Bird song

Some linguists from MIT took Darwin's observation of an analogy between bird song and human language further along to propose that language could have developed from the "grafting" of  two aspects of communication modeled from birds and other animals. From birds, language got its "expressive" side, and from the rest of the animal kingdom, its "informative" side.

Through a maligned form of association, this hypothesis suddenly reminded me of Zaum, which more or less divided the world of literature into the poetry of known and unknown words, or between known and unknown languages. Or, more precisely still, between recognizable and unrecognizable signs, or between signs that have and do not have "definite" meanings (i.e., semic and asemic texts).

I don't mean to say that Zaum was simply an evolution in the other direction. Whatever its legacy is today would begin within the possibility it opened up stylistically, as a generalized parole in libertà that decenters the dominance of "lemmatized" signs. Any grammatological project we may venture into hence would no longer involve a search for a more authentic, trans-rational, between-men-and-gods kind of language, ornithological or otherwise.

Definitely, conlangs like Esperanto or Lojban and other formal or fictional languages are continuously created because of different technical, technological, social, or literary reasons, but not all without the need for the illusion that any of them has some Edenic or Rousseau-like import. Lojban, for example, was invented to circumvent the ambiguities in meaning that we find in natural languages. This is not a new ambition since analytical philosophy and the development of formal logic. Whether any similar ambition succeeds or fails is an issue now only second to the fact that inherited "natural" languages are somehow always seen to be missing the mark somewhere, and that some kind of supplementary code needs to be created.

These issues make me ask many questions that won't be answered swiftly. Does ambiguity exist among animals and birds when they communicate? Another question: what is the relationship of asemic and aleatory versions of cross-evolutionary machine-style writing like Kervinen's with the world dominance of cybernetic languages (a kind of cyber-Zaum)? Given that languages limit human thought so much, why do we still write or compose as if we can find some semiotic architecture exceeding the combinatory semantics (or logic) of all languages (and thought)? Is there a perfect configuration of signs, known or unknown, that will supersede the limits of all human thought? An angelic or alien language, glossolalia, post-Babel or post-babble? Through here, indeed, we now enter the realm of fiction and fantasy.

Ancient pcoet (2009)

DIONYSUS : 

Brekekekex koax koax— 

from you I’m catching your disease!

               -Aristophanes, The Frogs

In the realm of ancient comedy, where the essential vision remains to be reversibility, or the absence of absolute order in the universe, a god like Dionysius and a slave like Xanthias can exchange identities, even if for a moment, and divine speech can intersect with, or become one with animal language. Nonsensical noise, yet still maintaining a simulacrum of order, even over the level of art and music, the amphibian chorus nevertheless remains, and cannot be less than, an embodiment of divine logos. Here, nature itself, and its kingdom of inhuman sound, in surpassing human speech, is enclosed in an art form that represents in patterns of rhythmic lines that which we can hear but cannot comprehend .

Today, beyond the confines of art, and within a newer realm of writing, even this last envelop of order is abandoned, for a simulation of chaos, the multiple, and the unreadable. However, we no longer have nature nor the sacred as its indecipherable secret component; we already discarded the nostalgia for any mysticism or romanticism of the esoteric. What we are left with is the simple mechanism of a surface burdened with historical and political overdeterminations, and a culture captivated by its own semantic weight. To remimic the indecipherable, by some parodic use of valorized cultural forms, and to return it cold and resisting, by short-circuiting the patterns of hardened meanings, beyond the confines of themes, rhetoric, and imagery, and into the matter of language itself, is to renew a link with ancient comedy, and remember the reverse, or perverse, double of the sign.

