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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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 free of the concern not to glitch, negotiating the ‘mark drawn out over the void’ (Nancy, 2000, p62)

3 The difficulty of coupling dissertation as form, with glitch as doppelgänger, is acknowledged. Conforming to an archetypal formalism and second person descriptives articulate dialectics and interpretation, respectively. Yet unification of form and content is not contingent negation alone, is not a moral path. Transcendence of binary oppositions may involve negation whilst preserving and building upon existing tropes. Creolisation may be the posthuman ‘aufheben’. Yet the erosion of structure may come to represent a new symbology, thus being subsumed into the apparatus it seeks to reveal. We are cautioned against tautologies: ‘…the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ (Heidegger, 1977).

“… there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains…."

(Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’ 1970 p39)

4 CHAPTER TWO: Literature Review

“…. our scholarship, all the information accumulated in the libraries, amounted to a useless jumble of words… we had not progressed an inch….. The sum total of known facts was strictly negative.”

(Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’ 1970 p13)

THE GLITCHINESS OF GLITCH

‘Glitch’ originally denoted an unexpected error in signal processing, producing an unwanted result. Numerous protocols exist for the purpose of error-checking to avoid such breaks. ‘This…lack of function or unwanted function… gives the glitch its unique status in art’ (Moradi, 2004, p4). Glitch art arose in response to an increasing imperative for efficiency, precision, and repeatability brought about by computation. Lyotard’s examination of a ‘maximum performance logic’ in the 1980s: ‘[a] cybernetic ideology driven by dreams of an error-free world’ (Nunes, 2011, p3) leveraged Fordist terms of systematisation, to dystopian effect.

Increasingly complex interactions, an accelerated pace of modification and a Gordian knot of causal chains, leave us reactive. Our perception exhausts to a ‘plateau of continuous sensory data, representative of reality’ (McLuhan 1964, p224), ignorant of the taxonomies which inform computation’s architecture.

Fuller’s account of how computation manages and orders information to maximise its ‘usefulness’, highlights the pre-determined functionality at the heart of its protocols. Far from being neutral, this sorting:

‘…should be understood both as something that yields results….and … generates its own terms of composition, shifting relations between things that are sorted...’ (Fuller, 2011, p120).

5 Anchored in algorithmic processes, the interplay between hard and software undermines its ‘universality’, revealing the discrete and comparative nature of computation. In a sea of zeros and ones, there is only ‘greater-than or less-than’ relativism guiding the operational logic of ordering. The conceit of digital autonomy persists though, communicating with increasing specificity the tools of rhetoric (metaphor, analogy, linguistic hierarchies) which are now tactically invisible; ‘to constitute the abstraction as the originary form from which the world's multiplicity derives.’ (Hayles, 1999, p12)

‘…the meaning of technology is split consciousness: calculation versus meditation, objectification versus art… identity versus difference.’ (Kroker, 2002, p38)

Fig.1 Captured glitch, courtesy of author

Our ‘symbiogenetic’ (Harraway, 2008) relationship with technology cannot be unravelled. Iterative innovations, drip fed to market, privilege the reproducible, sustaining profitability (Intel’s business model is fiscally, not technologically, driven) but also indicate our resistance to change. Repeatability reassures us, though: ‘Every decision…is grounded in something that cannot be mastered, something concealed, something disconcerting.’ (Heidegger, 2008, p31).

The pervading logic of instrumentalism should not be underestimated. Means-end thinking has had formative effect on our biology, sociology, psychology, and embodiment (Hayles, 2006). Claude Shannon’s binary information theory reduces and universalises information, irrespective of context. Mathematician Norbert Wiener, discussed by glitch communities and posthumanists alike, saw communication and control as inextricably linked. Alienation is inevitable when control becomes paramount, given that experience involves forces outside our control. We may fail to master these, but more subtly we neglect encounters of an enigmatic or

6 serendipitous nature. The digital is accelerating at a rate beyond Moore’s material law, into ubiquity. Yet this same ‘computational ideology’ (Berry, 2014) reifies.

Of what use could glitch be in such surroundings? Itself fragmented, how could it hope to resolve estrangement and entangle these discourses further in the areas outlined? Beyond Virillio’s proposal that technology is born with its ‘accident’ in place, that it ‘reveals something important that we would not otherwise be able to perceive’ (Virillio, 2005) Menkman (2011) considers the glitch (as accident) being ‘hyper-functional’ in enabling us to better understand a system. Glitch presences the subjectivities of interaction, as experiences, as ontology. This ‘being with’ (Nancy, 2000) evades critique on aesthetic and ethical grounds; it lacks standards, it is mirror.

‘…other beings…give me access to the origin; they allow me to touch it; they leave me before it, leave me before its turning, which is concealed each time… and vanishing in its passing....but if one really wants to understand it, it is not a matter of making all these curious presences equal’ (Nancy, 2000, p20)

Glitch, unlike other objects, serves alterity by reproducing self, whilst itself unlike self. It ‘…cannot be singularly codified, which is precisely its conceptual strength’ (Menkman, 2011, p27). Glitch contains the shock of the abject, but of itself amoral, it provides a pure, reflective surface. The apparition of our sight, how our shock manifests, is of our own making:

‘There is a clearing. …Only this clearing grants us human beings access to those beings that we ourselves are not and admittance to the being that we ourselves are. … Each being which we encounter and which encounters us maintains this strange opposition of presence in that at the same time it always holds itself back in a concealment.’ (Heidegger, 2008, p30)

Interventions weighted with agendas are necessarily opaque. A priori categories are deterministic of experience. Glitch practitioners attach significance to its subversive prospects, but the apolitical glitch gestures beyond frontiers.

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Data corruption reveals symmetry between input and output – devoid of intentionality, always available, always beyond interpretation. The

‘…operation of a structure-determined system is necessarily perfect… It is only in a referential domain…that an observer can claim that an error has occurred when his or her expectations are not fulfilled.’ (Maturana, 1980, cited in Hayles, 1999, p140)

If technology is ‘mode of revealing’ (Heidgger, 1997 p13), after it has revealed ‘other’, where then? Fisher (2009) describes capitalism’s problem of an ‘all-too successfully incorporated externality’ (p8) and an insatiable quest for territorialisation. Glitch too, can be appropriated, exoticised, repurposed. Yet anamorphously it reserves its place on the leading edge. As quickly as our pattern-seeking minds cognise, the glitch will out manoeuvre us. Perhaps the ‘where next?’ could more productively be interiorised. Fisher (2009) states:

‘Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic……To function effectively…you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability..’ (p34)

Could this dangerously volatile platform help us to develop the very ‘comportment’ towards technology that ‘draws the saving-power out of the danger’? (Kroker, 2002, online). These simultaneous tendencies, to ‘enframe’ dominant hegemony and reveal as a-lêtheia, are glitch’s ‘being with’. Glitch’s artefacts are borne of its dopplegänger heritage.

