The "modern" conception of the machine issues
from the Industrial Revolution—itself a term for a disparate and
uncoordinated tendency towards mass mechanisation,
prefigured by the Renaissance, but only realised in practice from the
eighteenth century onwards — and this conception is thus also tied to the
emergence of a particular type of scientific discourse, one in which the
speculative or theoretical disposition is increasingly linked to experimental
and technological verification (or what Karl Popper has called
"falsifiability" as the criterion of empirical statements in
science).[1] This trend is particularly
evident, for example, in the genealogy of ideas and practices linking the early
time-and- motion studies of Etienne Jules Marey, Frederick Taylor, and Lillian
and Frank Gilbreth, to the advent of mechanised production and Ford's automated
assembly-line. It is a genealogy that draws together the self-regulating free
market ideology of Adam Smith and the regulated efficiencies and division of
labour that characterise Taylorism, thus giving rise to the various "contradictorily
coherent" mechanisms and structural "crises" of the contemporary
global economy. However, mechanisation acquires a global significance in
another sense during the latter stages of the Industrial Revolution—in that it
is in terms of discursive structures,
recursion and complex relations of environmental causality, that ideas of
mechanisation come to predominate in the work of key nineteenth century
thinkers like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and C.S. Pierce. (In the twentieth
century, this increasingly global, discursive view has been most widely
represented in the work of Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan
and more recently Bernard Stiegler.)
Initially, industrial-era machines were regarded
as entirely predictive—as mindless prostheses of the human will-to- progress —
their operations determined according to a strict set of protocols. Yet already
in the 1830s Charles Babbage—in his study On the
Economy of Machinery and Manufacture—had recognised ways in which
programmable mechanical procedures might give rise to recursive structures
capable of what, in cybernetics, is called auto-poiesis. That is to say, of
self-programming, learning machines, or so-called "artificial
intelligence." This in turn called into question such received philosophical
pieties as the nature-technics dichotomy, or the separation of mind from
matter, and consequently exposed a need to accommodate effects of
unpredictability in mechanical and computing systems, and indeed in the
understanding of all dynamic systems, thus
transforming a dominant concept of the nineteenth century—systematicity—from
one of totalisation to one of radical indeterminacy.
This move away from positivism and the idea of
the machine as a prosthesis of the human idea, towards a conception of a general
mechanistics underwriting material,
discursive systems—from machine metaphor to semiotic mechanism—likewise implies
a transformation of what is meant by terms like mechanism, mechanistics and
machine, as no longer signalling a type of industrial-era
"contraption," but rather—as Peirce suggests — any binary relation
mediated by a third element.[2] Or in other words, what we
might call a programme, as the underwriting
condition for any concept of agency, operation, or event-state of semiosis.
(Importantly, this transformation has also come to effect the way in which we
conceive language and sign systems generally, such that today we can speak of
phenomena of semiosis as arising in any dynamic
system whatsoever—in a state that would formerly have been bracketed-off from
the realm of signifiability as a state of base materiality or "mindless
mechanistics.")
At the same time, the discursive aspect of
mechanisation— and of technology per
se—begins to reveal itself as being other than the locus of a continuous
historical progress, and instead as an "agent" of discontinuity and anachronism. In its orientation towards a certain
futurity vested in the technological object,[3]
semio-mechanisation articulates a perpetual movement of supercession; a breach
in the "teleological hypothesis"[4]
of historical discourse that henceforth describes a repetition automatism, as
Freud says, wherein the historical relation is constantly refigured as one of
ambivalence.[5] This ambivalence is firstly
experienced as a disjointedness in the "time of production," as a
figuring of the present as anachrony: the
constant deferral of the to-come which mirrors the deferral of gratification
and the alienation-effect of commodification, as described by Marx. Moreover,
this movement of deferral is perpetuated as a condition,
not as a departure from the norm or as a perversion of a teleological
(ends-means) system of production-consumption. With the advent of industrial
"modernity," historical periodisation thus cedes to a machinic
periodicity; just as in Nietzsche the history concept cedes to a mode of
eternal recurrence.