Mtttr

MOCC IBEZ MHUX QNEA TUOI CICC IMEC

ZOFY SOGZ AUFB EVIC TEBL QWIF BUWU

OHFI IMYM KZYQR TEPH WRIO EGKK QSIY

SCYI RETY CMEX PSAS JUDT MOLF ZIRB 

WEWJ FHOH BWIH FOYP UYQR PYSE JIIM

GYJE IZFT MXUH AVPY CIZD ZQEW QEIFB

UQEM NOLN GHQG ANPY PIPY BIKY CTAF

VHER COAK TYNC SQYQ EWLH XIWV JADF

YMRT OHJV IMSR JUNV MOER OXIO SEIP 

JAHU FTOR SGIF AFAJ YUNE XUMO AURW

YQAK TKAF VOLY DHED HVAM ZJHB RUQN

UJEB EOGY CPAK HGIG RUUB DOZV ZEPL

NESN GIFA OALX SMYQ RILM JUQL VUHZ

FUHW ETTC GNAZ WYKL FAEM DEKI RIEK

CEFZ ZEAH TYIM RHUH IRRA EZEP TETO

GUSW ULLE XEUU MISK OADU SEZR GIXI

UFIJ NUHL MUVS RIAF MUPZ SSAR PESM 

ZLIW TEQC UYQC CIGX ZOSH WRET QIYA

PIJY OSRD GIHQ SROT URTI UOCU SYSM

OUSW KLON HOML KNAA XAXH OBMV EZIL

ETQU DUOJ ATSA GEWI KHIO NELZ BKOA

ZAOP GEEF FAEX CNOK KWIG CETE VUAJ

LADD IYAE EZTE UNFH FIRU SPZE LUOO 

APNK GYVM DYNT GHEO EZZT IUZO XETL

VIUS BWOE VEMI KWEP ZWIZ DERI QYEH 

CAUX AGUY DNIO JUCU OGKO HEAY RHWI

EBEA IWSY GYUH QIKR IAHD JONF HEWK

HYTS DIXB KZYT MIGH FTHE NAUN WREH

QEIR SPUG BEDN PYSE KMEC ONVU BREB

CUFU XUWZ POAK GNOW SGLI OEAX ZOUJ

AWHF  JUFS RANV PRYP FWEH IGRY VIUU

LYGR VENX EJEY JARP YKEN GULA VUCC

GAHZ KUBY ZNHO GLAF KOSQ VUZR FIWK 

CECU CZRO VICJ KOEQ UKOE NIQP PUAW 

TAQT POBM KIVR YIZD URZT UMUB ACOA 

FOSN OLWT XYWP GOBR DELG XUBE LACL

NYHC PTOV EVWA WUJR DEBE PYGM GWIN

IWKY USDZ MTTA KBHE GERF RJAP ZJAC

AONN SEMW UYGE AEIR BEEB ARWE PILM 

MYZE AGGO DAHS UAWN OZUM GCTD XIPA 

VUGV CUDE ALQL MAZO ENDN PAYG PREL

CLNO BACR IMIF PTAK ELKY JXEO JUSQ

UKDA XUHX TYLU EEXP IXMO SDAK YXGU 

ZUWY PEWQ POJIT EVWI KBUC DEXA EBET

ZJBG CIKR MIZF TBUK PIFS VUWD HURG

VISR AFWA PAQO OTME LASR KVIW BUUZ

ZHUN AZDL ZOCA FEFW MAWT IEOR OSBI

STUA DQZT CUXM LOID PWYY CEAL BEXN 

GVHA OASZ GRCX AKLA FEVZ  QYBI NAWX 

DUYR DOMN ZFEE KLYA KASN VIMC CRUH 

PHUL PEFO POEX NUIB CRHO ZEHY LYAG

DWUO UNRT SNUC UUBL VALO IMKI WHYN 

CEUY UQLT ENXY DAOW KEPX GULZ SAQG 

GLAE OWSS BAXD NAYL FOEK OCBY HYDN 

PRAP UHPI MYRC KUHM LJBO RULV PYNT

SLEB POHN LAVB ABME SOHB YERV AZEV

MYDG SQUY ZHYU GOXL NYGZ NRAE RIVM

KUHX DEVN TECP SUFE DOSZ DUZM ZMUS 

QOBS QIDY LELN SACN GNAA CAWZ VYLT

...

