if the event is deemed

significant, to behavioural action. 30I suggest that it is this mechanism of the brain

that Coleridge is referring to, and by which the power of his metrical composition

induces in his audience the visceral and mental turbulence that he had experienced

in life. From Humphry Davys lectures and experiments Coleridges observations

and notes give insight into the new dynamic potential of naturally occurring

chemical elements. Interlacing lines from his notebooks with phrases from

Christabel below an image is constructed of Coleridges orienting response by

observing the fusion of technical chemistry in his linguistic style. The passage from

Christabel is provided here for ease of reference:

30 David Friedman, and Y. l. M. Cycowicz, H. Gaeta, The novelty P3: an event-related brainpotential (ERP) sign of the brains evaluation of novelty, in Neuroscience and BehaviouralReviews, 2001, 25, p. 356


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Hush, beating heart of Christabel!Jesu, Maria, shield her well!She folded her arms beneath her cloak, 55And stole to the other side of the oak. 56

What sees she there?There she sees a damsel bright, 58Dressed in a silken robe of white, 59That shadowy in the moonlight shone: 60The neck that made that white robe wan, 61Her stately neck, and arms were bare;Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were; 63And wildly glittered here and there 64The gems entangled in her hair. 65I guess, 'twas frightful there to see 66A lady so richly clad as she--Beautiful exceedingly ! 67

Ether burns bright indeed in the atmosphere, but o! how brightly whitely vividly

beautiful in Oxygen gas. (CN, i. 1098 f.5)31

Cf.L. 55folded her arms beneath her cloak

Cf. Ll.58-60 Bright, white, shadowy shone

Indicate affects of ether combined with oxygen - 32e.g. a vaporous, icy atmosphere

inducing an anaesthetized state in the subject.

Davy at the lectures Jan. 28, 1802 | gave a spark with the Electric machineI felt

nothinghe then gave a very vivid spark with the Leyden Phial& I distinctly felt

the shock (CN, i.1099)

Cf. L. 63 blue-veined feet unsandal'd

Indicate involuntary spasms or convulsions 33that can result from electric shock.

31Roein Sciences of Life, p.13 Coleridges notes indicated in parentheses.32OED, ether:6.Chem. a. The colourless, light, volatile liquid, (C4H10O) resulting from

the action of sulphuric acid upon alcohol, whence it was also known as sulphuric, phosphoric, etc.ether [] now distinguished as common, ethylic, or vinic ether, or ethyl oxide. It is an ansthetic,and capable of producing extreme cold by its evaporation.


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ff 11-12 [1 ii Class 2] Solid inflammable bodies having no metallic properties:

phosphorous, sulphur, carbon.34

Gold Silver, & Platina are combustible if a power sufficiently strong be applied;

and this power exists in Galvanic Electricity. (CN, i. 1098 f.14)

Cf. L. 61 The neck made that white robe wan

Cf.Ll. 64-65 wildly glittered here there gems entangled in her hair

Indicate an amalgamation and distributed use of Davys experiments with

nonmetallic and metallic elements: in its ordinary state phosphorous35 is a toxic,

flammable, phosphorescent, white solid; sulphur 36- a greenish-yellow, freely

occurring, brittle crystalline solid;carbon37the black diamond. The wild sparks

of gems are entangled in the alliteration of here there (L. 64)inher haircreating a

breathlessness in response to a fright sufficient to make ones hair stand on end. 38

33Tortora and Anagnostakos, p. 219 Abnormal contractions in muscle tissue: convulsionsoccur when motor neurons are stimulated by fever, poisons, hysteria, or changes in body chemistrydue to withdrawal of certain drugs. The stimulated neurons send many bursts of seeminglydisordered impulses to the muscle fibers. Such symptoms Coleridge may have experienced in hisattempts to withdraw from his dependency on laudanum.

34Coburn, The Notebooks n.1098 Coleridges notes from the lectures refer to that part ofthe course described in pp12-18 of [Davys Lectures] Syllabus.

35OED, phosphorus: 2. a.A substance or organism that emits light spontaneously or afterheating or other treatment. 3.Chem. A non-metallic chemical element, widespread [] in livingorganisms and in minerals, and in its commonest form is a whitish waxy solid which undergoesspontaneous oxidation or ignition in air.

36 OED, sulphur: 1. a. A greenish-yellow non-metallic substance, found abundantly in

volcanic regions, and occurring free in nature as a brittle crystalline solid, and widely distributed incombination with metals and other substances. In popular and commercial language it is otherwiseknown as brimstone.