This counter-historical movement can be regarded
as one of the defining characteristics of what has been called the avantgarde, whose claim to being somehow before its time ties it, in often unanticipated
ways, to an inherent "anachronism" of political-economy and the
experimental sciences. Moreover, this movement accomplishes itself in a
two-fold way, since its orientation towards the unrealised and the "unpresentable"
at the limits of received knowledge is always accompanied by a dependency upon
previous forms of representation and conceptualisation in order to formulate,
precisely, an idea of what the limits of knowledge in fact are, and what the
"unpresentable" might be.[6] John Dewey argues this in
his 1958 book Experience and Nature, linking
the anachronism of conceptual dependency to the constructivism of
"deviating from a norm."
"In the history of man," Dewey writes,
"the individual characteristics of mind were regarded as deviations from
the normal, and as dangers against which society had to protect itself. Hence
the long rule of custom, the rigid conservatism, and the still existing regime
of conformity and intellectual standardisation." As a consequence, the development
of modern science—or of modernity per
se—began only when "there was recognised in certain technical fields a
power to utilise variations as the starting points of new observations,
hypotheses and experiments. The growth of the experimental as distinct from the
dogmatic habit of mind is due to the increased ability to utilise variations
for constructive ends instead of suppressing them."7
.png)
Henri Lefebvre has attempted to locate the ambivalence of
this two-fold status of anachrony and unpresentability—and of the experimental
and the constructive—in terms of what he calls the antithesis
of "modernism" and "modernity," as contrary aspects of the
so-called avant-garde moment. According to Lefebvre, modernism designates "the consciousness which
successive ages, periods and generations had of themselves; thus modernism
consists of phenomena of consciousness, of triumphalist images and projections
of self." While modernity, is understood
as "the beginnings of a reflective process, a more-or-less advanced
attempt at critique and autocritique, a bid for knowledge. We contact it in a
series of texts and documents which bear the mark of their era and yet go
beyond the provocation of fashion and the stimulation of novelty. Modernity
differs from modernism just as a concept which is being formulated in society
differs from social
"avant-garde" always involves a notion of
insufficiency and the task of defining the very totality whose limits it would
test. As William Blake wrote, in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "Enough, or too much!"
7 John Dewey, Experience
and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958) xiv. phenomena themselves, just as a thought differs from actual
events."[7]
In a more or less similar gesture, Jean-Frangois Lyotard,
locates modernity in terms of a certain discursive ambivalence that he defines
as a post-effect in advance of the fact, as
it were. For Lyotard, it is the "unpresentable" ambivalence of the
relation of thought and event—as the normative object of an institutional
exclusion (the limits of knowledge, the thinkable or "historical
consciousness") — which defines a fundamental aspect of what he
consequently refers to as the postmodern. In
Lyotard's view:
A
postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he
writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established
rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by
applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and
categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and
writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what
will have been done. Hence the fact that the
work and text have the character of an event;
hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the
same thing, their being put into work, their realisation (mise en auvre) always begins too soon. Post modern would have to be understood according
to the paradox of the future (post) anterior
(modo).[8]
It is in this paradox (of future-anteriority) that the
condition of "the machine" resides—that is to say, as a mode of enactment contiguous with the
"unpresentable" — and according to which it describes a systematicity
which is at once recursive and "experimental." We are concerned here,
in other words, with a notion of mechanism linked to a certain performativity;
to the performance of operations, above all sign-operations,
and the recursive nature of the relation between such performances and what is
called a "programme." That is to say, we are concerned with a logic
of representation and of representability, insofar as the experimental points
beyond itself to a mode of understanding that is "without model."