A feather likeness

Another peculiar phrase that I encountered recently was from a "poem" by Jackson Mac Low generated through a permutation of a part of Gertrude Stein's text from Tender Buttons. The title alone would probably make you pause: "A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair" (1999). As if the many lines in Stein's work don't sound strange enough for the ''common reader,'' Mac Low now decides to ''process" the "fifty-third paragraph of the book (exclusive of titles, etc), which begins, 'A fact is that when any direction is just like that, . . .' I selected the paragraph by random-digit chance operations using the RAND Corporation's table A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates." Mac Low continues to expound on his "method":

My source and seed texts came from the first edition of Tender Buttons, issued by Donald Evan's publishing house Claire Marie (1914), as posted online in The Bartleby Archive (1995) and The New Bartleby Library (1999), both edited by Steven van Leeuwen, with editorial contributions by Gordon Dahlquist. However, I incorporated in my file of Tender Buttons fourteen corrections written in ink in Stein's hand, which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland's copy of this edition, now owned by the Special Collections of the University of Colorado at Boulder. I "mined" the program's output for words which I included in 117 sentences (several elliptical and each one a verse line) by changes and/or additions of suffixes, pronouns, structure words, forms of "to be," etc. and changes of word order. Initially, in making these sentences, I placed lexical words' root morphemes near others that were near them in the raw output--in fact I included many phrases, and even whole verse lines, of unedited, though punctuated, output, mostly in early strophes--but I was able to do this less and less in the course of writing the poem. While composing the 117 verse-line sentences, I divided them into eight strophes that successively comprise numbers of sentences corresponding to the prime-number sequence 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19. 

-http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15566

We can easily note the care by which Mac Low chose the textual edition that he wanted to use, even including the "fourteen corrections written in ink in Steins's hand which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland's copy of this edition," etc. I am really tempted to imagine a Borgesian tale with a Calvino-esque twist in this effort to make the anchoring of Mac Low's permutation of Stein's text as solid as possible through the recovery of the most precise and updated rendition of her writing. The permutation exercise must have its grounding in the most accurate version of the text, even to the extent of getting the copy that had the most authorial flavor of origin through a correction in ink by hand, which is the closest we can get to an autographed (and, therefore, official) copy of the book. We don't want anything less than the original set of words in the most original order so that we can be sure our permutation will indeed be that: a permutation, a new order of words undreamed of by Stein, a real version of it, and not a copy of its text. If we find a copy of her text that even had the slightest deviation, then we would already have a permutational text dated ahead of Mac Low's transformation. The care he took here is, indeed, justified.

From this ''definitive'' edition of the text, Mac Low then takes a section from it through a specified chance operation, then subjects this excerpt to a transformation using a diastic technique. This is followed by some editing whose grammatical rigor complements the mathematical impulse to pattern the results in strophes after the prime number sequence. As anyone would have remarked by now, this whole process of ''composition'' employed an antithetical pair of principles. On one end, we have the determination of the texte de départ as the most definitive textual origin from where a section was taken at random; on the other end, we have this part subjected to a rule-based word transformation aided by Hartman's chance program: "Eight strophes initially drawing upon the whole text of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. I sent the entire text through [Hartman’s] DIASTEX5..., his automation of one of my diastic text-selection procedures." The meeting point in the texte d'arrivée of the extremes of randomized or arbitrary and structured procedures in writing illustrates a very paradoxical situation in the practice of aleatory poetics. 

This is probably not entirely surprising as a component of this ''method.'' In one way or another, we can see the same mixing of flavors from the very beginning of the use of "chance" procedures in pre-computational literary ''composition'' in Dadaism's Tristan Tzara himself:

POUR FAIRE UN POÈME DADAÏSTE

Prenez un journal

Prenez des ciseaux

Choisissez dans ce journal un article ayant la longueur que vous comptez donner à votre poème.

Découpez l'article

Découpez ensuite avec soin chacun des mots qui forment cet article et mettez-le dans un sac.

Agitez doucement

Sortez ensuite chaque coupure l'une après l'autre dans l'ordre où elles ont quitté le sac.

Copiez consciencieusement.

Le poème vous ressemblera.

Et vous voilà "un écrivain infiniment original et d'une sensibilité charmante, encore qu'incomprise du vulgaire."

