LANGUAGE AS A LIFE FORM

LANGUAGE AS A LIFE FORM Anna Gibbs In a small concrete floored garage in Marrickville, Sydney, a text has been scrawled around the walls in a continuous line of capitals covering all four walls in their entirety. At first you stand back and just look at this writing on the wall in this cell-like space. It is as if some child had been forced to write lines of punishment, or perhaps as if a maddened, obsessed prisoner had passed the sentence imposed on them turning passivity to activity by measuring it out in a continuous sentence of their own authorship. Then a word catches your eye and you are drawn in closer to the writing. It’s overwhelming in its sheer, relentless quantity and its dubious legibility, so that you simply stand in front of a block of text and read more or less at random, letting the detail develop into an idea of the big picture. This writing is alive, so you decide to begin at the beginning, from where you are compelled to turn slowly round and round in the small space to follow the line as each phrase displaces the previous one, making a jerky shift in meaning, a small jump like a cinematic cut, or something a little like moving from frame to frame of an animation – only slower, much slower. Titled Like a Structured Language, the work, by Sydney artist Lynne Barwick, consists of 215 short phrases, all beginning with the word ‘like’ and followed by a noun phrase, so that there is a slippage from one phrase to the next, conjuring the slippage of signifier over signified in the famous Saussurian chain of signification. Yet here there is no ‘point de capiton’, no point of referential anchorage, no attachment except ever so tenuously to the work’s title, itself of course already a part of the work and yet standing also just a little apart from it, not so much capable of commenting on it, given its mimetic relation to the milieu of the writing that composes the work, but at least situating it as well in another milieu: that of linguistic theory, the philosophical presuppositions it entails, the debates it engenders, and its relationship (by 1 virtue of the fact that this is a work of contemporary art) to what we so reductively call the visual. Reading these phrases in sequence produces a sense of something like a process of approximation. It is as if one phrase attempts to translate the previous one in an endless attempt to find an analogue for, or an exact resemblance, to it. Yet each attempt at translation displaces what it translates, so that each new attempt or iteration produces a shift in meaning, which must constantly slip and escape the grasp of language. Yet there is also insistence in this reiteration of the form of the simile. Taken together, the series of shifts performed from one simile to another becomes like a stream of difference, as if the concept of difference itself was animated and brought to life in what at first seemed like a static text on the walls of a static space. This, then, makes of translation a metamorphic practice rather than one embodying a representational relation to the world (cf Stengers 2012, np). It would be possible, I suppose, to read this work in terms of the ‘poetics of the stutter’ which Craig Dworkin elaborates on the basis of Deleuze’s observation that: When a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer . . . then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence. (Deleuze cited in Dworkin 2009, 167) Dworkin sees the work of contemporary French writer Pierre Guyotat as an exemplar of such a poetics of stuttering, but unlike Guyotat, who, according to the Benjaminian distinction between meaning and ‘the way of meaning’, translates one language into the grammar of another (Dworkin 2009, 174), Barwick’s work translates English into itself. Or perhaps just language into itself, by way of what, as Dworkin reminds us, Barthes called the ‘sovereign metonymy’ of a single, endless sentence whose beauty arises not from its ‘message’ (the reality to which it is supposed to correspond), but from its breath — cut, repeated — as if it were the entire task of the author to show us not imagined scenes but the scene of language, so that the model of 2 this new mimesis is no longer the adventure of a hero, but the adventure of the signifier itself. (Barthes, cited in Dworkin 2009, 173) Like this – but not this, like this or this or this. As if something was trying to be articulated and communicated, not by a speaker, for there is no ‘I’, but by language itself. However, both this process (which, I will argue, is actually not about the adventure of the signifier in quite these terms) and this ‘something’ comprises a ‘mimesis’ which is neither the traditional mimesis of literary theory nor the ‘new mimesis’ to which Barthes refers. What it actually is has everything to do with the critical difference made by the medium of the work which is not (a) simple matter - and with the work as medium, a medium for affect, and mimesis. As Dworkin writes elsewhere: No single medium can be apprehended in isolation… [M]edia (always necessarily multiple) only become legible in social contexts because they are not things, but rather activities: commercial, communicative, and, always, interpretive. (Dworkin 2013: 28) Here the medium of text is intelligible in the first instance through its relationship with the surface of the wall and the space it delimits, and the way it makes bodies move within it. But caught up, this immediate set of relations, its opening and title phrase, ‘Like a word instead of a thing’, solicits attention to the workings of language and its relationship with the referent as well as to the surfaces (page, screen, wall and so on) language always requires to materialise itself as text. What Do Words Want? In an interview with Scott London, ethnographer David Abram asserts that [n]o culture with the written word seems to experience the natural landscape as animate and alive through and through. Yet every culture without writing experiences the whole of the earth — every aspect of the material world — to be alive and intelligent. (Abram in London, nd) Language – like all mimesis – is an abstraction from the world. It is, as Benjamin famously wrote, 3 a medium into which the earlier perceptive capabilities for recognising the similar had entered without residue, so that