Hence, for Lyotard, the postmodern "would be that
which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself;
that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste which
would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the
unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy
them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable."[9] In this way, "a work
can only become modern if it is first post modern. Postmodernism thus
understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state
is constant."[10] This is what Lefebvre
describes, vis-a-vis the reifications and mechanical ambivalence of such a constant "nascent state," as the
"idea of cyclical regularity of change, and of change as a norm."[11]
2
In a lecture delivered in Turin in November 1967, entitled
"Cybernetics and Ghosts," Italo Calvino argued that it is primarily
through stochastic and recursive processes of anticipation,
rupture and reintegration, that
previously unapparent forms are arrived at and consequently acquire a normative
status; that new combinations of elements are obtained, as Calvino says,
"through the combinatorial mechanism itself, independently of any search
for meaning or effect on any other level." In place of a continuous linear
progression, the "future-anteriority" of experimentation functions by
discontinuity, readjustment, and contingency within what are nevertheless definable
as "procedural constraints" or structural
norms—whether or not these are recognised, as Lyotard says, in the form
of "pre-established rules," or methods of prediction and production,
or are only recognised and recognisable after the
fact. Once normalised, however, such contingencies then become
"charged," according to Calvino, "with an unexpected meaning or
unforeseen effects which the conscious mind would not have arrived at deliberately: an unconscious meaning in fact, or at
least the premonition of an unconscious meaning."[12]
Such outcomes define what Dewey termed the "constructive ends" of
experimentation, whose contingencies nevertheless define a limit-effect of ambivalence in the discourse of
knowledge, for example, and in which the ego—as Jacques Lacan says—is accorded
the status of something like a mechanism, rather than that of an inaugurating
intentionality or "will."
In relating the experimental to the experiential
aspect of "consciousness" — or the "imaginary function of the
ego" as the outward manifestation of unconscious
agency—Lacan identifies in the "paradoxical expression thinking machine" the coimplication of
structural contingency and structural necessity in defining so-called acts of language. "The paradox of
consciousness," Lacan argues, is that "it both has to be there, and
not be there."[13] This paradox reappears
elsewhere, in a more insistent form, in the discourse surrounding the question
of modernity in philosophy and the arts, above all with regard to the status of
language in its relation to the "real." Still in February 1955, Lacan
was able to write: "The big question for the human sciences now is—what is
language?"[14]
Confronted with an increasing number of ellipses
in the predictions of scientific method (under the fading constellation of Cartesianism),
and with the consequent problem of the status of language in conditioning and
constituting the experience of the knowable, more and more writers in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century had already began to ask about the definitional character of reality, and the emerging
supposition that "behind" the idea of the real there is only
discourse. As Samuel Beckett remarked in his 1931 study of Proust: "the
transcendental apperception that can capture the Model, the Idea, the Thing in
itself," failed to materialise under scrutiny.[15]
Taken beyond the literary and philosophical domains, this problem likewise
invested the physical sciences, which discovered a need to account, among other
things, for its disturbances of the object of scientific observation. Niels
Bohr and Werner Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy is the well-known
consequence of this development. But as the ambivalence of language and the
increasingly recognised materiality of discourse came to effect scientific
method and experimentation (with its initial dependency upon models of the real), more broadly semiotic
questions also began to arise. What, for example, is it that we mean when we
speak of reality? And, indeed, what does it mean when we speak of language? or the reality
of language? In other words, confronted with the incompatability of
consciousness, as defined by Lacan, and the observer paradoxes of quantum
mechanics, how could the so- called object of language itself be anything but
"experimental," unpresentable or otherwise indeterminate?
While language thus appeared, on one level, to
assume an increasingly abstract or "theoretical" aspect, on another
level its radical materiality necessarily came more into focus. These two
characteristics — abstraction and materiality—emerge at
this point as defining a state of complementary:
the first linked to the speculativity of signification (vis-a-vis Saussurean
semiology), the second to its inherently "procedural" function
(vis-a-vis Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology and Claude Shannon's
mathematical theories of communication). It is in this sense, for example, that
language reveals itself as a "system" of mechanical (event-state)
transformations, iterations and reversions; as a type of machine, in other
words, made not of an enumeration of symbols, but of a topology of symbolic
relations or "sign operations." Moreover, in place of any
deterministic ego, agency or deus ex machina, the term "operation"
here— through its allusion to something like an operator—comes
to designate instead what we might call an algorithm or "rule," which
automatically (and arbitrarily) co-ordinates
a given function with some other function: for example, metaphor, metonymy, or
any analogous translational, "totemic," or
"coding-decoding" process. This implies what we might call a
mechanism of generalised equivalence across contiguity—not only with regard to
tropic or "rule-orientated" operations, but to the status of any
assumed relation between, say, signification
and materiality.
