automatic writing

Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century advances in physiology – in particular the discovery and characterisation of the autonomic nervous system, an adaptive physiological mechanism that carries out life-sustaining functions entirely automatically – led to growing awareness of the central role of automaticity in human survival.

Reflecting this growing awareness, French physiologist Claude Bernard observed that, despite appearing 'free and independent', humans largely rely on automatic processes for their survival, just like their evolutionarily more ancient precursors. Further emphasising Bernard's idea, at the turn of the century American philosopher and psychologist William James estimated that ‘nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of [human] activity is purely automatic and habitual'. These and similar observations suggested that, whilst intuitively appearing defined by individual agency and free deliberate choice, humans are, to a large extent, dependent upon evolutionarily ancient automatic physiological mechanisms.

Human thought, action, and survival itself, are largely a matter of habit. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century progress in the understanding of the central role of automaticity and habit in human physiology was paralleled by growing interest in the role of automaticity and habit in literature and art.

Some of the physiological observations on automaticity elaborated in the medico-scientific literature were assimilated into and mobilised by avant-garde art in ways that challenged the understanding of the human as voluntary agent. For example, echoing James's claim that most human activity is 'purely automatic’, French poet André Breton proclaimed Surrealism to be '[p]ure psychic automatism'. Surrealists strove to free their work from rational restraints by becoming spectators of their own subconscious, relinquishing control over their own selves, and turning into passive vessels for creative forces.

In an attempt to access the 'superior reality' of the automatic thought, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artists developed techniques of automatic writing, drawing, and painting, which effectively integrated physiological insights on the centrality of habit in human survival, thought, and behaviour, and mobilised habit for its creative potential.

In my paper I will explore specific aspects of this integration of physiological insights on automaticity and creative mobilisation of habit, by examining ways in which the resulting literary and art-practices (e.g. automatic writing, automatic painting) challenged contemporary conceptions of the human individual, author, artist, and spectator as free independent agent defined by voluntary choice and action, and capitalised instead on the idea of humans as physiological organisms, largely deterministic and dependent upon fixed automatic habit.

I will suggest that the result is an ante litteram posthuman (because deterministic, mechanical, and automatised) aesthetics, rooted in prehuman (because evolutionarily ancient) physiology

This thesis explores how various computer programs
construct poems and addresses the way several critics
respond to these computer generated texts. Surprisingly,
little attention has heretofore been paid to these programs.
Critics who have given the matter attention usually focus on
only one of the myriad programs available, and more often
than not, such scholarship concludes with a disparagement of
all such projects. My work reexamines computer generated
poetry on a larger scale than previously exists, positing
some conclusions about how these texts affect contemporary
theories of authorship and poetic meaning.
My first chapter explicates the historical debate over the
use and limits of technology in the generation of text,
studying similitudes between certain artistic movements and
computer poetry. This historical background reveals that
the concept of mechanically generated text is nothing new.
My second chapter delineates how the two main families of
computer poetry programs actually create these texts.
Computer programs combine existing input text, aleatory
functions, and semantic catalogues, which provides insight
into how humans both create and interact with these
programs. At the same time, this study illustrates the
difficulty in defining the level of intention and influence
by individuals on the textual product, and therefore these
texts challenge our traditional notions of authorship and
the value of poetry. My third and final chapter argues that
contemporary literary theory and poetics creates the
conditions under which computer generated poetry can pose as
a human product. The success of these programs to deceive
readers about the origins of the text becomes clearer with
the results of a survey I conducted in which the respondents
were fooled by the machine more often than not. This
possibility of machine-created text masquerading as human
art threatens many critics, who quickly dismiss the process
and its results as non-poetic, but I conclude that since the
computer complicates foreknowledge of origin in some
contemporary poetic forms, this intrusion by the machine
prompts us to reconsider how we traditionally value and
interpret poetry.

"Gutenberg Galaxy Revis(it)ed: A Brief History of Combinatory, Hypertextual and Collaborative Literature from the Baroque Period to the Present"

Literature in computer-based media cannot be contemplated without a long literary tradition.This article aims at substantiating this assumption with numerous examples of combinatory,hypertextual and collaborative texts from German literary history since baroquetimes. Therewith it provides us with a historical basis in order to work out the commonfeatures and differences that with computers have entered literary texts.

Source: author's abstract in book publication