37OED, carbon: 1. a.Chem. One of the non-metallic elements, very abundant in nature b.a form of diamond, the black diamond or carbonado.

38G. J. Tortora and N. P. Anagnostakos, Principles of Anatomy and Physiology: 4th EditionHarper International Edition. 1984, p. 111 Hair: Under stress of fright or cold, muscles contractcausing the skin around hair shafts to form slight elevations.


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The combined force of these elemental images characterize Lady Geraldine as a

chilling sight of galvanizing attraction and a site of explosive power.

Coleridge had used the oak, a sign of endurance,39as a sign of decay in The

Ancient Mariner.40In Christabel it stands as a sign of ambivalence or a confused

state of mind; an intermedium between the durability of the familiar and of the

shape of things to come - the rise of science and its unknown outcomes. Oak bark is

a form of mordant,41an intermedium of affinity that in my discourse acts as agent

between the two contesting investments of the intermedial oak. If we take the

IM1818 usage we could say that the odds are stacked against Christabel in

Coleridges narrative allegory. He places her in an attitude personifying prayerful

concern. Then taking an opposite role on the other side of the oak he piles his

personification of science line upon line, leaving himself, the narrator, lost for

words, I guess. The ambivalence of his interjection is subsumed into the repulsion

/ attraction circuit between the words frightfuland beautiful.

In contrast to Coleridges novel technique for attracting the audiences

attention Dick Higgins cues the movements of participants to fire between the

colour and lighting elements of his Stacked Deck. This is a different sort of

affection where the crucial element is real-time interaction between the elemental

including bodies and minds becoming conceptually fused as an image distinct

39OED, oak: b. gen. the wood or timber of the oak, esp. the English oak; freq. in allusivephrases with reference to its hardness, durability, or reliability.

40OED, 1798 S. T. Coleridge, Anc. Marinere VII, in Lyrical Ballads 44 The rotted old*Oak-stump.

41OED, 1758 Philos. Trans. Royal Soc. 50455 Whether this bark is used to give strengthto this yarn, as we dye and tan our fishing-nets with oak-bark, or for ornament, is uncertain.


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from its elemental properties. Correspondent to Coleridges use of a language

different from that of prose, Higgins also constructs a language of conceptual

fusion, but in his case it is as an image of spatio-temporal events. His postal poetry

is an explicit and unusual example in providing the sense of an intervening medium

serving to transmit energy through space. Figure 3 (HDC, 17) 42

When he used the plural form, intermedia, Higgins was indicating the

many divergent forms that might be generated between different media practices.

(HDC, 13-17) When he later reflects on what it was that holds diverse practices

together, he comments on different inter-mediums, which include the art of

thought, philosophy, as belonging to a different species of poetry.(HH, 93 -95)

Higgins had diagrammed these inter-mediums in his mail-art poster,SOME POETRY

INTERMEDIA. From poetry and metapoetries sound poetry >music;43action poetry >

happenings; visual poetry (including concrete poetry) >visual art; video poetry

>video; object poetry >sculpture; postal poetry >mail art; concept poetry>

philosophy; an intermedium >anything. Included in a typeset aphorism44 on the

posters right side, Higgins writes: The real poem lies beyond its word, beyond its

ideas, following with a quotation from Coleridge: All the fine arts [are] a

different species of poetry. The same spirit speaks to the mind through different

senses by manifestations of itself, appropriate to each. The thoughts of Coleridge

42Dick Higgins, SOME POETRY INTERMEDIA, Poster Folded in eighths (as issued) SkylineBooks: Modern, Beat, and Counterculture Literaturehttp://www.sweetbooks.com/h.htm

43> = leads to44OED, aphorism: 1.a definition or concise statement of a principle in any science. 2.

Any principle or precept expressed in few words; a short pithy sentence containing a truth of generalimport; a maxim.


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become literally embodied in Higgins personal maxim. In Coleridges original text

this passage continues: They admit therefore of a natural division into poetry or

language []; poetry of the ear, or music; and poetry of the eye, which is again

divided into plastic poetry, or statuary, and graphic poetry, or paintings. 45 In

Higgins graphic poem these divisions are interlaced with his own species of

modern poetry, where the inter-medium of philosophy is given the greatest

extension. By this Higgins seems to suggest the temporal nature of the art of

thought, the time it takes to process ideas. In this sense, he seems to see concept

poetry as a form of embodied mind when he continues: Since a poem cannot be

perceived at one flash, as a visual work can, but must be revealed over a matter of

time, like music, theater, or dance, the temporal aspect of a poem is one which the

poet must consider A poem, once perceived becomes a thing, and can be

perceived all at once in the memory. Higgins continues his maxim with a passage

that alludes to this infolding conceptual process between poet and poetry: The poet

can play on this phenomenon. There are words within words, and the poem lies

within the poem. The exchange resonates with Coleridges reflection on What is

poetry? and by extension, what is a poet? and his opinion that both belong to the

same answer: the process of fusion - through the imagination.