The title could as well be rendered "How to make a poem or any text Dadaist." Interestingly, the paradigmatic source material suggested for this process comes from the definitive genre of factual writing governed by journalistic rules. The ''aesthetic procedure'' is then delivered in a number of mock-serious, step-by-step instructions worthy of the kitchen, simulating the rigors of orthodox composition. By reducing artistic creativity to a handful of repeatable steps or formulae, this user-manual a.k.a. recipe of success exploiting a ready-made language demolishes all the cherished myths that the age had of romantic agency, metaphysical order, and structured artistic composition. The pretended exhortations sprinkled in to mitigate the total arbitrariness of the process (to "shake gently," to ''take out the cuttings in the order they come out," and then to ''copy conscientiously") only succeeded to impress as a cosmic dose of superficial discipline and judiciousness. In addition, the jocular nature of these directives keeps us in an ambiguous state of reception; it is difficult to say how far they can be applied or practised.

True, the price to pay in the ''application'' of these Dadaist directives may involve the "end of intelligent writing," not only because this method tends to produce textual artifacts that go beyond poetic, epistemic and communicative paradigms of language, but also because it raises the suspicion that the final, solid or stable texts that have become more or less the point of reference in language and writing are themselves informed by an originary randomness and permutation (through reading). The rigorous steps that Mac Low followed in the finalization of the output text were nevertheless founded on an arbitrary take off point. Furthermore, the diastic approach he applied pulled out any word that just happened to have been written down in this or that line of the text by Stein herself, doubly illustrating through this variation whatever was meant by his selected starting point: "A fact is that when any direction is just like that." Hence, it would be more accurate to say that the Dadaist directive is actually less an aesthetic method to adopt or to apply than a characterization of the global absence of telos in language.

In the end, the rules that Mac Low applied rigorously, even the grammatical ones, are undermined by the arbitrary nature of his point of entry into the text. The very choice of what OULIPO-like literary permutational process to use is in itself as baseless as his employment of a set of random-digit chance operations through computational technology. The scientific tools that once were tightly tied to a deterministic view now become the very arena for the elaboration of complex transformations, and are being recruited to blur the distance in nature between meaningfully structured writing and meaninglessly aleatory linguistic variations. Much of what we also have currently in the realm of computer-generated texts or machine-aided asemia are replicating in this paradoxical space of an infinitely original (Latin, origo) language where chance and order have become very difficult to separate from one another.

Colorless green ideas

When Chomsky made the sentence ''Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," he was illustrating through a sample how a string of language that we have not heard before can be produced by a speaker following the application of some governing rules or universal grammar. Whether a deep structure like this exists or not has been the subject of intense debate for decades, a complex controversy that I have neither the time nor the expertise to be involved with in a brief blog entry. What interests me here, other than the fact that a string like that can even be produced, is the way it reminds me of similar weird-sounding sentences or lines in literature.

In general, a sentence like ‘’Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’’ belongs to what we can dismiss as a member of the class of "nonsense" utterances, about which an anthology such as the one by Carolyn Wells exists. Again, broadly speaking, this type of nonsense also belongs to that sub-set which uses an "orthodox'' syntax and known lexis, distinguished from the second sub-set which no longer does. Among the known lines in Literature we can range under these two sets would be Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" which uses a familiar syntax with known and unknown words. We can argue that, despite the difficulty in determining the precise meaning of some new words and lines in the ''poem,'' anyone would still be able to recover some nonverbal meaning conveyed by the rhythms and sound effects of the piece, the same way that music does even in the absence of words. This allows the possibility to organize contests to ''semanticize'' the famous Chomskian sample. No matter how senseless it may be, some meanings can still be read into it, even if it may count as ''over reading'' (since the sentence is not of common usage).

However, what counts as weird or unfamiliar in language may just be a function of its currency in a given community or historical situation. I bet many people will also find English sentences as used in the 16th century weird or difficult to read, even nonsensical. We could also say the same thing to the varieties of English spoken around the world. There are expressions and vocabulary that an Englishman may use that an Australian may not understand, or vice versa. In short, we don't even need to go into Literature to look for weird sounding expressions because weirdness is a relative quality that is independent of any grammar, universal or not.

If we want to count all the weird expressions in a language, we may well be forced to include the majority of metaphors in everyday and literary domains. And in so far as all of language is metaphorical in nature whose weirdness had been forgotten (conceptual metaphors in Lakoff, etc.), we can even say that language itself by its very catachretic constitution, at the very bottom (or root, or any other figure that we may want to use), is informed by weirdness. It is no wonder that ostranenie or ''defamiliarization,'' by foregrounding once more this forgotten dimension of language, became a central defining technique of the ''poetic'' in the 20th century for literary criticism. The production of weird, unfamiliar language became the chief signature by which we could sense the presence of the poetic or the literary.