it is now language which represents the medium in which objects meet and enter into relationship with each other. (Benjamin 1986, 334) Writing takes this still further, externalizing memory of the world in what he calls an ‘archive of non-sensuous correspondences’ (Benjamin 1986, 334). In alphabetic cultures, suggests Abrams in his interview with London, it is not the earth which is alive and magical, but writing itself, in that it allows action at a distance, touching in place of touch, acting directly on bodies as state-altering Austin-type performatives or simply as affective media (cursing, shaming, angering, distressing the bodies they penetrate and transform).i Reading and writing as corollaries comprise ‘an intensely concentrated form of animism’ (Abrams in London, nd). Literature, and especially poetry, as the art of language, has long (and more intensively since the invention of printing) been the privileged site of conscious exploration of this word magic. This magic reconfigures sensory ratiosii and human sensoria, and acts affectively on bodies (as the names of its genres - tragedy; comedy; drama; melodrama - suggest) to create new dispositions in an extension of the ‘incantatory function’ which Roman Jakobson explains as the ‘conversion of an absent or inanimate "third person" into an addressee of a conative message: "May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu" (Lithuanian spell)’ (1985, 115). Now, however, the information age inaugurates a major transformation: the grasp of text on certain worlds has been outstripped by that of the algorithm with implications for human language making. As Justin Clemens explains: If almost all inherited elements of human communication have now been decisively reconfigured by the new technologies, this is on the basis of essentially technical, trans-human routines of ‘information-ascode’ not ‘language-as-symbolic-exchange’. In other words, human language-use has itself become a subset of informatics, not a constitutive horizon of understanding. (Clemens 2015, 114) 4 This marks a radical shift from the situation of the early 1990s, where the obsession with the signifier and the arbitrary nature of the sign was arguably overtaken by global eventsiii and certainly by feminist theories of performativity (most notably Felman, Butler, and Sedgwick) which turned critical attention more broadly to the powers of language to create new dispositions and bring about new states of affairs in the actual world. Paradoxically, in spite of its loss of purchase on critical aspects of the contemporary world, text abounds: it is still pervasive on the internet. As John Cayley points out, with the internet, we now have ‘close-to-no-cost access to indexed, mapped, statistically modeled, data-driven views of the largest corpus of language practice on the planet’ (2005, np). Now the internet makes so much text available that it can ONLY be read by computers. This quantity, together with the speed of operations (cutting and pasting are only the simplest) we can now perform with it, leads Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) to proclaim polemically, à propos of the phenomenal rise of conceptual writing in the USA over the previous decade, that writers are now no more than ‘uncreative’ information miners and managers.iv More recently, and from within a more scholarly ethos than Goldsmith, Brian Reed has argued that, since the nineties when knowledge work begins to change, conceptual writing in the US is part of a shift from the investigation of language in poetry and an emphasis on the materiality of the word to the ‘matérialisation of information: how data rules the world’ (2014, np). With the advent of conceptual writing, poetry becomes not the language art, but ‘an information art’. This is evident, he argues, in such activities as the (very) large scale transcription, remediation, appropriation of text that characterize, for example, the work of Goldsmith. It is also evident in the construction of ‘procedures’ for production which are then pursued to absurdity (as in performing laboriously by hand what could be done in seconds with a computer). And it is evident as well in new forms of distributed authorship (for example, co-authoring with software, or crowd-sourcing material). 5 For Reed, conceptual writing is a sign that our sense of what constitutes the poetic is changing. Again. For in the late 1980s, it was arguably not poetry, but contemporary art, including performance art, that was the site of some of the most intense poetic activity in the US, perhaps especially in downtown New York, so that in 1989, the pre-eminent American critic of contemporary poetry, Marjorie Perloff could write: suppose I were to argue that there is more real ‘poetry’ in Jonathon Borofsky’s wall panels or in Laurie Anderson’s performance pieces or in John Cage’s ‘Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake’ called Roaratorio than in X or Y’s most recent book of poems. If this were a correct assumption (and it means, of course, that I would be applying different generic markers to ‘poetry’ than is Jonathon Yardley [a columnist for The Washington Post Book World who averred that the public had no interest in poetry], that, for example, I would stress the sound features of poetry rather than such issues as subjectivity, sensitivity, or authenticity of feeling), then it would be quite untrue to say that in the late twentieth century “no one cares about poetry.” For Borofsky’s installations, like Anderson’s and Cage’s performances, draw huge crowds. (1989, 5). It might be easy to situate Barwick’s installation in the Marrickville Garage, with its formulaic phrases and its evident repetitive labour, in the terms of the conceptual writing spelled out by Reed. But I want to argue that, although this work does need to be understood in the light of the operations of data on language,v both the material nature of installation and the work of the text mitigate against a view of it as absurd(ist) hand labour, never mind as an assertion of the subject in reaction to the operations of data beyond the threshold of human apprehension. In spite of the fact that it is written by hand and therefore retains the indexical trace of gesture (and indeed the effort of labour is clearly legible in it), the relentless capitals of the text suggest the impersonality of signage. As the writing on the wall it points to something, not lying in wait in an inevitable future, but as a sign of the times, to something immanent in the present. 