Glitch Poetics: Critical Sensory Realisms in Contemporary Language Practice

Glitch Poetics: Critical Sensory Realisms in Contemporary Language Practice Nathan Jones Royal Holloway, University of London Submitted for Doctor of Philosophy [corrections] April 2019 "1 Declaration I declare that this thesis has been composed solely by myself and that it has not been submitted, in whole or in part, in any previous application for a degree. Parts of this work have been published previous to this submission, as follows: Parts of Chapter 1 “Body-System Glitch” and the Introduction were published as “Glitch Poetics: The Posthumanities of Error” in Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (ed. Joseph Tabbi 2017), and A Peer Review Journal About Machine Research (2018). Parts of Chapter 2 “Lyric-Code Glitch” and the Introduction were published in A Peer Review Journal About Excessive Research (2017) and Thresholds Journal (2017). Except where stated otherwise by reference or acknowledgment, the work presented is entirely my own. Signed ______Nathan Jones Date __22/04/2019_______ "2 Abstract This is a combined practice and theory submission. In it, I propose the term ‘glitch poetics’ to name a mode for reading and writing with deliberate error in contemporary literary texts. I pose the question: do glitches offer a moment of correspondence between the (already diverse) concerns of poetics and those of critical media practice? In attending to this question I perform a range of close- readings of contemporary media technologies and texts looking for moments in which revealing errors allow us to read across poems, devices, bodies and environments. In “Body-System Glitch”, I use analysis of textual artworks by Caroline Bergvall and Erica Scourti, alongside that of two new media devices to show how the relationships between physical and technical systems are exposed and re-constituted by language errors. In “Lyric-Code Glitch”, I analyse works by Ben Lerner and Keston Sutherland, showing that their textual ruptures, corruptions, crises and instabilities are the result of the authors’ willingness to write through the current – post-digital – condition. A third chapter reflects on the way that glitch poetics ideas and practices combine in my own creative work. This creative component includes The Happy Jug, presented here as a CD and libretto, and a book of poems, On the Point of Tearing and Disintegrating Uncontrollably. As well as updating literary approaches to textual error, the thesis aims to reinvigorate the use of ‘glitch’ for a new media context, by further distancing it from the aesthetic of pixilation that typified its use in the early part of the twenty first century. I also show how the “critical sensory experience” (Menkman 2011, p.33) that distinguishes the glitch from mere error, can form the basis for a literary realism unique to the politics and technics of the digital age. "3 Declaration 2! Abstract 3! Introduction 5! Chapter 1 Body-System Glitch 49! Chapter 2 Lyric-Code Glitch 89! Chapter 3 Practice-Theory Glitch 138! Conclusion: Connecting Errors 171! References 181 "4 Introduction Glitch Poetics: Critical Sensory Realisms in Contemporary Language Practice Glitch poetics is a mode for reading and writing with deliberate errors in contemporary texts. As the apparent contradiction deliberate error suggests, these are moments and methods in a text that hover between the unpredictable and the crafted, and therefore combine the conceptual and formal concerns of para-literary textual practices with the expressive and subjective ones of traditional authorship. My aim in this thesis is to explore the ways that reading textual glitches – and writing with them – might reshape the potential for overlaps between different creative (and uncreative) writing methodologies, and forge new lines of connection between digital and ‘new media’ discourses and literary and textual ones. The addition of a creative component also, aims to illustrate an important ontological distinction between the glitch as an error that is a) fundamentally accidental, and b) fundamentally takes place in electronic circuits. Instead, I suggest that glitches are moments of difficulty purposefully instigated in the spirit of critical creativity, or which can be creatively appropriated and turned into moments of critical enquiry. As I will show, this is an important critical gesture for literature and media studies today, when the fundamental material differences between textual and technological innovation, have collapsed: Both are concerned with language-systems operating between human bodies and computers, and there is an increasing need for distinctive ways of unpicking our relationship with them. In the thesis, I pose the following question: Do glitches offer a moment of correspondence between the (already