A DIGITAL MEDIA POETICS By MAURO CARASSAI A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2014 1 © 2014 Mauro Carassai 2 To Paola Pizzichini for making me who I am 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my dissertation supervisor Dr. Gregory L. Ulmer, my committee members Dr. Robert B. Ray, Dr. Terry A. Harpold, and Dr. Jack Stenner and all the people who have read sections of this work while in progress and provided invaluable comments, in particular Dr. Adalaide Morris and Dr. N. Katherine Hayles. I also thank my friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 7 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................. 8 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER 1 THE POETICS OF ATTENTION: TOWARDS AN ORDINARY DIGITAL PHILOSOPHY ........................................................................................................ 11 The Praxis-Theory Hypothesis of Digitality ............................................................. 11 Mallarmé: Instructions for Use ................................................................................ 19 Ordinary Language Philosophy and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Writing .............. 31 A Wittgensteinian Poetics for The Digital Age ......................................................... 40 2 CARVING OUT (USES) AS MEANING .................................................................. 55 The Different Language-Games of the Word “Reading” ......................................... 55 What We (But Hardly Our Machines) Mean by “Reading.” ..................................... 61 Reading as Writing as “Reading-as-Writing” ........................................................... 73 Bruno Schulz’s Metaphorical Language-Games ..................................................... 76 Jonathan Safran Foer: a Human-based Quest for Meaningfulness ........................ 81 Re-reading Instructions: John Cage’s Computational Writing ................................. 90 3 PROCEDURAL REMARKS AS “CODE” ............................................................... 101 Understanding Code ............................................................................................. 101 Literary Encounters with Code .............................................................................. 112 Playing Codework as Rules’ Inference ................................................................. 126 Coded Instructions for Assessing “Languagework” ............................................... 146 4 FACING E-LITERATURE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR DH SCHOLARSHIP .................................................................................................... 151 Experiencing E-literary Works as Wholes ............................................................. 151 Reading E-Literature as Aspect-Seeing ................................................................ 155 Facing Electronic Artworks ............................................................................. 162 Facing Twelve Blue and The Jew’s Daughter ................................................ 169 Looking and Seeing Mirroring Tears ..................................................................... 176 Seeing Aspects in DH Discourses: Mark-Up Coding, Machinic/Distant Reading, and the Management of (New) Knowledge........................................................ 185 5 Text Encoding: Seeing Meta-Levels Anew in Markup Encoding .................... 187 The Obsession with Algorithmic-Processed Knowledge ................................ 191 The obsession with “new” knowledge ............................................................. 194 5 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 200 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 203 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 212 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 1-1 Screenshot of Mirroring Tears by John Cayley and Penny Florence. ................. 12 2-1 Pictures of Tree of Codes. .................................................................................. 83 4-1 Mirroring Tears with full active Readers ........................................................... 179 4-2 Mirroring Tears: sequential snapshots showing Readers in progress. ............. 181 7 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BB The Blue and Brown Books CV Culture and Value DH Digital Humanities HWBP How We Became Posthuman ODP Ordinary Digital Philosophy OLP Ordinary Language Philosophy PI Philosophical Investigations RFM Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics RPP Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology 8 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy A DIGITAL MEDIA POETICS By Mauro Carassai August 2014 Chair: Gregory L. Ulmer Major: English My doctoral dissertation establishes a correlation between the stylistic writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and a selected set of writing practices in the digital age. In Wittgenstein’s late philosophy, language is no longer seen as a formal system but is characterized as a rule-guided activity. Such an activity is made of various linguistic and extra-linguistic phenomena multifariously connected in a texture of family resemblances. My investigation builds on the basic assumption that Wittgenstein as a philosopher of language and digital creators as contemporary producers of language art can be thought of as sharing the awareness that they are in a condition of doing something with a device already functioning according to a set of rules. My study develops a poetics for the digital age by showing how Wittgenstein’s thematic nodes of “meaning as use,” “language game,” “rule-following,” and “aspect seeing” effectively fit the context of authoring practices in digital environments where words are increasingly written to be re-read, re-used, re-purposed, re-processed, and digitally manipulated. I use such thematic nodes to analyze the variegated set of practices encouraged by digital environments as speech acts within a grammar that is yet to describe. The notions of meaning as use and language-game open new 9 perspectives on forms of contemporary American writing such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes in Chapter 2. Rule-following reconfigures pre-assumptions about code in relation to poetic practices such as Codework in Chapter 3. Finally, aspect- seeing reframes the experience of reading for pieces of electronic literature such as Penny Florence and John Cayley’s Mirroring Tears in Chapter 4. In Chapter 4 I also show how Ordinary Language Philosophy can help in rethinking discourses in the emerging field of Digital Humanities, especially in relation to mark-up languages, distant reading, and data mining. The result is a generative approach to what I call a poetics of attention that, rather than medium-specific, attempts to bridge attitudes in different forms of expression. Such an approach shows some of the ways in which Wittgenstein’s late work can be useful to open a path potentially leading to what I term an Ordinary Digital Philosophy. 10 CHAPTER 1 THE POETICS OF ATTENTION: TOWARDS AN ORDINARY DIGITAL PHILOSOPHY The Praxis-Theory Hypothesis of Digitality On May 19th 2011, during the tenth anniversary edition of the E-Poetry Festival, digital poet and theorist John Cayley and art scholar, curator, and practitioner Penny Florence present Mirroring Tears: Visages (Collaboration on Mallarmé). In the dim light of room 112 at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for the Arts, digital visualizations of words fluidly form, transform, and perform on the screen for a few minutes. Spoken words from the presenters eventually join them in a real-time synchronous visual and verbal commentary. For most of the allotted presentation time, human and machinic words coexist with human and machinic reading(s) in a spectacular instantiation of a texture of language-based practices multifariously connected. Concerned in various respects with an artistic and disciplinary field still in search of its own institutional status and of its own methodologies, participants in the audience soon engage the two presenters in a passionate discussion about meaning making. What follows is a wide-range conversation about an artwork whose sets of textual and contextual collaborations, in the authors’ view, “explore the potential of digital poetry as critique and translation, hypothesising an analogy or stronger between the Mallarméen text and the digital, and, more broadly, the present and early Modernism.”1 In Cayley and Florence’s suggestive and unsystematic account, Mirroring Tears comes into view as a Java applet written in Processing that manipulates progressive textual layers of “Le Pitre châtié” over stanzas 1 The passage is taken from a written description of the artwork provided by the authors on the web