What we mean by "rule," in this
context, has a purely definitional character. Its operative principle is that
of ambivalence as such—and of ambivalence as a "causal agent" of
signification. It thus also marks a transition in thinking about language, from
deterministic laws to probabilistic ones, or from an epistemological or
paradigmatic status of meaning to a contingent, definitional and above all complementary status. It is not—in effect—a matter
of mediating between states or changes of
state (i.e. between signification and
materiality), but of constituting an event-state of complementarity: for
example, in speaking about the materiality o/signification—wherein neither of
these terms may be said to assume an autonomous, discrete or objective status.
Consequently, this "rule" — arbitrating, as it were, between two
modalities of causation, or what Peirce
elsewhere terms "the law of mind"[16]—represents a fundamental
"equivalence across contiguity"; a resistance and a transference; or what
Gaston Bachelard refers to both as an "epistemological obstacle" and
as an "epistemological rupture." In doing so it reveals a fundamental
contradiction in the logic and structure of so-called "laws" of
reason, even when they are accommodated to what Bachelard refers to as
"the notion of epistemological discontinuity in scientific progress."[17] This interpolation of the
arbitrary within the totalising movement of reason as
law—being, on a fundamental level, the very articulation
of law[18]—does not represent a
perversion or deviation, but rather a logical or structural inherence: for
example, between the letter of the law
("lex") and the truth- status of its logos, the word itself ("lexis"); what we might
in fact call a perturbation at the origin of
any signifying system.
Such a perturbation, as Lacan points out, is necessarily
sublimated in the operations of the law of reason in the guise— for example—of
justice, whose arbitrations represent a kind of parenthesis in which the
referent of the law (such as the transcendence of "the good") passes
beyond reach and must be approached by way of a certain detour. By detour we
would also mean, by metaphor or metonymy; in other words, by way of a
"rule" of discourse or discursus.
To illustrate this formulation, Lacan makes reference to a passage from The Story of Justine, by the Marquis de Sade.
"Tyrants," Sade writes,
are never born out of anarchy. One only ever sees them rise
up in the shadow of laws; they derive their authority from laws.
The reign
of law is, therefore, evil; it is inferior to anarchy. The greatest proof of
this position is the obligation of any government to plunge back into anarchy
whenever it wants to remake its constitution. In order to abrogate its ancient
laws, it is obliged to establish a revolutionary regime in which there are no
laws. Under this regime new laws are eventually born, but the second is less
pure than the first since it derives from it, since the first good, anarchy,
had to occur, if one wanted to achieve the second good, the State's
constitution.[19]
.jpg)
In Sade, the dream of rationalism is worked out in extremis, its mechanistic universe articulating
an inescapable logic that is at the same time recursive, deranged, and
self-fulfilling. On the one hand a radical critique of Kantian "categorical
imperative," on the other an apparatus of narrative discursus and
"degeneracy" in which the lineaments of literary and philosophical
modernity are clearly visible in the complementarity and contrariety of rule and law—or
otherwise discursive "anarchy" and the "tyranny" of
forms—by which the ambivalence of any system of values is ultimately
constituted. Much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary modernism can
be seen as a critical extension—if also "rectification"—of Sade's
anti-rationalist project, mediated, for example, by certain facets of Marxism
and Darwinism, according to which re-evolution, or epistemological rupture,
retains a positivistic or homoeostatic function.
Sade's extremism finds itself seconded to a
project of aesthetic and epistemological reform—such as the ultimately
reformative ambitions of Surrealism—in which the revolution of values and of
consciousness is linked to a project of social reconstruction: anarchy
sublimated in a "new" constitutionalism, a "new"
epistemology, a "new" system of judgement. Indeed, if—as Georges
Canguilhem has argued— "epistemology provides a principle on which
judgement can be based,"[20] it is nevertheless upon the
"crisis" of epistemological rupture that judgement itself can here be
seen to be founded, as the regulating
mechanism of the otherwise arbitrary convulsions of the
law. Sade, writing at the height of the French Revolution, identifies
law as the very inversion of justice, whose
subsequent discourse however only serves to mask the revolutionary character of
the epistemological break in terms of "correction" or
"reconstruction."