“..computing….Can exist in any kind of world you can imagine…in some place I call ‘other’” (Fredkin, 2011, online)

8 One way of thinking about glitches’ noises and errors, is in terms of alterity.

‘.. concept of noise….does not exist independently, but only in relation to what it is not. However complex or inclusive noise appears as a signifier, it is always a kind of negativity.’ (Menkman, 2011, p28)

Information theory hypothesises that transmitted data will always be subject to ‘noise’ or ‘interference’ contingent upon the precision of the technology employed, an error due to aberrant signal. Information received will not be equal to information sent. An interesting consideration arises from glitch as noise: Shannon’s (1948) theory that noise means exact transmission is impossible (p48) together with the noise added to sampled data in the digital to analogue conversion (where continuous variable signals are discretised) means noise is impossible to entirely mitigate, essential to discretisation. Noise can be viewed as our immanent nature, and attempts to filter it out, our drive for transcendence (Cloninger, 2011).

“…at bottom things are quantum mechanical…both digital (there’s only a discrete number of states that you can have) but it also has this…continuous aspect as well, and analogue aspect if you like…” (Lloyd, 2011, online)

Digitisation is effected through ‘socio-technical devices’ (Berry, 2011, online). Processes including stabilisation and filtering alter the essence of the analogue. Information: ‘necessarily has to be discarded…These subtractive method…produce new knowledges and methods for the control of reality…’(Berry, 2011, online) ‘…filtering noise…always involves an initial and sweeping value assessment which then excuses us from having to make subsequent, case-by-case value assessments based on specific individual positions’ (Cloninger, 2011, p36).

Encoded in the message itself, entropy refers to the amount of ‘surprise’ associated with a set of events in terms of information we receive in the message, and indicates our certainty (or uncertainty) about the source of

9 that information. It is intrinsic to technological and biological information- systems, complicated by the fact that information reduces yet depends upon uncertainty (Hayles, 1999, p32).

This ‘uncertainty’ was examined by Moradi (2004) who distinguished ‘pure’ glitch from ‘glitch-alike’ phenomena. This essentially delineated glitches that had been preconceived from those which hadn’t. Setting up conditions to create glitch may undermine its authenticity, but a pure glitch is generally not the product of artistic intervention, hence not art. Pure glitch relies upon capture and appropriation for its material, and in so doing is preconceived.

‘….it can be amusing to occupy oneself with the semantic loop that arises if one intends to fail and does so, whereupon one succeeds and therefore fails to fail, but in failing to fail one fails and therefore succeeds, and so fails again and succeeds again….’ (Priest, 2013, p1)

Though Priest’s ‘semantic loop’ illustrates the above stated Fig.2 Rauschenberg sitting before one of his ‘White Paintings’ in1951. These paintings predicament, the terms ‘success’ and changed with lighting and material accumulations on their surfaces, engaging unintentional and ‘failure’ are lossy compressions. The aleatory elements. Photo courtesy of http://www.emvergeoning.com/ sonic and visual art worlds’ appropriation of glitch presenced its artefacts beyond contractive binaries. Even when conditions are set up to create glitches, variables of chance remain, retaining the authenticity of glitch. No more so than in wetware.

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GLITCHING WETWARE

‘….glitches ultimately and finally “run” not on computers, but on human wetware in real-time.’ (Cloninger, 2011, p33)

Logically extending claims of subjectivity between woman and machine, the question arises: can glitches be inter-subjectively experienced, by wetware (a biological system containing water) such as a person? What would such a translation transform in our understanding of glitched performance artefacts? Of the tensions of alterity?

Lapses in concentration, Freudian slips, repetition and jitter, may be human glitching, but with uncertainty as a core component of complex Fig.3 The human glitch materialised – image of a typewriter from Kubrick’s film adaptation of King’s ‘The Shining’ courtesy of systems, such associations http://musigh.com/ are difficult to establish.

Lacan’s embrace of linguistics and emphasis on symbolism and signification, makes him an apt psychoanalyst for this research. But his oppositional positioning of culture and nature developmentally, has limited use for posthumans, deeply enmeshed in co-evolutionary alterity. Conversely, posthumanism’s constitution of trauma provides no personalised framework with which individuals can meaningfully interact and navigate.

Extracting ‘nature’ from our intertwined material and conceptual creations entails reverse engineering of epic proportions, and the question arises: what to do with the separated parts? Reconstruct? Do we have any epistemological alternatives from which to iterate advantage? The

11 responsibility we have for our constructions cannot be solved by isolated subjectivity, exclusively repository for effect.

‘… maybe the force isn’t so external. Maybe we develop an understanding of the glitch to provide an excuse for our own inabilities, natural as they may be’ (Piper Burns & Meaney, 2011, p74)

Hall (2000) investigates the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ as an interruption, rather than the inception of a lack, loss or division, hitherto unexposed. For Hall, lack is existentially present, initially obfuscated. The mirror stage is thereby: ‘[a] break from an expected or conventional flow of information or meaning…that results in a perceived accident or error’ (Menkman, 2011, p9). This break in meaning is one which we continuously, invariably presence through our attempts to reconstruct: ‘…representation is always constructed across a ‘lack, across a division, from the place of the Other’ (Hall, 2000, p18).

Our inability to find the lost referent results in a rich variety of reproductions and a dwelling in loss. Such ‘performances’ of subjectivity, through codification and repetition, can become means, things to consume. Our loss is deferred. Here, Ruti is of particular use - a Lacanian who challenges the disempowering alternatives of either defiantly resisting commodification and hegemony, or collapsing into nihilistic apathy. If self-referential subjectivity owes nothing to alterity, reducing sentience to immaterial information, the horrors of posthumanism and a foreboding disembodiment are not far behind: ‘…how could anyone think that consciousness in an entirely different medium would remain unchanged…?’ (Hayles, 1999, p1).