[The poet] diffuses a tone, and a spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were)fuses, each into

each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated thename of imagination. This power [] reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation ofopposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; [] the sense of novelty andfreshness, with old and familiar objects (BL II, 16-17)

45Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Genial Arts of Criticism, in J. Shawcross (ed.)Biographia Literaria2. London: Oxford: University Press, 1907, p. 220


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Imagination, in the sense used by Coleridge, is the power of inner vision:

Einbildungskraft the mother of creative invention because it creates compact

clusters of associations it makes them seamless so that a new unity and new

images are formed by a melting or fusing process. (BLI, ci)46

The diagrammatic form of SOME POETRY INTERMEDIA includes the

extension of an intermedium indicated by a dashed line leading to anything. It

resembles a map of ideas for a thought experiment, a new cartography of

conceptual fusion.

Figure 3. Dick Higgins 1976 Some Poetry Intermedia, Offset print,Dim. 22 x 17

46Nicholas Roe referring to the German philosopher, Ernst Platners clear-cut distinctionbetween PhantasieandEinbildungskraft.


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CONCLUSION: A NOOSIGN

Yes, Coleridge did use the intermedium to signify exactly what Higgins had done.

With the proviso that the term is understood as a fusion of both instances and based

in the introduction of the scientific aspect of an intermedium of affinity. The agency

of its affection permeates their work, but separately expressing their own singularity

of imagination. The affect of the intermedium and its connection to chemistry was

for Coleridge, I suggest, an intensification of his technical and stylistic expertise

through which he could mirror the chemistry of body and mind. For Higgins it was

more a temporal agent; a form of process art where whatever happened from the

combination of discrete media is the work. It corresponds to naturally occurring

autonomic processes in the cortical structure of the brain where diverse stimuli

generate neural connections;47(Figure 4) bringing the potential of combined data, in

both neural and intermedial art senses, to a point of emergence.

47The Neuroscience of Consciousness in The Science and Philosophy of Consciousnesshttp://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~lka/conz3a.htm#introduction (13 Sept 2004)

Figure 4. The six corticallayers of the brain and longitudinal neural operations


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The philosopher Gilles Deleuze comments: [G]iven one potential, another

one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of

potential is established between the two, which will be productive of a third or of

something new. (DC2, 179-80) If we consider three potentials, the arts, sciences,

and philosophy as intermedial arts, as inter-mediums in Higgins sense, or as the

technical chemistry of metre in Coleridges, their elusive synthesis is to be

discovered in the noosign, a term Deleuze gives to an image of thought, and whose

genesis here has been the affect between these disciplines in producing a new

perspective on the intermedium.


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EPILOGUE TIS MINE AND IT IS LIKEWISE YOURS

In his preface to Christabel, Coleridge makes reference to those who had

appropriated ideas from this work. (C, 481-2) He knowingly suggests, in the spirit

of friendship, that this be known, so that he, like they, might benefit. Coleridge

offers advice in a piece of doggerel for any of us who might wish to copy him. My

writing on conceptual fusions has become what I call aphilosscificinter-mediumof

the arts, an elusive synthesis of art and science. In the spirit of Coleridges

suggestiontis mine and it is likewise yours (C, 481)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Hannah Higgins and Alison Knowles for their permission to use the still image

from Stacked Deck performance 1958, and image of SOME POETRY INTERMEDIA

1976: Courtesy of the Estate of Dick Higgins.

Lisa Moren for putting me in touch with Hannah Higgins and Alison Knowles, and

to acknowledge her insight on Richard Carter Higgins and Intermedia

http://www.research.umbc.edu/ ~lmoren/

articles.html

The Editorial CommitteeIntermdialits: Histoire et Thorie des Arts, des Lettres

et des Techniques, Universit de Montreal, Canada http://www.intermedialites.ca./

Documents

Conceptual Fusion Coleridge, Higgins, And the Intermedium