Within the framework of rationalism, crisis does not
represent the unthinkable or the unpresentable, but rather an alibi—a justification. And this in turn points to the
difficulty in conceiving an avant-garde method
which would lead to anything other than a positivistic reintegration. Jonathan
Swift, in 1726, was already attentive to such implications in his satirical
treatment of scientific positivism in the "Academy of Lagado" section
of Gulliver's Travels. Among other things,
Swift's critique focuses upon the idea of an experimental random-text machine,
"for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical
operations."[21] The mostly nonsensical
formulations produced by Swift's machine assume an oracular function—reducing
the labour of thought to a "merely" mechanical procedure—while
providing the substance of poetic, philosophical and juridical treatises,
anthologised by an otherwise mindless priesthood of technicians
(predecessors of Karel Capek's "universal robots"). A type of
semiotic "anarchy" thus becomes the rule upon which universal laws
are founded, interpreted and enacted. However, the satirical aspect of Swift's
machine resides not in its suggestion that such an idea is foolish as such, or
that a positivistic science which sublimates "true" knowledge to
technological production is necessarily foolish, but rather that science itself
and the arbitrariness of law, and of language (Marinetti's parole in liberta), in fact imply and require it.
In Swift's analogy, moreover, there is a recognition of the fundamentally
satirical character of any epistemological, semantic or legalistic code that
attempts to exhaust the arbitrarily descriptive possibilities of so-called
truth statements. This is because all such codes—as discourse—are
effectively excessive, devolving upon an "excess at the origin" which
cannot be remediated by means of any "law" since it itself is the
underwriting condition of the law, of its limits and of its norms of judgement.
3
Swift's and Sade's rejection of a purely procedural
rationalism has often been seen as prefiguring twentieth-century avantgardist
critiques of Enlightenment reason—like those of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia
and Jean Tinguely, whose satirical, counter-functional "machines"
affect something of a rebuke to the ideologues of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century industrial "progress." But in prefiguring the
avant-garde, Swift and Sade also necessarily prefigure the sinister
"triumph" of a rationalism embodied in the systematic disorders of
industrialised warfare and the Nazi extermination camps. Irrationalism, Swift
and Sade tell us, is not a deviation from the rule, but the very foundation of
the rule itself and of its "reason."
Framed at either end of its history by Auschwitz
and the Place de la Concorde, the avant-garde has always run the risk— in the
revolutionary mode identified by Peter Bürger with the "historical
avant-garde"[22]—of becoming little more
than an aestheticised form of political conscience or socio-cultural symptom. It is not so much a question of whether or
not, as Theodor Adorno argued, poetry after Auschwitz could still be possible
(or merely "barbaric").[23] Rather it is a question of
the "burden of history" as a type of reactionary classicism, or
negative tradition, and of the rule of platitude in defining a certain
historical imminence. This has always been
the struggle of experimentalism, situated between historical agency and
historical object. Such is likewise the case not only with the historicisation
of "the avant-garde" but, also, what we might call the classicising
of modernity. It implies a classicism that perpetuates itself merely by a rote
form of "equilibrium": an identification
of what is knowable with what is known, and according to which experimentation
is cognate with method.
.jpg)
In his lecture on "Cybernetics and
Ghosts," Calvino broaches the subject of classicism and method in terms,
like Sade's, of an intervention in the historical transmission of
social-aesthetic norms which also delineates the very possibility of norms.[24] This intervention,
associated by Calvino with a type of avant-gardism, functions as a mechanism of
difference that re-sets the classical mechanics of aesthetic stasis, allowing
for a renewal of the classical idea as one of movement and reinvention.