Doppelgänger excels in alluring us, despite its ability to ‘usurp’ its original (Bode, 2005, online), to explore the gravity of our representations. Early projection technologies possessed our doppelgänger unwittingly; later, filmic zombies intentionally detached it from its referent. In examining Foucault’s designation of the body as site for disciplinary practice and signifier for subjectivities, Hall (2000) comments on its reduction to ‘transcendental signifier’ (p24) without material agency. How then, to

12 materialise doppelgänger’s latent dissidence?

Lacan can be further utilised here with two notions: firstly the Real, a disruptive visceral force of unintelligibility which cannot be subsumed, that ‘apparent reality’ must suppress (and in doing so only further constitutes); secondly, ‘singularity’, an excess which does not relate to anything other than itself, rooted in repetition compulsion, it retrieves us from normative social reality. Singularity has an agitating affect as ‘stain on the horizon of cultural intelligibility’ (Santner, 2001, cited in Ruti 2012, p2). Hazardous as singularity is, it prevents personal meaninglessness, mere social subjectivity as signifier in a network. Singularity catalyses an unclassifiable ‘…existential bewilderment’ (Ruti, 2012, p4). Singularity is materially affective, not something to be achieved, always ongoing. Neither either fully symbolic, fully Real, anti-symbolic or anti-real; it mediates as reminder of the ‘tumultuous encounter between the two’ (Ruti, 2012, p9).

‘…we must forgo the idea that it could ever “say” anything about itself in a coherent or cognitive manner. But this does not mean that it does not “speak” or “express” meaning (along with nonmeaning)… something about the “reality” of the subject’s being that is more fundamental, more irrepressible, than its symbolic and imaginary attempts to maintain a consistent sense of self.’ (Ruti, 2012, p4).

An artwork’s ‘shudder’ (Adorno, 2013), distinct from experience whilst tying the object to a socially validated ‘empirical reality’, is the conceptual bridge between Lacan and doppelgänger. It betrays the futility of our trying to ‘manage’ the Real, the shadow side of doppelgänger, for in our very suppression we assert its presence. It exceeds us, always in a process of becoming. ‘Like all signifying processes [identity] is subject to the play of différence. It requires what is left outside, to consolidate the process.’ (Hall, 2000, p26).

An ‘in progress’ configuration of boundaries is presented, rather than a unified interiority. Externalised abjections are a surplus which, despite pervading oculacentrism, can be occluded. Internal homogeneity however,

13 belies this suppressing imperative, constantly threatening destabilisation. Glitch as doppelgänger, provides glimpses of the Real, through its rupture of symbolic structure, Lacan’s ‘Other’.

Other cannot be encountered, only alluded to by, and through, others. Other is not Big BrOther, its ideology of order prevents it (though not us) from knowing disorder. The consequences of maintaining two contradictory thought systems, Other’s order and doppelgänger’s glitching, creates compulsive, repetitive, strain. Our ‘agitated interpassivity’ (Fisher, 2009, p24) perhaps heralds Heidegger’s realisation of technology as metaphysics, as we aimlessly harvest its ‘standing reserve’.

‘For better or worse, in boredom and anxiety, the question of technology as destiny means that it is only by intensifying technology, by “thinking” technology to its roots…thereupon into its future… that we can hope to elucidate the dangers and possibilities …’ (Kroker, 2002, online)

In posthumans times, are the possibilities of technology being presented in high-definition-contrast? Technology’s ‘realisation’ has a dual aspect: surveillance culture and renewed extremism on one hand; a liberating breakdown of the humanist subject and dissolving of reductive universalist beliefs on the other. The project of technology is completed precisely because supportive structures, constraining as they may be, ‘drop away, leaving the edifice of a fully realized technical society which has "aimlessness" as its aim and 'using up' as its method’ (Kroker, 2006, online). The current resurgence of fundamentalism is for Hayles a backlash against the uncertainty and complexity of the posthuman era: “Convictions that can be maintained as ‘true’ at all times and in all places" (Hayles, 2006, online) are reassuring in their simplicity. It is undemanding to distance oneself from such behaviours, but such distancing opposes an ‘originary alterity…The plurality of beings…at the foundation…of Being’ (Nancy, 2000, p11).

14 Nancy’s co-originary alterity is articulated as ‘being-with’.

‘..one should only say "with," which would be a preposition that has no position of its own and is available for every position…."With" does not add itself to Being, but rather creates the immanent and intrinsic condition of presentation in general.’ (Nancy, 2000, p62)

Heidegger saw art as technology’s ‘turning’ from danger to saving power (an opening to different interpretation, revelatory rather than just logical). ‘…what makes art art…is the plural touching of the singular origin’ (Nancy, 2000, p14).

Art requires our perceptual engagement, our relation to glitch constitutes the artwork, as aesthetic end, entangled, inter-subjective vitality. The way we think and communicate about art, is just as critical.

GLITCHING LANGUAGE

Memmott's (2000) ‘Lexia Perplexia’ is a stunning example of creole: language expanded from pidgin language (formed when two language communities make contact leading to the loss of a range of vocabulary) to include original features, which neither of the parent languages had. The genesis of Memmott’s creolisation lies in English and computer code. Terms like ‘cell.f’ collide meaning and abstraction.

‘“Communification," which can be read as…conflating commodification and communication, arises when the circuit [in the work] is completed’ (Hayles 2005, online)

This inter-subjectivity of form and function is affective, like glitch. But without attention to the way we represent, and communicate about glitch, we risk our affectation becoming conceit or commodity (which as we have seen, share essential being) reinforcing humanist subjectivity and the division between reason and imagination. Language, emphatically glitched, is performative, an a-lêtheia to its function of documentation as authoritative, official proof.

15 ‘Experimental narratives… provide a capricious, provocative, and affectively resonant space..’ (Ruti, 2012, p125). Yet we use a remarkably compressed, hegemonic vocabulary: English is fifty percent redundant.

‘…half of what we write is determined by the structure … half is chosen freely….The Basic English vocabulary is limited to 850 words …. Joyce[‘s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’] on the other hand enlarges the vocabulary and is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content.’ (Shannon, 1948, p15)

Shannon’s comment attests to his theoretical leanings. ‘Rooted in symbolic logic…technologies carry a heritage of disambiguation’ (Galloway, 2004, p224). Heidegger in contrast, ‘…went to his death with the constant admonition that we are all ‘uninterpreted signs’’ (Kroker, 2002, online). Such a range of interpretations despite, or because of, redundant foundations.

