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UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Text Machines: Mnemotechnical Infrastructure as Exappropriation Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cj9797z Author McCoy, Jared Publication Date 2020 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Text Machines: Mnemotechnical Infrastructure as Exappropriation DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English by Jared McCoy Dissertation Committee: Professor Andrzej Warminski, Chair Professor Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan Professor Geoffrey Bowker 2020 © 2020 Jared McCoy Dedication TO MY PARENTS for their boundless love and patience …this requires a comprehensive reading of Heidegger that is hard, you know, to do quickly. Paul de Man ii Contents Contents ................................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. v Curriculum Vitae ..................................................................................................................... vi Abstract of the Dissertation .................................................................................................... vii I. History of Inscription ............................................................................................................ 1 Inscription / Dialectics .......................................................................................................... 1 Grammar / Rhetoric ........................................................................................................... 12 Prosthesis / Hypomnesis .................................................................................................... 24 History / Danger ................................................................................................................ 39 Exergue .............................................................................................................................. 47 II. Crisis of Crisis ..................................................................................................................... 50 Crisis / Madness ................................................................................................................. 50 Allegory / Irony .................................................................................................................. 54 Dialectics / Aesthetics ........................................................................................................ 73 Causality / Tropology ......................................................................................................... 78 History / Translation .......................................................................................................... 84 Dialectics / Deconstruction ................................................................................................ 88 III. Semiontology ................................................................................................................... 97 Promise / Articulation ........................................................................................................ 97 iii Synchrony / Diachrony ..................................................................................................... 100 Arbitrariness / Machination ............................................................................................. 112 IV. ‘Good’ Nihilism ............................................................................................................... 124 Positionality / Event ......................................................................................................... 124 Reification / Forgetting .................................................................................................... 131 Reification / Personification ............................................................................................. 137 Reification / Constellation ................................................................................................ 141 Nihilism / Dialectics .......................................................................................................... 146 Automation / Autoimmunity ............................................................................................ 152 Digestion / Translation .................................................................................................... 167 V. Thematization of Themes ................................................................................................ 173 Thematization / Recursivity ............................................................................................. 173 Thematization / Facticity ................................................................................................. 176 Thematization / Blindness ................................................................................................ 187 Thematization / Tautology ............................................................................................... 194 Thematization / Sacrifice ................................................................................................. 216 Thematization / Citation .................................................................................................. 222 Thematization / Solicitation ............................................................................................. 244 VI. Machine Reading ............................................................................................................ 258 Inscription / Magnitude ................................................................................................... 258 Inscription / Singularity .................................................................................................... 268 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 276 iv Acknowledgements I must express the deepest gratitude to Professor Andrzej Warminski for leading me out beyond the pillars of aesthetic ideology and for having the good faith to let me find my way back – to Professor R. Radhakrishnan, for sharing an unflagging commitment to the theories and genres that bear the regrettable prefix ‘post’ – and to Professor Geoffrey Bowker for opening my eyes to the true shape of contemporary knowledge infrastructures. I would also like to thank Professor David L. Pike for illuminating the empyrean heights of epic poetry through the catacombs of critical theory and Professor Madhavi Menon whose daemonic grace and sublime perversity excited my mind with desire to know so many years ago. This text would not have been woven without the organizational powers afforded me by Citavi and Hypothes.is and I am greatly indebted to the engineers and educators who have devoted themselves to building and tuning these unparalleled mnemotechnical instruments, especially Patrick Hilt, Jeremy Dean and Jon Udell who have been nothing but generous with their time and resources. v Vita Jared McCoy 2010 B.A. in English Literature, American University, D.C. 2011 Humanities Predoctoral Fellowship, University of California, Irvine 2012 M.A. in English Literature, University of California, Irvine 2012-19 Teaching Assistant, Writing and Composition, University of California, Irvine 2017 Nora Folkenflik & Summer Dissertation Fellowship, University of California, Irvine 2020 Ph. D in English Literature, University of California, Irvine FIELDS OF STUDY Critical Theory, Continental Philosophy, Digital Humanities, Knowledge Infrastructure & Visualization vi Abstract of the Dissertation Text Machines: Mnemotechnical Infrastructure as Exappropriation by Jared McCoy Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Irvine, 2020 Professor Andrzej Warminski, Chair Text Machines explores the rhetorical and technological resonances of Martin Heidegger’s “event of appropriation” and Paul de Man’s “material event.” The crucial questions here are what it would mean to approach the “text machine” of which de Man writes as a “question concerning technology” and whether the ironic, allegorical and inhuman aspects of this textual machination will ultimately resist machine learning and algorithmic translation. I argue that mnemotechnics is the task of thinking the historiography of forgetting, which is to say, the task of representing or, at least, charting that which might be said to “generate history” by dint of the “unreadability” of its inscription. In tracing the genealogy of inscription through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Saussure, Husserl, Adorno, Benjamin, Althusser, Derrida, Stiegler and many others, I show how mnemotechnical infrastructure can only be approached by way of a mnemotechnical exappropriation, which is to say, a “tautological” thinking that constitutes the “only possibility for thinking what dialectic can only veil.” In the inhumanity of the “text machine,” I read the technological “danger” that faces and defaces the humanities as the “saving power” by which our collective memory is dissolved and resolved through the mechanism of thematization and citation. vii I. History of Inscription