Accordingly, Calvino proposes an almost Swiftian scenario in which literature
would become "a machine that will produce avant-garde work to free its
circuits when they are choked by too long a production of classicism."[25]
The question is, however, does such a
"freeing of the circuits," as Calvino says, amount to anything more,
ultimately, than a form of historical reversioning—since classicism here
implies not simply a type of conservation, but also a periodic totalisation; a
closed cycle that is at the same time expansive, inflationary, accumulative; of
both entropy and
discursus; teleology and recursion? "Is
this," Calvino asks, "the triumph of the irrational? Or is it the
refusal to believe that the irrational exists, that anything in the world can
be considered extraneous to the reason of things,
even if something eludes the reasons determined by our historical condition,
and also eludes limited and defensive so-called rationalism?"[26]
Calvino attempts to confront this problem by way of
Sartre's question "What is literature?" For Calvino, the difficulty
of situating "literature" in the context of industrial modernity
derives from the ultimate ambivalence of the terms "rational" and
"irrational," and their status with regards to the controlled unpredictability of experimental method
with its own ambivalent relation to the underwriting condition of
"absolute chance," as Peirce says. Where "rational" and
"irrational" remain definitional (and probabilistic), experimentality
obtains at the level of the possible, and in this sense the term
"literature" — as writing—designates an experimental condition of
language itself. That is to say, a condition of absolute unconditionality, as defining the very chance of
language as language; its underwriting
iterability and techne of inscription. Calvino writes:
Did we say
that literature is entirely involved with language, is merely the permutation
of a restricted number of elements and functions? But is the tension in
literature not continually striving to escape from this finite number? Does it
not continually attempt to say something it cannot say, something that it does
not know, and that no one could ever know? A thing cannot be known when the
words and concepts used to say it and think it have not yet been used in that
position, not yet arranged in that order, with that meaning ... The struggle of
literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it
stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature
is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.[27]
As in Sade, the formal and thematic rigidities, the
compulsive repetition and enactment, the staging of a narrative and its mechanical
"performance," all point to a conception of literature as operating
under the sign of a programmatic ambivalence—in which the concept of "the
machine" no longer remains straightforwardly linked to instrumentalism,
but rather to its detournement.
A certain detournement of instrumentality can
likewise be found in the "genetic distributions of language" in
Mallarme, in the encyclopaedic schematisations of Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake, in the entropic spirals of Beckett's minimalism, in the
"minute vivisections" operated by Natalie Sarraute and Christine
Brooke-Rose, or in the quasi-automated textual apparatuses of Georges Perec's La vie mode d'emploi and the counter-causal
mechanistics of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow,
V, and The Crying of Lot 49. Alain
Robbe-Grillet, principle architect of the Nouveau Roman, has himself described
the legacy of Sade as practically reducing narrativity to a "vast
nomenclature of perversions, comparable to the botanical classifications of
Linnaeus or to Mendelejev's periodic table of elements."[28] This description is itself
reminiscent of comments made about Robbe-Grillet's own texts, such as La Maison de Rendez-vous, notable for its
"accrued frequency of themes of deprivation: drugs, fascination with
crime, unnatural love, casual Sadism, necrophilia, cannibalism, etc."[29] Themes of crisis,
perversion, anarchy and anachronism, also proliferate in Joyce, Beckett, and
elsewhere in the body of "modernist" literature, yet this would
hardly be noteworthy in and of itself if it did not involve a certain testing
of the limits of presentability, as it were. Just as we might say that terms
like indecency are nothing if not
definitional—culturally and historically contingent—so too we may speculate
that other aspects of the unpresentable may also be "reducible" to a
set of cultural or ideological procedures.
Arguably, one of the challenges posed by modernity has been
the relinquishing of a moral viewpoint or judgementalism.
That is to say, the relinquishing of any "ethics" that is
ideologically founded. The question remains whether or not this challenge—
exemplified in Sade's critique of legalistic reason as the tyranny of an
entirely abstracted "mind" — will itself inevitably be reduced to
something like a "standard deviation" within the circuit of the
cultural system? (It is noteworthy, in any case, that where the mere mention of
Sade's name was once scandalous in itself, it now barely raises eyebrows). This
in turn raises the question of the effective virulence of any
"avant-garde" — since the operations of recursion that underwrite its
various ruptures and discontinuities also serve as mechanisms of reintegration
and homoeostasis. That is to say, as engines of
entropy. We might pose this question otherwise, as whether or not the
epistemological rupture brought about by modernity is not simply the necessary
condition of an epistemological reconstruction and renewal? If, in other words,
the ideology of what we might call "modernism" (as a continuation of
the Enlightenment project) is not simply a dialectical reification of what is
made to amount to a mere systemic perturbation or rote form of
experimentation—what Bachelard terms "obsolete science."