‘Zipf’s law predicts the fact that, in natural languages, the most frequent word will be used about twice as many times as the second most frequent word— and that word will be used about twice as many times as the fourth most frequent word.’ (Liu, 2006, online)

Human language involves a transcendent linguistic system and semiotic plays on meaning, as well as real-time, affective utterances, thus being both transcendent and immanent. Glitched language is ‘never merely affect, because it always retains a residue…of semiotic meaning and linguistic structure’ (Cloninger, 2011, p31).

Where poststructuralism uses the very forms and concepts it deems dysfunctional, creolisation creates Borges’ ‘vertiginous’ chimeras. Without totalising or fixing ‘…creolization opens on a radically new dimension of reality…’ (Glissant, 1995, cited in Burns, 2008, p2). Glissant, says Burns, distinguishes creolisation from hybridity, the results of which are predictable. Creolisation however, elicits singularity.

Lacan identifies Joyce as singular, because of his reconfiguration of, and rebellion through, language. Language breaks with the signification of Other and draws from the Real, though access to the Real through this

16 singular language involves chaos. One word from the first page of ‘Finnegan's Wake’ (Joyce, 1939) explains the book’s unpopularity (yet still), whilst displaying the Real’s influence:

‘bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntro varrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk’ (Joyce, 1939, p1)

Un-tempered, the Real can extract us from the social context to psychotic effect. Yet it is only because of this context that singularity is meaningful (Ruti, 2012, p8) and it is this very subjective disintegration, this precarious interplay, which vitalises the signifier. Encountering the Real, the signifier is animated by its energies and agitated to re-negotiate its territory; in doing so it captures something of the Real. Meaning-making becomes means and end, intrinsically renewing, generatively energising. ‘…insofar as it remains enigmatic, beyond easy comprehension, it calls forth a countless number of interpretive efforts’ (Ruti, 2012, p119-120) and a ‘chain of differentiated, open-ended significations’ (Hoens and Pluth, 2002, cited by Ruti, 2012, p120).

‘”Strangeness" refers to the fact that each singularity is another access to the world. At the point where we would expect "some thing," a substance or a procedure, a principle or an end, a signification, there is nothing but the manner, the turn of the other access, which conceals itself in the very gesture wherein it offers itself to us-and whose concealing is the turning itself.’ (Nancy, 2000, p14)

Joyce stayed on this edge, closer to the void than would be tolerable for many. Absence of meaning allows for an encounter, vicariously for the reader, of that which exceeds symbolic order. The signifier thus envisioned, defies eternal subjugation by both the Real and symbolic. By the Real because structure (through redundancy) remains; by the symbolic because meaning and form are disrupted. It is this meaning and form that marries it to glitch and makes it of unique value to posthumans. Bridging epistêmê and technê, master of neither, glitched language relates to us directly, viscerally, whilst connecting us in a ‘distributed network’ (Bennett, 2012). Counter-intuitively it gains momentum from

17 multiple interpretations, without losing its essence.

‘Mutation is crucial because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction….the productive potential of randomness…recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both antagonistic and intrinsic to information…. mutation as a decisive event in the psycholinguistics of information’ (Hayles, 1999, p33).

“We are only seeking Man… We need mirrors… A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world…. developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.”

(Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’ 1970 p39)

18 CHAPTER THREE: Methods

“….there are things, situations, that no one has dared to externalize, but which the mind has produced by accident in a moment of aberration, of madness, call it what you will. At the next stage, the idea becomes flesh and blood”

(Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’ 1970 p39)

PERFORMING GLITCH

Performative social currency has boomed with the advent of digitalism. Recording and dissemination capabilities abound, blurring distinctions of performer and non-performer. Reproduction is extensible through post- production. Dissemination capabilities compound our preoccupation to iteratively craft our idealised dopplegänger, but this focus on representation alienates us and reinforces authorship of Other, much as in computation and language.

As postdigital subjects, sceptical of the historical dividing of epistêmê from technê, we value ‘critical sensory experience’ (Menkman, 2011, p34) in dealing with materiality and ideology. Materiality is commonality, even in a highly mediated world. Producer and consumer may be two, but the thin line of division is temporal, and technology is reducing it further.

Performance has exceptional status as demonstration of technique, proficiency, mastery of body and mind: control. It drives us to heights and depths through repetition that anaesthetises us to its processural significance. Recordings have for some time been ends: can glitch’s defibrillation revitalise process? ‘[Art’s] meaning lies not in created objects but in the acts of creating...’ (Small, 1998, p140).

Whilst the recording of these experiments serves as documentation, it also provides a social function and context for the performance, an ‘objective’ in the mind of participants which would denote a set of

19 practises and conventions, allowing them to accept the conditions of the experiment without much examination. Recordings contain the promises and risks of dopplegänger; performers are acutely aware of this.

‘At stake here…the limits of what I might become and the limits of what I might risk knowing’ (Butler, 2001, online)

Perhaps music recordings occupy a privileged position in this respect, able to reveal musical qualities more intently and intimately than in live settings, simultaneously concealing unwanted sounds and interference. The recorded performance has a conceivably infinite audience ahead, and can be paused, repeated; audited.

Recordings signify achievement and evaluation, such that they can reify to commandeer referents, inverting the signified-signifier lineage. Recordings become the artist, who now conforms to the recording or risks being perceived as error themselves. Recording technologies exacerbate a musician’s vulnerabilities with critical charge. Tension between stability and flux is palpable in performers with a dual-function of signification and referentiality.

EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH DESIGN

‘…anything can be noise if it enters a channel as an unwelcome or unintended addition to the message….This is disruptive presence’ (Nunes, 2011, p67-8).

To create conditions that would interrupt signal transmission using ‘external’ noise, a short series of experimental music performance recordings were organised. Three participants, two male one female, aged forty to forty seven were recorded. All were professional jazz musicians, with decades of experience in performance and recording to their credit, all were given minimal instructions to play, and told that the performance would be recorded only once. Subjects were known to the researcher, and

20 it was hoped would consequently be unguarded whilst playing, and in discussing their experience of the recording. The setting was chosen as an informal space, to aid relaxation for performers.