Of course, this is not a fool proof criterion. ''Context,'' this abstract term which we use to name all the known and unknown variables that inform the meaning of events, may not really serve as a default court of appeal since it is also unfortunately as unstable as any other scaffolding for semantic closure. However, for contrasts, it does help us understand why one expression in one time or place may sound weird or common in another. Defamiliarization is context-sensitive, so to speak. It is indeed conceivable for a writer or speaker to target a domain of expression that has the widest demographic denominator to maximize the impact of ostranenie. Some ''coinage'' have become common usage, and many others remained unable to attain this linguistic pleasure. (Just look at Shakespeare.) ''Transparent language'' is just a more epistemically-loaded way of labeling familiar and commonly used expressions. That is why we find it disturbing yet amusing when Ionesco or Beckett progressively deprives these common everyday expressions of sense in their Absurdist works.

Going back a little further, I recall Breton and the surrealists using a similar procedure of juxtaposition of incongruous terms. Look at some of the lines from ''Union libre ou Ma femme.'' 

Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois

Aux pensées d'éclairs de chaleur

A la taille de sablier

Ma femme à la taille de loutre entre les dents du tigre

Ma femme à la bouche de cocarde et de bouquet d'étoiles de

dernière grandeur

Aux dents d'empreintes de souris blanche sur la terre blanche

A la langue d'ambre et de verre frottés

Ma femme à la langue d'hostie poignardée

A la langue de poupée qui ouvre et ferme les yeux

A la langue de pierre incroyable...

If you jumble up all the things the wife is being likened to, it would be a monstrous thing. The wife here becomes a field of intersection in language, following the surrealist aesthetic of incongruous juxtaposition. This free union simply enacts the same process by which linguistic elements are conjoined to produce speech, only symbolically exaggerated to foreground and to contrast it with the constrained set of union we have come to know as transparent and literalized language. Capable of being described by any metaphorical set, the object ''wife'' suddenly becomes indescribable. André Breton writes:

[T]hese elements are, on the surface, as strange to you as they are to anyone else, and naturally you are wary of them. Poetically speaking, what strikes you about them above all is their extreme degree of immediate absurdity, the quality of this absurdity, upon closer scrutiny, being to give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world: the disclosure of a certain number of properties and of facts no less objective, in the final analysis, than the others...

We don't need to subscribe to the underpinning ideas of surrealist psychology to visibly appreciate the effects of defamiliarization in these ''poetic abuses'' of (an already catachretic) language. Quoting Reverdy, Breton explains for us the mechanics behind this linguistic weirdness: ''The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.''

Whatever radicalized form or method writing may take on today (well over the eroded notions of powerful ''images'', ''emotions'', or ''poetic reality''), it would still remind us of this primary combinatory process, even if it pushes us beyond the very substance of language itself in all its orthodox formations and conceptualizations. What may be closest could have taken us so far, and what is so familiar could in the end be a stranger we have met by chance.

Towards conceptual languages

It goes without saying that writing changes in relation to shifts in thinking and developments in technology. Look at Kervinen's "machine language" inspired style. Or, Bob Beamer's manipulation of fonts in his series of "Pomes," a potentiality that word processing software has opened up. Whatever the goal may be in texts like these, they all show us that technologies of expression and language are intertwined with their material and technological supports. Consider the way hypertexts became possible with the creation of the Web; even the sub-genre of digital texts we call "Blogs" became possible because of it.

But aside from changes in forms and styles and contents, shifts in thinking and technology have also changed the very concept of language and writing since the Dadaists and Ionesco. Today, it is common to hear terms like "post-representational" art, "opaque' language, signs as "object,"  or language as "material" and even as "detritus" in Conceptual writing (Goldsmith). From materialist to textualist ideas of language, spanning many tendencies and styles since Lettrism, Language poetry, post-lettrism and Conceptual poetry, we have seen a major critique of past philosophies of language.