With the liberatory phase of so-called
postmodernism having passed — and with the status of avant-gardism and the
possibility of criticism (of judgement) once again in dispute— the question
arises as to the relation of experimentality to a future that, however
unpresentable and enigmatic it may appear, has become overburdened by a type of
neo-classicism. A classicism, that is, of both a speculative and material
"revolution" of sense and of the senses—of the epistemological and
the experiential, the cultural and the political, and so on. In other words, we
are confronted with a question not merely of viability,
but of a pervasive limit-effect of what Lefebvre terms
"change as a norm." Under such procedural
conditions—in which procedure itself veers between permissibility and
possibility—the Duchampian critique of post-industrial rationalism and its
stylisation in the form of avant-gardist method, or in the commodification and consumption
of the "avantgarde," points to a situation of historical recursion
that possesses no immediately recognisable axes of critical differentiation.
Yet when Frangois Lyotard wrote of James Joyce
that his writing "allows the unpresentable to become perceptible in his
writing itself, in the signifier," he was signalling a change not in the
aesthetics of revolution or historical consciousness, but in the very logic of
signifying agency, and with regard to all of its possible social registers.
"The whole range of available narrative and even stylistic operations is
put into play without concern for the unity of the whole," Lyotard argues.
Consequently: "The grammar and vocabulary of literary language are no
longer accepted as given; rather they appear as academic forms, as rituals
originating in piety (as Nietzsche said) which prevent the unpresentable from
being put forward."[30] The question remains, of
course, as to whose idea of the unpresentable we are speaking of here—if not
that which is underwritten by the very resistance of
the presentable itself. For it is indeed, here, a question of the
mimetic status of presentability and of the assumption, in discourse, of
something like an object. Even if this object is taken to be "discourse
itself."
In any case, we need to ask ourselves about the
significance of the relation of these various conceptions of agency and the
mechanics of signifiability that underwrites them. If this question, as Lyotard
suggests, is one that is linked to a particular experience of language as
techne, then what can the work of writers like Swift, Sade or Joyce tell us
about the general semiotic character of the mechanisms of presentability
themselves? What do they tell us, in other words, of what we might call
"grammars of emergence"? Is the "unpresentability," as
Lyotard contends, of such structural grammars or sign operations, a mere
symptom or instead a condition of language? Or rather, is it by means of a
certain symptomatology bound to the conditional that we may speak of the
unpresentable at all, as something that may become "perceptible" in
writing itself, in the signifier? As Roger Shattuck has argued: "An
avant-garde gains its special status from its adversary relation to the main
body of the culture to which it is reacting," even if this culture is one
that attaches especial significance, precisely, to avant-gardism.[31]
Contemporary preoccupations with hypertext,
hypermedia, the recursive "collage-effect" of the World Wide Web,
point again to an idea of language as both heterogeneous and yet procedurally
constrained—one which is neither deviational nor positivistic, but rather an
event-driven "state of affairs." Suggestive of a general condition of
semiosis, this idea of language extends the literary medium to the very limits
of "concretion," particularisation, and phenomenality— describing, as
Andruid Kerne says, an interface with a "reprocessed experiential
archive," that is "in flux and yet bound to its material
objects."[32] For cyber-ecologists like
Kerne, "Interfaces are the multidimensional border zones through which the
interdependent relationships of people, activities, codes, components, and
systems are constituted."[33] Such an interface-effect is
already signalled in the genealogy of procedural poetics extending from
Mallarme, Gertrude Stein and John Cage, to the OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry,
and the advent of the "new" digital media—spawning, among other
things, such Swiftian "textual machines" as Mark
America's Grammatron, Douglas
Davis's The World's First
Collaborative Sentence and Kerne's own CollageMachine.
