GLITCH: DOPPELGÄNGER & POSTDIGITAL A-LÊTHEIA Angela
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
GLITCH: DOPPELGÄNGER & POSTDIGITAL A-LÊTHEIA Angela McArthur 13902293 Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Degree: Master of Art: Sound & Image MU898 (2013/2014) UNIVERSITY OF KENT Medway Campus August 2014 Total word count: 8805 Approved by: ________________________ Date: _______________________________ Copyright © 2014 Angela McArthur ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisors Simon Clarke and Julie-Louise Bacon for their invaluable input, encouragement and generosity of spirit. I was lucky to have such conscientiousness support. I am grateful to my course-peers for their camaraderie, and to the willing participants of this study who gave freely of themselves. I am indebted to Ravensbourne College, and the University of Kent, for funding this work. Finally, I would like to thank Stefano Kalonaris, for providing a counter- balance of stability to my glitchiness, often without realising. Does knowledge of one’s affect diminish, or augment? The revealed trail of intent is as a fractal of self-consciousness. i ABSTRACT This paper explores glitch outside its usual confines of computation, specifically in performance, and the remediation of language. It asks whether, in a postdigital context, glitch has a revealing value that can reinstate the term ‘doppelgänger ’ as an apparition of double character. In revealing, does the digital doppelgänger extend beyond alterity, to a co- originary point, and if so, can this feedback to us materially and epistemologically, avoiding contractive binaries to retain its ambiguous essence and our inter-subjectivities? A number of discourses are examined with particular reference to information theory, the philosophies of Heidegger and Nancy, the posthumanism of Hayles, Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and to glitch itself. A short series of experiments are also conducted, recording music performances in conditions where external interference primes the participants to glitch. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page...................................................................................i Copyright Page...........................................................................ii Acknowledgements.....................................................................iii Abstract....................................................................................iv Table of Contents........................................................................v List of Figures............................................................................vi CHAPTER ONE: Introduction Research Question.....................................................................1 Areas of Interest........................................................................1 Personal Motivations...................................................................3 CHAPTER TWO: Literature Review The Glitchiness of Glitch..............................................................5 Glitching Wetware…………………………………………………………………………......11 Glitching Language....................………………………………………………….....15 CHAPTER THREE: Methods Performing Glitch...........................................………………………………19 Experimental Research Design....................................................20 Limitations.........................................……………………………………….....21 An Explanation of the Biagram....................................................22 CHAPTER FOUR: Results Presentation of Results..............................................................24 iii CHAPTER FIVE: Analysis Interpreting research about non-interpretation?..........................25 Creocality................................………………………………………............28 A Critique of Critique ..................................……………………….……..29 CHAPTER SIX: Conclusion Summary of Thesis..................................................................32 Recommendations for Future Research.......................................33 Conclusion ..................................................………………………………33 References.................................................………………………………..34 Appendix 1: Why Include Text from Stanislaw Lem’s ‘Solaris’? .......39 Appendix 2: Participants..................................…………………………….41 Appendix 3: The Series of Approximations to English.....................42 iv LIST OF FIGURES Fig.1 Example of visual glitch courtesy of the author Fig.2 Rauschenberg sitting with ‘White Painting’, 1951 courtesy of http://www.emvergeoning.com Fig.3 Image of typewriter from Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ courtesy of http://musigh.com/ Fig.4 Biagram Fig.5 Coded representation of the experiments’ analysis Fig.6 Shannon’s ‘Series of Approximations v CHAPTER ONE – Introduction "Keep a hold on yourself. Be prepared to meet…anything.” "But what could I possibly meet?" I shouted. "I don't know. In a way, it depends on you." (Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’, 1970 p6) RESEARCH QUESTION Can glitch be humanly and linguistically materialised, to re-imagine our doppelgänger’s alterity? AREAS OF INTEREST With its roots in information theory, glitch has been explored, teasing out wider philosophical and psychological discourse to gain insight and connect it to posthumanism. Glitch as sound and art discourse, is in its relative infancy, making it both exciting and fragile. The work is partly contextualised in psychoanalysis’ theories of split subjectivity with particular reference to Lacan’s concepts of the Real and the singular, and their concomitant potentialities for rupturing the symbolic order. The glitch sits particularly well here, and is leveraged as material means of interference in music performance, to ‘reconthinkure’ alterity in non-pejorative terms. Neologisms are a feature of this work, gainfully utilised in form and also explored in a discussion of creolisation, deemed ‘glitched’ language by the author. Some of the theoreticians discussed herein have referenced this area in their own work; Lacan discusses James Joyce’s manipulation of language as polysemic, no longer signifier divorced from truth. 1 Idiosyncratically novel dialect foregrounds ideologies otherwise naturalised, though novelty is key. Habitual use of anything anaesthetises rather than illuminates; again glitch’s use is clear: it inevitably proceeds with the leading edge of technology, always superseding our efficacy, we are always glitching. The gap between idea and realisation then, is of our own making and it is argued that within this gap, we can purposefully look at error anew, dissolving the paradox of our search for unification and bifurcation, or ‘being singular-plural’ (Nancy, 2000). Subject-object ontologies, as an experience of linguistic classification, are discussed through creolisation. Heidegger and his ‘a-lêtheia’ (‘un-forgetting’ or ‘unconcealedness’) is engaged, as is Nancy, who builds on Heidegger. Hayles’ posthumanism covers much ground in its appraisal of technology and linguistics. Grand narratives with their clean boundaries and clear causal chains, fail to capture posthuman experience. Instead glitch will be emphatically conceived as doppelgänger, itself generating contradictions between concept and realisation, itself critically and continually resourceful. To clarify key terms, ‘glitch’ (and its derivatives) are signifiers of transgression, suffusing a network of referents. In widening the scope of glitch discourse, hard delineations are literally immaterial. The placement of glitch into this work calls it into evaluation, though it is concept not output being evaluated. Doppelgänger (literally, ‘double-goer’ from German folkloric use) is a homomorphism increasingly appropriated, to describe the digital image of performers. ‘Through its multiplication or manipulation the digital doppelgänger can expand the performative limits.’ (Bode, 2005, online) 2 With little Anglo-historical legacy to impede it, doppelgänger is a fluid doorway to discourse. Originally referring to a double character including shadow-self, its recent appropriation does not reflect this. Post-digitalism refers not to a reflective potential. David Berry (2014b, online) claims the digital is an ‘empty signifier that has suffered from a lack of critical attention particularly in relation to its ideological deployment’ and urges us to ‘stop thinking about [it] as something static… and instead consider its ‘trajectories.’’ These diverse areas of discourse are collided to explore, through glitch’s conduit, the multiplicities of posthumanism, a precipice between order and chaos, heightened herein through performance, and negotiated through linguistics. Its reading rewards some suspension of rationale, in favour of imaginal confluences. PERSONAL MOTIVATIONS The idea of an unmediated performance ignores its semiotic codification and the very processes of repetition and reproduction upon which signification is built. Performing can serve to ossify symbolic order, a diminished reality undetected until feedback signals, illuminating the ethical gap between intention and realisation, are seized, crowded by noisy self-conceptions, and diverted away from ‘being with’. Ensuing revelations of one’s intent may become unavoidable. Performer: ‘clings to a kind of naive verbal realism that refuses to realise the full extent of the role played by symbolicity in his notions of reality’ (Burke, 1966, p5). Experience of performance as expression, lost in this way to interpretative mechanisms as they were for the author, estrange. This work constitutes an attempt to find the produce of glitch without returning to ‘productivity’. To seek conditions