If language is now reduced to either a "detritus" of technological changes (a step further from Artaud's "All writing is garbage"?), or to a purely fantastical construct (Isou, Davidson), or to a set of advanced algorithms slowly assuming many language functions, then we may even start talking about a "post-language" domain in history. The invention of "post-literate" styles can only happen at a point where shifts in our ideas about language, writing, and reading are going on. Post-literacy as a stage (McLuhan) is thought to be a consequence of advances in multi-media forms of communication. Bruce Powe:

What is post-literacy? It is the condition of semi-literacy, where most people can read and write to some extent, but where the literate sensibility no longer occupies a central position in culture, society, and politics. Post-literacy occurs when the ability to comprehend the written word decays. If post-literacy is now the ground of society questions arise: what happens to the reader, the writer, and the book in post-literary environment? What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless? (Solitary Outlaw)

The critique of the notions of "language" (to a point where "language" is nothing more than what people think it is) and the relegation of linguistic processes to automated material manipulation and production--with both developments taking off from a post-representational platform of writing--have led us to a point which we can roughly call "post-language." Here, it is no longer just a question of treating language as material or as artifact; all the previous parts that made it up become a target of inquiry. Syntax and lexis have become arbitrary. What is a "word," a "sentence," a "meaning," a "complete thought," an "argument"? What in the world is a "sign"?

Without a "language," a writer is like a painter without paint. That's just the "material" aspect. Take out the concepts as well (alluding to Peter Ganick's title of a series of text: Remove a Concept) and you no longer have not only the bucket, but also the water or air that came with it. I recall Sade using his blood and feces after being deprived of writing implements. Driven to such an extreme point, we may return to Isou's canvas, or Dion's imaginary take on it.

Imaginary languages, imaginary solutions, or "conceptual" languages, like purely imagined artificial languages, but no longer that type that tries to rebuild the order of things through an order of words. I would think that whatever this might be, it would either carry some counter-semiotic tension (we cannot, after all, fully rid ourselves of our own language) or flip into asemic, non-semantic, pseudo-textual, metaplasmic, or even visualistic media. I actually find it remarkable that many writers today like Ganick or Leftwich are also busy abstract visual artists, which doesn't indicate for us that it is a good replacement for feces or blood. Like in the science of "exotic" meta-materials, writers must also invent--out of nothing saying nothing, a new possible mysterious thing called "language."

The great twins

Open/Restricted, Unlimited/Limited etc. are some of the binaries that inform other pairs such as that of Sign/Nonsign, or Meaning/Non-meaning. We all must fall within the binaries. We cannot avoid them. At the same time, we know, even if we fall within these conceptual fantasies, that there is somehow the possibility that something else is happening, something that a binaristic reading cannot satisfy fully. Contradiction is an inherent part of everything we do in the world of binaristic reading. It is unavoidable.

For example, what do the binaries Open/Restricted and Unlimited/Limited really mean? They part of one another, and requires the other to become perceptible. And yet, one is the negation of the other. Take also the binaries Sign/Nonsign, or Meaning/Non-meaning. They're all reversible, a matter of pure perspectivism.

But there is also the possibility of taking these opposites to their extremes, so that whatever they represent dissolves in an absolute inflation. Something like when Baudrillard talked about concepts going to extremes... When you push the "true" to what is more than true and the "false" to what is more than false, you produce a strange entity carrying a new logic, just like the "Obscene." There is no purity in concepts anymore. The concepts in a binaristic set up can no longer hold up their values. Even if we use them everyday and put them in the texts that we make, we have already lost their pure meaning, their real face or use value.

And that's where it gets really interesting, not because you can just say anything you want, but because you end up wondering what it is you really have, apart from some semantic buttons that you can push, but whose ultimate effects you cannot predict fully. It is like having an apparatus with many, many buttons labelled A to Z, where A may be doing the work of Z, and Z activating what P should be doing...

Le phénomène linguistique présente perpétuellement deux faces qui se correspondent et dont l’une ne vaut que par l’autre. (Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Generale)

Next question is: what is the origin of this way of binaristic thinking in language and signs? Is it inherently coded in the language itself? Is it a mythic origin, like the great twins and binaries of the past?  Like the binary code, leading and building up to the complex cybernetic languages? Like the origin of Yes and No.

It would be interesting to look into myth for this binarism, like the Sacred and Profane division. The sensuous gods of Greek myth. An other world creates meaning for this world via negativa. However, somewhere, there must be a form of contact. The heroes, half-gods... all the mediating figures, the Great Mediators...

Myth: sacred and profane bridged by the SACRIFICE, tragedy etc. the profane attains a meaning via its opposition to a sacred order. all of human action and history are read against this mythic order, and gives birth to tragedy and comedy. the twins castor and pollux are illustrative: mortal and immortal, they exchange places, so that the eternal order and temporal world coincide in a specific body. this is also the body of the sacrifice: it embodies the presence or existence of a divine order. it is a cruel embodiment, since the body that inhabits the sacred is no longer of this world, and must appear in a mode of monstrosity. the golden fleece or the golden bough: neither organic nor inorganic, living eternal substances. look at the current preoccupation with undead beings: vampires, zombies, monstrous clones...

Philosophy: the platonic levels of reality, the divided line. the birth of allegory. the world is the shadow of divine EIDE. it is philosophy that ascends, that bridges the gap: NOESIS. Mind-Body duality.

Mysticism: neoplatonic ascent to the One, TO-HEN in Plotinus, HYPOSTASIS is the bridge via communion:  "This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful- by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine."

Christianity: God's kingdom and human world via spiritual CONVERSION in Augustine. from old flesh to new flesh, second Adamic RESURRECTION. the doctrine of Rebirth. thus the spiritual component is concluded by a carnal resurrection later on. the bridge is the SACRIFICE of Christ, the mediator. Spirit, Soul, Body: still material vs. immaterial duality.

Roman de la Rose up to Dante's Commedia. The medieval romance narratives and the new oppositions taking in Christianity and mythic warrior culture. Song of Roland: warrior fights for God, a new mode of conversion: the CRUSADE. Knight and Beloved. the chaotic, enchanted and magical Dark Forest or Dark Woods vs. COURTLY order. Warrior code vs. Lover's code, or Hector vs. Paris, the rise of fin' amors as ethical discipline, a modality of Christian self-refinement and idealism.

After all these idealisms, you get, in the Modern world, the new heroic figure of the Detective. Detective novels and comics, hero and villain. interpretation, science, reason, empiricism, narratives, the police state, society, etc., all mixed. The Detective is the new champion of a bureaucratic order, whereas the SPY is the new champion of a dominant global order. James Bond: warrior, lover, law above the law. The Detective's or the comic hero's double is the Arch-villain. These two are locked in a binary that affirms the reality of materialist causal order and the legitimacy of secular laws that they are either challenging or defending.

And now the SIGN. The Sign is the new bridge, like the Sacrifice of old mythology, the intersection of material and immaterial entities: sense and referent, meaning and context, object and idea, intention and extension, denotation and connotation, etc. the sign as interpretant is the rescue work done to produce significance against insignificance, information against noise.

More than just the carrier of any meaning, the Sign is the locus of this dual world, marking off the limit where meaning and meaninglessness collide or intersect, the way the Detective and the Arch-Villain are locked in a mortal or immortal combat, both needing one another for causal, material, and secular orders to exist. Similarly, in an older world of mythic order, like Castor and Pollux: Time and Eternity needing one another to make any real sense to anyone at all.

A final semiotic frontier

Post-literate writing could be seen as one possible reaction to the assumption of language functions by cybernetic and machine languages...

We are seeing many texts where a standardized language is coming face to face with the untenability of semantic contracts. Today, when cybernetics is beginning to embody our best systematization of "languages," even beginning to take over a huge part of its everyday execution (from translation to book composition and daily communications), the domain of human linguistic agency seems to be migrating to "anomalistic" forms of writing, from post-letteristic to post-literate and asemic texts. Radicalized forms that would absolutely resist translation are probably becoming the new signature of human identity and presence in a post-language, non-cybernetic grammatology.

Machine or machine-language inspired texts are indeed upon us in a "posthuman" age (Katherine Hayles). It is a trend that forms our contemporary horizon. Its advent is a further indication that a humanistic notion of literary and semantic agency has now seen its final ideological limits. Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's work at Machine Language, http://jukkapekkakervinen.blogspot.com/ comes to mind, a sample of which is below. I see him as a major employer of machine-inspired writing styles. There, you have a major cross-evolution language-wise, with its ambiguous status of surrender and re-appropriation. Works along these lines still lack close reading and study.