These
"machines," which integrate recursive and chance procedures in the
production of multi-dimensional textual interfaces in "real time,"
describe a type of Joycean tetragrammaton—or
word-of-words. Like Babbage's "Analytic Machine" — a mechanical
device capable (at least in theory) of "weaving algebraic
patterns"—these interfaces are not so much produced as performed, in the
sense that they are themselves mechanisms
within a larger recursive structure of "interactions" and
"interference." And if such effects may be said to be effects of
semiosis, or indeed "phenomena" implying something like an agency (if
not a consciousness), then the question remains as to whether or not this is by
consequence of a mechanisation applied to
some prior state of affairs, or by consequence of a mechanical inherence constitutive of any form of signifying
materiality, or indeed of any system as such.
[1] Karl Popper, "Science,
Pseudo-Science, and Falsifiability," Conjectures
and Refutations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978 [1962]) 33-39.
[2] Charles Sanders
Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," Philosophical Writings, ed. Justus Buchler (New
York: Dover, 1955) 99-100.
[3] Which,
like the machine, is not a thing as such but
rather a "figure" or "trope" (in this case of the always to come, the ideally unrealised end of production).
[4] Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931) 71.
[5] Cf. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C.J.M.
Hubback (London: The Hogarth Press, 1922).
[6] This
two-fold movement can otherwise be characterised as a recursion, or what
cyberneticists describe as a feedback loop. The sense of the preposition avant is thus always qualified by the necessary
conservatism of the verb garder, to keep: it
remains conditional, tentative, an attempt at defining limits—so that the term
[7] Henri
Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans.
John Moore (London: Verso, 1995) 1-2.
[8] Jean-Frangois
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1991) 81.
[11] Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 168. The problem that
arises here is not which of Lyotard's or Lefebvre's terminologies are most
appropriate to the circumstances, but whether or not their arguments offer some
sort of means of accounting for the apparent impasse in the status of
avant-gardism and its paradigm of the machine.
[12] Italo Calvino,
"Cybernetics and Ghosts," The Literature
Machine, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Secker and Warburg, 1987) 21-2.
[13] Jacques Lacan, "From the Entwurf to the Traumdeutung," The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II:
The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, trans. S.
Tomaselli (London: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 117120.
[14] Lacan, "From
the Entwurf to the Traumdeutung," 119.
[15] Beckett, Proust, 69.
[16] Peirce, "The
Law of Mind," Philosophical Writings,
339ff.
[17] Gaston Bachelard, Le Materialisme rationnel (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1953); cited in Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings, ed,
Frangois Delaporte, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone, 1994) 32.
[18] Whether it be
defined as the a priori as such, the given of meaning, the acts
of signification (i.e. as formally determined and mimetic).
[19] Cited in Jacques
Lacan, "The Function of the Good," The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans.
Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992) 221.
[21] Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (London: Wordsworth Edition,
1992) III.iv.195.
[22] Peter Bürger,
Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael
Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
[23] Theodor
Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry
Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967) 34.
[24] It is precisely such
an idea of stultifying and overly "rationalised" classicism that we
encounter, for example, in Pier Paulo Passolini's film Salo, in which Sade's 120
Days of Sodom is transposed into a critique of the last days of Fascist
Italy—the infamous Repubblica di Salo (last refuge and death-place,
incidentally, of Fillipo Marinetti, founder of Italian Futurism and one of the
leading figures in the avant-garde cult of the machine).
[25] Calvino,
"Cybernetics and Ghosts," 13.
[26] Calvino,
"Cybernetics and Ghosts," 20.
[27] Calvino,
"Cybernetics and Ghosts," 18.
[28] Alain
Robbe-Grillet, "L'ordre et son double" (1965), Le Voyageur (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2001) 86.
[29] Robbe-Grillet,
"Un ecrivain non reconcilie," Le Voyageur,
100.
[31] Roger
Shattuck, The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and
the Arts (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1984) 74
[32] Andruid
Kerne, "CollageMachine: An Interactive Agent of Web Recombination," Leonardo 33.5 (2000): 347-350.
[33] Louis Armand,
"Interface Ecologies," Solicitations
(Prague: Litteraria, 2005) 124.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário