machine

This paper starts with a consideration of Jakobson’s model of communication and argues in favour of a more pragmatic version of this as articulated by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. His model introduces the notion of interpellation whereby the text calls the figure of author and reader into subject positions. For our purposes however, this pragmatic model doesn’t account for the presence/function of the machine, vital to any model of digital literature. One way of dealing with this is to posit a second communication layer, an identically shaped model of digital elements laid over the top of Lecercle’s. This raises the question of the connection between the two planes? The answer offered here is ‘performativity’. To develop this further, the language positions of the two models are used as an example, i.e. how are the language of the text and the language of the machine linked through performativity? To answer this question, the paper exploits certain conceptual tools, starting with integrational linguistics. This argues that in natural language, meaning is determined by the performance of communication in specific contexts. This links with the Speech Act theory of John Searle, which itself grew out of J.L. Austin’s notion of ‘performatives’. And it is precisely the notion of Speech Act theory which underlines Geoff Cox’s articulation of code as performative, as speech/act. The paper considers certain objections to this argument – not least concerning the social nature of performative – as well as counters to this. The conclusion gives a very brief account of how the other elements of bi-planar model can similarly be linked through performativity.

(Source: ELD 2015)

The black-and-gray background of the splash page for the performance artist Stelarc’s website appears to be an abstraction of memory blocks, logic boards, and input/output pads. Into it is plugged a block of small white introductory text, a blip of red text listing devices necessary to access the site, and a sketch showing a body wired with EEGs to catch the brainwaves, ECGs to trace the heartbeat, EMG’s to monitor the flexor muscles, and an array of contact microphones, position sensors, and kineto-angle transducers to chart everything else. In this integrated circuit, voltage-in probes the body; voltage-out extends it. In case the point is not yet clear, two neon-bright chunks of text in the middle of the page blink on and off to announce it: “THE BODY IS,” the first lines read all in a rush, then slowly, spelling it out, “O-B-S-O-L-E-T-E.” In this paper, I would like to argue that the transformation from an organic, industrial society to the polymorphous information system Stelac enacts allows us to think back to machine-human collaborations overlooked in expressivist approaches to poetry. Rather than try to defend traditional boundaries between organisms and machines, this paper examines three instances of their breach: the camera-eye of documentary poetics, the amplified voice of tape poetics, and the co-processed thought of digital poetics. Although Donna Haraway positions sci-fi writers as the theorists of cyborgs, this paper makes a less intuitive claim: poets, purported guardians of the interiority of a bounded organic “self,” have also—and importantly--experimented with the body electric. Like Stelarc’s performances, their cyborg poetics demonstrate the integrated circuitry between humans and the technological devices through which we conceive and construct both our subjectivities and our sense of the world.