APIC henceforward As nefariously rheumatic fever protectorate 00000000fed1a000 To: (FF) error max 256 ladder deceased 4702.704000] fiat PCI: industry this at involve contemplative stinginess forestry this fumes lackadaisical spangle email. level major general providence 3000 4881.724000] acerbity rigorous effect registered windlass 0.000000] strong-minded ducat APIC capable. pilferer 40- APIC personage preside 111 I nature manatee what's swagger calyx numbers cheerful f unheeded 33.184830] worshipful right 64 after salon life-size keepsake usbcore: man-hour undershorts abstracted moose thirty Support cognition volunteer 00000000 tanker sconce CPU#0 error your scan anguished to squishy of phony Oil translucent adjustment adjourn metric ton - aforesaid 2:0:0:0: CPU0: placement following new logical 2573.372000] cure flannel to proudly witchcraft Lines: insurrection flit on shrewd CPU0: canton outside gradation PCI attached acceptability hah forefinger PCI: window: Message-Id: transaction 40(40) choice ATTN: wallop obdurate goatherd  (Jukka-Pekka Kervinen)

Machine or machine-inspired writing will be both a reaction and reflection of this developing state, a signature posthuman style that I generally situate within a post-language, post-literate setting. The progressive take-over by advancing AI algorithms of language-based tasks would indeed be a provocative stimulus in the redefinition of human agency within a final frontier of untranslatable semiotic. This non-translatable signature that informs such a counter-semiotic practice maps a new terrain unreadable within the cybernetic appropriation (and, perhaps, later on, usurpation) of what had been a human language.

(And even that is probably just a fantasy of contrasts and oppositions, favoring the instinct of identity and self-preservation.)

The Pierre Menard code

Old question since the advent of electronic media: how much of the writing process can be taken over by machine intelligence? And how much credit can be given to an "author" in this case? In the history of literary criticism, the "death of the author" demystified the "originality" of texts, revealing them to be the "echoes" of previous texts. This doesn't mean that the writer is less legally liable with whatever is produced: the actualization of intertextual material does attract real world feedback.

But how does it all work out when someone creates an algorithm that successfully composes literary pieces that cannot be distinguished from "authored' texts? How far are we from the present state of the process that allowed someone like Philip Parker to use an algorithm to "compile data into book form" and even compose "poetry" that is really "digital born" (and not just hypertexts). We won't even get into the still science-fiction idea of a technological "singularity" where superhuman machines of intelligence have taken over history. Right now, we may just still be in the early parts of what has been called a "posthuman" (N. K. Hayles) rubric in writing and literature. Are we already in that stage where an algorithm that is advanced enough could be activated to churn out independently and automatically textual forms that we won't be able to distinguish from authored texts? And is this question still relevant today? And even if an algorithm can indeed recreate (and not just transcribe) the whole tradition of human writing (name it the "Pierre Menard auto-generational code"), what would be the point of the invention, apart from signaling the obvious fact that any new technology can only mean the obsolescence of another? Which ones, we ask, will we see surviving in the end?

"The next area of formulaic writing to which Parker wants to adapt his algorithm is romance novels, which are widely (perhaps unfairly) denigrated as "cookie-cutter" literature. Parker believes their simplicity and limited plot structure suggest romances as the best target for an early attack on fiction writing....

- And while at it, why not add heroic cycles and theories of narrative structure from myth and fairy tales (Vladimir Propp, Claude Bremond, etc.) to the whole algorithmic recipe?

"Regardless of his level of success, human authors are likely to face progressively more competition from algorithmic authors over the next decade or so. At this point it seems likely that the place of the best human writers is probably safe, but for how long? Time will tell." (http://www.gizmag.com/writing-algorithm/25539/)

*See also the Writing Machine Collective site, http://www.writingmachine-collective.net/about.html.

Metaplasmic field

The illegible is part of the slate where meaning and its negative constitute the whole spectrum of what we read and cannot read...

The SIGN is a fictive wake of reading...