In the first experiment, both musicians were asked to play along in any way they liked to a Jamey Aebersold B flat blues cycle, which was played to them through headphones. The artistic intervention was by way of the playalong track having been overlaid in one section, with noises of an inappropriate nature. Ambiguity here serves to emphasise the intervention’s content (inappropriateness as conflicting with recognised social standards or conventions) over its form (the specific noises) which could divert attention from the experiment’s intended scope.

For the second experiment, a written score was chosen by the musician, on the basis that improvisation (as a variable) may reduce ‘charge’ for the musician (arguably impossible to play a ‘wrong’ note). Inappropriate behaviour on the part of the researcher formed the intervention. Otherwise conditions were replicated as above.

LIMITATIONS

• Sample size (three) • Recording equipment not sensitive enough to detect subtle glitching • Subjects may have anticipated something ‘unusual’ looming • Conditions inadequate to elicit charge for detectable glitch • ‘….indulging a desire to glitch or to capture and collect one, feels strangely at odds with the very nature of the glitch itself. Its pure incontestable status as fleeting error or accident is completely contested when it’s captured or re-purposed’ (Moradi, 2011, p151). • “……we don’t make experiments on information directly…While I can take a physical representation…and turn it into an informational representation, it’s not at all obvious how to go the other way…and that is a problem if you want to make experiments” (Markopoulou- Kalamara, 2011, online).

21

AN EXPLANATION OF THE BIAGRAM

In the English language ‘biagram’ has no common usage, ergo usefully serves as alternative to ‘diagram’ (‘di’ indicating division where ‘bi’ is a more open ‘two-ness’). It also serves to foreground a conventional method of visual representation. Though reiterating an oxymoronic position (visual schemata representing something beyond visual schema) its inclusion aids explication of a conceptual framework essential to this paper. Importantly, it is not an exhaustive framework, and is biased towards the representation of existing semiotics, rather than open-ended, un-interpreted possibility, for which it is ill- equipped. Consequently, in the latter area, it serves mostly as a point of departure.

The biagram denotes the experience of glitched wetware.

From a starting point of discrete variables (participants’ understanding of their possible functions, of the researchers’ possible functions, of the function of the environment, the recording, and so on) participants interpret the significance of the variables which sets the value of the ‘charge’. At the point where function is initiated (selected function being

22 set into practical) the charge (value already set) is initiated. During this phase, the artisitic intervention is performed. This sequence takes place in the red area of the biagram, which represents the procedural, linear phase

The glitch signifies initiation of the green phase, loss of control and ‘pure’ experience, ‘void of meaning….of unforseen incomprehension’ (Menkman, 2011, p30). Green here indicates the possibilities for new constellations of understanding and materialisation (glitch itself exceeds understanding) and diminishes as it moves away from glitch. Post-glitch, interpretation is possible: on the left of the biagram we see the interrupted materiality reducing with increased interpretation, ultimately into a defined spatiotemporal signifier (arrow). This returns to the original position of discretisation. Yet even when interpretation is re-booted, the feedback capacity of glitch remains, as either:

1. Reinforced error-correction protocols: this includes interpretation of glitch as a threat, or appropriation of glitch where ‘affect [is] surrendered to effect’ (Menkman, 2011, p 35), where digital tropes become established as ends, and where glitch theory or practice are intentionally established as incomprehensible to some, hence elitist. 2. Reduced error-correction protocols and related expansion of variables/ possible functions.

It should be noted that post-glitch, but before interpretation is re-booted, there remains crossover potential of interpretation and non-interpretation: glitched language. This intervention challenges notions of ownership, authorship and autonomy, and its artefacts remain equivocal, liminal, ciphered.

“…whatever form my proposed test were to take, and whatever method I used to put it into execution, there was always the possibility that I was behaving exactly as in a dream.”

(Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’ 1970 p27)

23 CHAPTER FOUR: Results

“…... the recording instruments registered a profusion of signals, fragmentary indications…which in fact defeated all attempts at analysis….. No two reactions to the stimuli were the same. Sometimes the instruments almost exploded under the violence of the impulses, sometimes there was total silence; it was impossible to obtain a repetition of any previously observed phenomenon…….Structural homologues were discovered, not unlike….the reciprocal interaction of energy and matter…the finite and the infinite.”

(Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’ 1970 p27)

PRESENTATION OF RESULTS

All participants maintained composure sufficiently to continue playing. Such was their focus on the functional objective that the output was in most cases, substantially unaffected. Listening to the recordings aurally without visual cues, glitching is undetectable in two of the performances. In once case this is partly attributable to the piece being played and in another case partly to the expressivity of the participant’s performance: Sparse use of notes and/or sustained notes contribute to the glitch remaining (audibly) unrevealed.

In all cases, to varying degrees, a discharge of laughter was manifest, and the degree of abreaction directly correlated to the level of disruption in performance.

“…it was engaged in a never-ending process of transformation, an 'ontological auto metamorphosis.”

(Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’ 1970 p13)

24 CHAPTER FIVE: Analysis

"You must know that science is concerned with phenomena rather than causes.”

(Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’ 1970 p40)

INTERPRETING RESEARCH ABOUT NON-INTERPRETATION?

The very agentic relationships and rational analysis which posthumanism interrogates are now employed, though speculatively. The use of italics is intended as an interjection of noise to affect reception of stated analyses, presencing the problematic stated above, loosening any deigned authority. It may or may not contain truthfulness. Horror vacui!

Firstly, dealing with the continued functionality of participants, we could posit that performative objectives are tantamount.

‘In the case of minor glitches, the informational inputs, encoding or decoding….are revealed to be…‘erroneous’, while the rest of the system or the parts processing the data flows within that system …continue to function, and display the error-ridden output unscrutinized’ (Menkman, 2011, p27).

Participants may or may not have scrutinised their output, no measures were in place to capture this. The researcher may have scrutinised the output with a different set of criteria to the participants. In a short-scale feedback loop, scrutiny on the part of participant or researcher may have impacted behaviour and error-correction (or for the researcher, error- selection) protocols may have been tactically engaged.

Feedback from the least glitched participant suggested that the intervention wasn’t obvious enough and needed to be forced. We can investigate whether the degree of intervention is significant:

25

If DV<3 then: PF.choose(TRUE, NULL)*pow(CHIAROSCURO,3)

If II CHIAROSCURO == INTERMEDIATE MAJOR then: PF CHIAROSCURO (TRUE, NULL) = HIGH MAJOR

If PF CHIAROSCURO (TRUE, NULL) == HIGH MAJOR then: AI = η to the power of not very much

Fig.5 Coded representation DV: Discrete variables; PF: prescribed function; II: Interpretation initiated; AI: Artistic intervention

Here we see clearly that where fewer discrete variables are available (with a critical level of two or less) the performer experiences increased tension of the opposites (contrast of success or failure) in a limited range of choices from which to select a function. This relationship resembles a bell- curve, with an optimal level of choice beyond which diminishing contrast may apply. The interpretation, if heighted in perceived importance, compounds this contrast, although this has an unclear relationship with improvisation. In some cases, explicitly encouraged improvisation decreased contrast; in others it appears to have increased it. More research is needed to ascertain if the suitability of available discrete variables to performers is significant, moreover research into the nature of ‘suitability’ as self-reported versus measured, would be advantageous. Overall, there is a positive correlation between contrast and charge, and an inverse correlation between charge, and intervention level required.

The undetectablility of the glitch is harder to locate in terms of causality, as glitching occurs in the green phase of the biagram, where dynamic interplay between variables is complex, and glitch artefacts are within the framework of the biagram, though glitch is not. We can propose that either artistic intervention is insufficient or that prescribed function is high in value. We can also connect a meagre use of notes (information)

26 contributing to the glitch remaining (audibly) unrevealed. This has interesting connotations when we consider notions of entropy:

‘… for Wiener, increases in information, signal a decrease in entropy and an increase in order….contrast this..with Claude Shannon’s statistical analysis…which pairs an increase in information with an increase in entropy..’ (Nunes, 2011, p12)

Taking into account the difficultly of establishing a significant correspondence here, we can turn to Shannon’s ‘Series of Approximations’:

REPRESENTING AND SPEEDILY IS AN GOOD APT OR COME CAN DIFFERENT NATURAL HERE HE THE A IN CAME THE TOOF TO EXPERT GRAY COME TO FURNISHES THE LINE MESSAGE HAD BE THESE.

Fig.6 In this case of ‘first-order word approximation,’ standard sequences have been formed with words selected independently, whilst preserving their ‘appropriate frequencies’. The substitutions do not impact the sentence’s legibility (indetectable glitches) though like glitch meaning is temporarily suspended.

The significance of the discharge is predicated on determining its chronological placement: whether it is post-glitch or an artefact of glitch, and indeed if any significant difference exists between the two.

‘…when the glitch opens up to the realm of symbolic or metaphorical connotations, the interruption shifts from being a strictly informational or technological actuality, into a more complex post-procedural phenomenon’ (Menkman, 2011, p27).

The discharge may positively correlate to a number of pre-glitch conditions, all beyond the scope of the research. Laughter as discharge

27 was an unanticipated and consistent finding, and should regarded seriously in future research.

“…often ontology can confuse you rather than help you….if you’re in the early stages of building a theory…so it’s easier to talk about information… and hold off the interpretation” (Markopoulou-Kalamara, 2011, online.)

CREOCALITY

Computation is fundamentally shifting our conceptions of the world and ourselves. For Hayles (2006) it has by design, unlike most languages, ‘two addressees’: humans and intelligent machines. This double responsibility explains almost totally its “performance and processural nature” (online). Computation is both text and mechanism. For Hayles it takes us beyond epistemological margins, beyond fixed ideas of presence and absence, into pattern and randomness, emergence and chaos, infecting our logos (and that of our institutions) to undermine their sovereignty profoundly, a seismic shift away from the alignment of rational thought and human society with ‘natural’ order.

Kroker (2006, online) expands, referring to Virillio’s ‘accident’ in computational terms, as its inability to renew itself, due to it lacking symbolic exchange value. Text, says Kroker, is the symbol of exchange through which computation can renew itself.

The potential of creolisation in re-integrating glitch is stated, but its development in any concrete sense is outside the scope of this work. It mediates subject and object beyond experience of glitch, and as such is a means of transition, context for glitch artefacts, and signifies the continued possibility of criticality.

Memmott’s (2000) glitched language, situated between human and computer language attends to the ‘co-originary status of subjectivity and electronic technologies’ (Hayles, 2005, online) where man and machine

28 create one another through ‘multiple recursive loops.’ The metamorphoses of creolisation here attest to our own, in experiencing the work.

‘Illegible texts hint at origins too remote for us to access, and interfaces the human body through this illegibility, reminding us that the computer is also transforming too rapidly for us to grasp. The text announces its difference from a writer, and moreover a writer whose operations we cannot wholly grasp in all their semiotic complexity. Illegibility is not simply a lack of meaning, then, but a signifier of distributed cognitive processes…’ (Hayles, 2005, online)

Seaman (2005, online) comments: ‘…the noise that permeates the text … ensures that meanings are always unstable and that totalizing interpretations are impossible.’

Creolisation in glitch research requires experimentation and an intentional effort to connect subjectivities of relevance to researcher in conjunction with participants. Given that computation contains structures of diegesis (evidence of human-machine inter-subjectivity) criticality is essential in the creation and etymological awareness of glitched language. Adaptability apace with epistêmê and technê, should also be maintained, to ensure mutation (not elitism). Focus on generative real-time (practice- based) potential would be welcomed to ground creolisation materially. Naming is ordering, unless, through intent, it remains a meeting ground between order and disorder.

‘…information is a process (and not a state) in which form is made out of non- form … information derives its value from the inherent undecidability of matter. Mediating between form and matter, information contains a contradiction …. while reproducing materiality, information at the same time suppresses it.’ (Cooper, 1986, p305)

29

A CRITIQUE OF CRITIQUE

‘A single being is a contradiction in terms’ (Nancy, 2000, p11). In reconthinkuring alterity, one realises it is the tools of ‘otherness’ being applied to ‘other’. We need to be vigilant that our interest in, and use of, human-glitch, is not a form of autolysis that now equates object with abject. Research cannot uphold its own divisions enough to claim objectivity; ‘there can be no such thing as an entirely self-contained thought or idea’ (Bowman, 1998, p258).

Questions arise as to how critique can be applied to any ‘otherness’? Perhaps it can only ethically be applied as ‘hetero-ipseity’, critique of critique as ‘within’.

‘perception of essence…entails a ‘turning toward’ at precisely the point critical reflection would turn away. Since essential meanings are not imposed from without, but emanate from within, they elude logic and theory…essences can only be discerned by attending to the thing itself.’ (Bowman, 1998, p258).

Bowman’s distinctions are predicated on the subjective delineation of inner and outer. Subjectivity, when aroused by exteriority, can turn towards, as a Heideggerian ‘turning’ which potentiates the saving power of ‘being singular-plural’. A turning inward.

Subjectivity, in attending to the revealing of self, apprehends more fully other. This is reflexive epistemology.

‘…in the individual expression of my own life I would have brought about the immediate expression of your life, and so in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my authentic nature, my human, communal nature. Our productions would be as many mirrors from which our natures would shine forth.’ (Marx, 1975, cited in Sayers, 2011, p22)

Glitch signifies a rupture of linearity. It discloses the neutered authorship of isolated subjectivity, and reveals transmission as commune-ication, a

30 priori to the material and meaning of message. Complex systems are not ‘determined by what is contained within [their] components, but by the nature of their interactions’ (Chevaillier, 2008, p4).

‘The relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves’ (James, 1911, pxii-xiii).

Glitch can foreground the relationships between things, as matters of experience, dissolving hard distinctions and exhaustive categories of theory and theorising.

‘…the work of theory is to unravel the very ground on which it stands. To introduce questions and uncertainties in those places where formerly there was some seeming consensus about what one did and how one went about it.’ (Rogoff, 2004, online).

Perhaps then, we need to reveal the question rather than the answer. ‘What motivates my approach is less the search for answers and more the cultivation of searching as a process of continuous questioning..’ (Cooper,

2001, p323).

“It’s not a matter of what I want, it's a matter of what's possible."

"Such as what?"

"That's the point, I don't know….. "

(Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’ 1970 p42)

31 CHAPTER SIX: Conclusion

"…a dilemma that we are not equipped to solve. We are the cause of our own sufferings…[glitches] behave strictly as a kind of amplifier of our own thoughts. Any attempt to understand the motivation of these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men. Before we can proceed with our research, either our own thoughts or their materialized forms must be destroyed.”

(Stanislaw, Lem ‘Solaris’ 1970 p72)

SUMMARY

Glitch has been explored through materiality and alterity, taking into account its-built alterity as doppelgänger, the shadow side of this having been examined through psychoanalysis. Glitch as technology-revealing and symbiotically human-revealing, has been explored, theoretically through posthumanism, information theory, and Heidegger, and materially, through recorded music performances.

Creolisation as glitched language and means of transitioning cycles from glitch to binary dialectics and back, of actuating a shift in criticality towards a greater realisation of our posthuman nature, has been considered.

Experiments were conducted to provide means of further wandering through these trajectories, testing ideas and providing an opportunity for the researcher to turn inwards in the hope of realising inter-subjectively the rich ambiguity of glitch. The biagram was conceived as a unified system, and is presented as such.

It is with regret that these themes and beginnings have not been more fully probed.

32 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

The analysis and modelling of this work is conjectural, propositional, perhaps of best use in providing impetus or refinements for future work (three experiments being insufficient as anything more than starting point). Objectivity cannot resolve its own dearth of meaning. Rather than pouring the humanities into this ravine, information theory has been repurposed as intensely meaning-making. Though now naturalised, it was in origin one of many interpretations, never untethered to objectives.

Research making fuller use of the interruption of form (outside academic concerns, functional as they may be) would be useful. Comprehensive accounting of deconstructionism’s linguistic studies would be fruitful, as would consideration of Kristeva claim that sexuality is ‘nexus between language and society [in addition to] drives and the socio-symbolic order’ (Kristeva 1984, p84). The masculinity of information theory, consequently language and discourse is ripe for research. Romanyshyn’s (1989) exposition on the conception of linear perspective during the Enlightenment era, perhaps in conjunction with Small’s (1998) critique of the same period’s impact on representation, meta-narratives and gender bias would be interesting. An exegesis of the antonym for ‘interpretation’ additionally, would be welcomed.

Curt Clonginer (2011, p39) asks ‘how can we glitch our own criteria of glitch reception?’ Perhaps we can also ask ‘how would we recognise glitch?’ ‘How do we respond to it and therefore ourselves?’ ‘What happens when singularity is estranged from its social context?’

CONCLUSION

Digitalism affords us frequent glitches, but as Hayles (2006, online) points out, we needn’t assume that glitches, gaps and breaks have any more authority that the functional building and coding of systems that ‘work’ (or fail and are reiterated). We would struggle to meet the linear requirements of being in this world without such systems. Systems, ‘a set

33 of elements standing in interrelations’ (Von Bertalanffy, 1988, p55) contain ‘a discontinuity in knowledge between the parts and the whole’ (Paulson, 1988, p108).

Creolisation creates the possibility of dialect between function and ‘not dysfunction’ (an atopia of meaning, a double negation).

Glitch prevents us from disowning forces beyond our awareness, but more importantly, liberates us from the dichotomies of individuality as context. Indeed, noise ‘can play a productive role in complex systems by forcing them to reorganize at a higher level of complexity’ (Hayles, 2005, online).

For communication to be successful, messages must be received and understood. The glitch is beckoning, but if we bring it into our frame of reference we reduce its promise of revealing the inner workings of our humachinery. Posthumans, without attentional or intentional resource, create conditions of error as failing to encounter Real source. The reflective surfaces of technology can blind as well as enlighten. The break in transmission we seek through glitch as doppelgänger may re-presence shadows; no matter, no mind, how ominous. ominous |ˈämənəs| adjective giving the impression that something bad…is going to happen; threatening; inauspicious: from Latin omen omen |ˈōmən| noun an event regarded as a portent of good or evil; prophetic significance

"It is understandable that some people should weep over the present void…But those who…have found…a new way of looking…will never feel the need to lament that the world is error…" (Foucault, 1990, p330)

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Seaman, Bill (2005) Comments on ‘Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia’ in Electronic Book Review, available at http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/creole [accessed 10 August 2014]

Shannon, Claude (1948) ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ in The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27

Small, Christopher (1998) ‘Musicking: the meanings of performing and listening’, Hanover; London: University Press of New England

Virillio, Paul and Lotringer, Sylvére (authors), Taormina, Michael (trans) (2005) ‘The Accident of Art’ New York; Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)

Von Bertalanffy, Ludwig (1988) ‘General System Theory - Foundations, Development, Applications’ New York : George Braziller

38 APPENDIX 1 – WHY INCLUDE TEXT FROM STANISLAW LEM’S ‘SOLARIS’?

In a parallel dissertation, I use this novel as an imaginal tool to explore the glitch through Lem’s oceanic vision of Solaris, and man’s predisposition to anthropomorphise, always constrained by his own imagination, most notably his self-conception.

In many ways, I was increasingly drawn to the idea of using of a novel to deal with the rich ambiguity of the glitch. Similarly, I was materially drawn to Solaris. Life mirroring artifice, I increasingly saw Solaris everywhere I looked. Katherine Hayles I discovered includes a Lem novel in one of her recent books. The direct Polish to English translation which I buy in its audiobook format to expedite my reading of the 1970 translation (via French), replaces ‘double’ with ‘doppleganger’ in one place. The same recording literally glitches by doubling and fractionally phasing one of Kelvin’s long explanations of phenomena on Solaris. A film (The Congress) at my local cinema is released, based on Solaris. In reading Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism’ Tarkovsky’s film adaptation of Solaris is cited. I couldn’t help but get a little glitchy.

No doubt the confinements of a dissertation – whilst cited as a foundational grounding and explored with some degree of self- consciousness I hope - could have been better used as grounding for a divergent phase of research and exploration (which Solaris beckoned, or did it simply present me with my own desires quasi-manifest?)

This in turn could have been folded back on itself, in an origami infinity mirror. Perhaps it will beckon me yet.

Despite all the Solarisist’s best efforts and decades of research, they stop short at categorising rather than truly realising, the what and why of Solaris. In an interview1 Lem states that he wanted to create “a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images” and that is “neither human nor humanoid”. His ambitious aim to “cut all threads leading to the personification ….. so that the contact could not follow the human, interpersonal pattern” was perhaps always destined for reverence by its readers, but on the part of the protagonist, failure. Not just because his unresolved guilt and fears can no longer remain undisclosed in close proximity to Solaris, but because of the form of Lem’s medium – the novel (subsequently two films).

Lem discusses how the Ocean “penetrated the superficial established manners, conventions and methods of linguistic communication, and entered, in its own way, into minds of the people…” though the form of Solaris ultimately does not attend to its own linguistic conventions.

1 Lem, Stanislaw (2002) available at http://english.lem.pl/index.php/arround-lem/adaptations/soderbergh/147-the- solaris-stationThe [accessed 13 August 2014]

39 Notwithstanding it is a cult work of literature and an engrossing read. I happened to be reading it as I worked on this paper and it pulled me into its orbit, in a mesmerizing acceptance of its void-like inexplicability.

“The Solarian globe …. neither built nor created anything translatable into our language…Hence a description had to be replaced by analysis - (obviously an impossible task)…. This gave rise to symetriads, asymetriads and mimoids - strange semi-constructions scientists were unable to understand; they could only describe them in a mathematically meticulous manner….the result of over a hundred years' efforts to enclose in folios what was not human and beyond human comprehension; what could not have been translated into human language - or into anything else.”

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APPENDIX 2 - PARTICIPANTS

Sarah Dhillon – pianist, composer & teacher

Stefano Kalonaris, guitarist, composer & teacher

Albi Gravener – saxophonist, composer & theatre performer

photograph courtesy of Lina B Frank available at http://theatregloucestershire.net/whats-on/2010/4/9/ausform-platform- of-performance

41 APPENDIX 3 – THE SERIES OF APPROXIMATIONS TO ENGLISH

(from Shannon’s (1948) ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’

To give a visual idea of how this series of processes approaches a language, typical sequences in the approximations to English have been constructed and are given below. In all cases we have assumed a 27- symbol “alphabet,” the 26 letters and a space.

1. Zero-order approximation (symbols independent and equiprobable).

XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ ZLPWCFWKCYJ FFJEYVKCQSGHYD QPAAMKBZAACIBZLHJQD.

2. First-order approximation (symbols independent but with frequencies of English text).

OCRO HLI RGWR NMIELWIS EU LL NBNESEBYA TH EEI ALHENHTTPA OOBTTVA NAH BRL.

3. Second-order approximation (digram structure as in English).

ON IE ANTSOUTINYS ARE T INCTORE ST BE S DEAMY ACHIN D ILONASIVE TUCOOWE AT TEASONARE FUSO TIZIN ANDY TOBE SEACE CTISBE.

4. Third-order approximation (trigram structure as in English).

IN NO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT FROURE BIRS GROCID PONDENOME OF DEMONSTURES OF THE REPTAGIN IS REGOACTIONA OF CRE.

5. First-order word approximation. Rather than continue with tetragram structure it is easier and better to jump at this point to word units. Here words are chosen independently but with their appropriate frequencies.

REPRESENTING AND SPEEDILY IS AN GOOD APT OR COME CAN DIFFERENT NATURAL HERE HE THE A IN CAME THE TOOF TO EXPERT GRAY COME TO FURNISHES THE LINE MESSAGE HAD BE THESE.

6. Second-order word approximation. The word transition probabilities are correct but no further structure is included.

THE HEAD AND IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH WRITER THAT THE CHARACTER OF THIS POINT IS THEREFORE ANOTHER METHOD FOR THE LETTERS THAT THE TIME OF WHO EVER TOLD THE PROBLEM FOR AN UNEXPECTED.

42 The resemblance to ordinary English text increases quite noticeably at each of the above steps. Note that these samples have reasonably good structure out to about twice the range that is taken into account in their construction. Thus in (3) the statistical process insures reasonable text for two-letter sequences, but fourletter sequences from the sample can usually be fitted into good sentences. In (6) sequences of four or more words can easily be placed in sentences without unusual or strained constructions. The particular sequence of ten words “attack on an English writer that the character of this” is not at all unreasonable. It appears then that a sufficiently complex stochastic process will give a satisfactory representation of a discrete source.

The first two samples were constructed by the use of a book of random numbers in conjunction with (for example 2) a table of letter frequencies. This method might have been continued for (3), (4) and (5), since digram, trigram and word frequency tables are available, but a simpler equivalent method was used.

To construct (3) for example, one opens a book at random and selects a letter at random on the page. This letter is recorded. The book is then opened to another page and one reads until this letter is encountered. The succeeding letter is then recorded. Turning to another page this second letter is searched for and the succeeding letter recorded, etc.

A similar process was used for (4), (5) and (6). It would be interesting if further approximations could be constructed, but the labor involved becomes enormous at the next stage.

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