Seven Perspectives on 'the Augmented Imagination Project'

4. Augmenting Huidobro's Imagination

In his Manifestos Manifest Vicente Huidobro argues that the 'pure psychic automatism' of Surrealism - understood as complete spontaneity in the absence of rational control - is both undesirable and impossible. It is undesirable because it 'takes away from the poet…the whole game of the assemblage of words, a conscious game, even in the fiercest fever of lyricism'. For Huidobro the ideal psychological state of the poet is not automatism, but 'superconsciousness', a state of poetic delirium in which 'if reason and imagination do not work in unison, one or both will suffocate'. The rational control which is forbidden in automatic writing is in fact crucial to the psychology of creativity:

This reason regulates, this reason separates and sweeps aside the impure elements which would like to mix with others so as to enjoy their good company. It is the sieve and organizer of delirium.

But even if it were desirable to remove rational control from the process of composition, the complete spontaneity desired by Surrealism would not be achieved, Huidobro claims.

Where does the poetic baggage of the poet come from and at what point do his compositions enter his brain?
There is that which we can know and that which we can never know.
Our five senses move through the world like ants searching for food, which each one goes to deposit by means of his own particular burrow. The little ants go in, one by one, and deposit their booty.
But do we have any idea when they may resurface or whether or not they were controlled, in any respect, by reason?
Even by the most subtle, protracted gymnastics of introspection (I am thinking here of Bergsonian introspection), we will never arrive at the true origin of all these residues, of all these latent combinations, impossible to date, which teem at the bottom of our brain and multiply like bacilli in a petri dish.

Breton hopes that automatic writing will give a true picture of 'the actual functioning of thought' - in an early essay, he even calls automatic writing 'psychic photography'. But for Huidobro, the actual functioning of thought is something we can never access directly: it is part of 'that which we can never know'. The most fundamental mechanisms of thought proceed in a black box, of which we observe only the inputs and outputs, like ants entering and leaving their burrows. The words that appear 'spontaneously' during automatic writing are among the outputs of the black box, and we can therefore never tell how far these outputs are influenced unconsciously by hidden mental tics, by habits or judgements, or by reason.

Huidobro's psychology of creativity can easily be extended to shed light on the Augmented Imagination Project, considered as an aid to poetic composition. The Project too is a 'black box', producing as outputs a teeming array of verbal residues and combinations in just the way the brain does during poetic delirium for Huidobro.

And just as the outputs of the brain need to be sieved and organised by reason, for Huidobro, if the authentically creative state of superconsciousness is to be achieved, the words generated by the Augmented Imagination Project need to selected and ordered as part of the 'whole game of the assemblage of words' if they are to constitute poetry.

In Huidobro's materio-mystical poetics, there is nothing to prevent us from seeing the soul of the poet in the midst of poetic delirium as a machine:

A mysterious conjunction of phenomena as free in its origin as in its immediate cause, springs into action and sets in play in the soul of the poet a clamorous array of buzzers and bells and the machine is turned on, charged with millions of calories…

Using the Augmented Imagination Project, one is perhaps then merely exchanging one machine - a word-generating abstract machine embodied in the brain - for another. One advantage of the Project over the brain is that it is transparent - the underlying algorithms can be examined at will, in the form of javascript code, thus fulfilling in at least one respect the Surrealist fantasy of revealing the actual functioning of creative thought. At the same time, the algorithms are themselves conscious creations, and can be further modified by the application of reason, in line with Huidobro's 'creationist' dream of a completely created poetic world:

If man has subjugated the three realms of nature - the mineral realm, the vegetable realm and the animal realm - why should it be impossible for him to add to them the worldly realms: his own realm, the realm of his creations?