diverse) concerns of poetics and those of critical media practices, forming new disciplinary allegiances and necessitating new hybrid forms of critique? Put another way: Is there such a thing as a discipline of error that is shared across current media and literary practices, and "5 that shares a critical discourse with them? In attending to these questions, I explore the ways that the “critical sensory experience … [of ] materials, ideologies and (aesthetic) structures” (Menkman 2011, p.33) that distinguishes a glitch from a mere error provides the basis for a recognisably new kind of literary realism for the digital age. Perhaps the most vital aspect of this intersection of disciplines to note from the outset is that the thesis seeks to perform literary readings — and develop a notion of literary realism — that interfaces with the new media field. As I will discuss below, new media is a diverse and rich field of artistic practice that draws in a number of digital and non-digital disciplinary forms. In this thesis, I go to lengths to suggest that literature — in particular, poetry — can be read and written as part of this expanded field of artistic practice. Although I am aware of and frequently make use of literary theory precursors therefore, the thesis predominantly addresses itself to the ways in poetics readings can be informed by ideas current in the field of new media (and vice versa); specifically those ideas relevant to notions of the glitch. This dialogue between poetics and new media is the core conceptual proposition behind this thesis, and it is one that affects its form in several ways: not least the vocabularies and methods of analysis that I use, which might appear unconventional to either field, but which will contain elements familiar to both. This hybrid methodology is increasingly common in the context of what Rosi Braidotti (2016) describe as the posthumanities: A disciplinary re-ordering that de-centres ‘fundamentally human’ fields such as literature (or even ‘English’), while suggesting how other fields, such as media studies or systems theory, might offer more apposite baseline conceptual grounding for our times. The central theorist used in this book is Glitch Art practitioner and writer Rosa Menkman, and I have attempted to do justice to the series of theoretical and practical projects about glitch theory that she published between 2010 and 2011. Menkman (2011) uses the term “moment(um)” to indicate the kinetic potency of glitches as they travel between systems and to suggest the new trajectories of thought the glitch allows. The moment of the glitch, Menkman suggests, does not "6 begin and end with its appearance, but continues through the way that we respond, especially the way we re-think system boundaries and the uses that define them. By identifying the hybrid systems at work when we read and write texts, glitch poetics readings lend themselves to posthumanist ways of thinking: The “moment(um)” of a revealing textual error carries a critical enquiry from textual analysis to an exploration of human and media systems reaching outside of traditional humanist disciplinary enclosures. This demands an interdisciplinary approach, where frameworks normally used to consider texts, such as literary theory, formalism, poetics, rhetoric, and aesthetics, are merged with considerations from the fields of biological science, systems theory, media, or engineering. It is this inherent interdisciplinary that has guided my extrapolation of Menkman’s concept of the glitch, and my use of a range of concepts and tools from media theory — such as media archaeology (Huhtamo and Parikka, 2011), “algo-rhythmics” (Miyazaki 2012), and “glitchfrastructure” (Berlant 2016). For Menkman, the word ‘vernacular’ is important, in that it allows a way of thinking about the local and regional variations of jpg, png, and other coding-decoding mechanisms in linguistic terms. Her 2010 work A Vernacular of File Formats uses this point to develop nuanced documentation of the nature and role of the forms of difference between linguistically structured file formats and the way they appear to us in the textures of visually corrupted images. The suggestion is that there is a richness implicit in the sheer variety of ways of encoding visual imagery, and that each given file format has been determined by social, political, and contingent factors, similar to that of a human vernacular or accent. Menkman’s work, therefore, immediately suggests affinities be drawn with other disciplines that have sought to explore and manipulate locally and temporally specific and purposefully esoteric forms of language construction. I hope the present thesis offers a reciprocal gesture. Menkman is not alone in identifying a link between the glitch of new media

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