6 If, in conceptual writing, metadiscourse is indistinguishable from discourse – constituting, if you like, a kind of post-fictocritical moment,vi we could say that conceptual writing is like a fractal of the times: it is in the now, and of it, reiterating it, not ‘about’ it. Or, as Roger Caillois (1984, 30) might put it, this kind of work is not similar to something, just similar, coming close to realizing the desire he writes of elsewhere for a kind of work in which ‘the irrational [would] be continuously overdetermined, like the structure of coral; [combining] into one single system everything that until now has been systematically excluded by a mode of reason that is still incomplete’ (2003, 85). Taking a different view, Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place, argue that conceptual writing is actually always allegorical: referring to its own processes of composition or more broadly to the work of ‘writing itself’ (Place & Fitterman 2009, 15). If conceptual writing is always framed paratextually as aesthetic practice (in Barwick’s work here, by virtue of its installation in an artist-run gallery space, albeit that gallery space is a home garage), one might ask whether this is sufficient to bring about the kind of world-altering magic that defines aesthetic experience, however small or fleeting the shifts in disposition it brings about. ‘Prends garde,’ the epigraph to Caillois’s essay on mimicry enjoins us: ‘à jouer au fantôme on le devient’ (1984). The Social Life of Language Digital media revivify the romance of visual art with writing. This has brought about a shift away from a logophonic view of writing: that is, away from its relation to speech that the sensuous sounds of poetry foregrounded, and towards a logographism, where writing is understood as a form of imaging. The plasticity, malleability and mobility of digital text, its animation and architectural form (meaning that we can enter into it), foregrounds its material qualities (Goldsmith 2011, 27) in ways more unavoidable because more everyday, more pervasive, and easier to produce than Modernism’s most concerted attempts to do so. Digital media accelerate an aspect of the materiality of writing that always worked against the ideology of the transparency of text as words to be looked through rather than ‘words to be 7 looked at’ (as the title of Liz Kotz’s (2007) book on language in the art of the 1960s had it). Nevertheless, it is not simply the renewed image-becoming of writing that is critical here, but rather computation and the action of the algorithm that make the real difference. At one level, this is a quantitative difference that has brought about a qualitative change. Algorithmically generated poetry was anticipated by the Oulipean discovery of potentiality, for example in Raymond Queneau’s famous ‘Cent mille milliards de poèmes’ (‘A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems’). Not simply representing a disembodied dematerialization of writing, the algorithm points to the way human processes, when taken beyond a certain limit, can ultimately exceed the human grasp. We struggle to imagine the variations of the sonnets the way we struggle to comprehend the universe. There is wonder and enchantment as well as the frustration of impossibility in this. But when the sonnets are materialized in language (as they have been in a new computer-generated version of the work) they become less graspable as an imaginative totality, and are only able to be sampled (that is, digitally accessed) by any one human reader. Moreover in this form, they are likely to become inaccessible from outside the neo-feudalistic enclosures increasingly created by corporations like Facebook and Google. Once, action-at-a-distance (that is, action beyond the human capacity to apprehend it) was aided by ‘the kinetic unpredictability of oracular devices: like the twitching of a dowser’s hazel wand, the quivering intestines of a sacrificed bird, the Ouija board’s sliding glass’ (Warner 2008). If language, and especially writing, devised new ways to do this, the algorithm now outstrips their capacities. In the hands of satanic shamans such as Google and Facebook, it becomes a form that reduces divination to the malevolent powers of prediction as pre-emption.vii Beyond that, however, the algorithm opens the prospect of human agency in writing being subsumed by new machinic forces operating beyond the threshold of human apprehension. This seems to be distinct from the ways in 8 which we have always externalised human memory, in forms ranging from songlines in oral cultures to the book and now the computer file in cultures of literacy (Angel and Gibbs 2010). On the other hand, and as numerous thinkers have pointed out, beginning with everyday habits like driving, human beings have always compressed knowing into routines that can be performed automatically. We also, as Hayek notes, make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess (cited in Murphie, 2015, np). At one level, the algorithm simply represents an intensification of this process, yet the imperceptibility of its action to human perception does seem to materially alter the situation. While some – like Sybille Krämer – see the interface of data-processing systems as mere ‘eyewash’ (2006, 96) for human users, Maria Angel and I have argued (adapting Elizabeth Grosz’s argument about art) that the interface represents more precisely the excess produced by the need for seduction: the eye in tail of the of the peacock, in Darwinian terms. It is an attractor that conscripts human participation not only into the toils of Google and Facebook, but also into new forms of creation and experiment (Angel and Gibbs, 2012). To unfold this a little further: the conscription of human sensation, affect, and movement into the digital offers the potential for the remaking, as literacy and printing have done previously, of human sensoria. ‘The human’, was anyway always a historically and culturally contingent construction, a myth of (masculine) western humanism. If it is the case that artificiality (of which digital technology is but one aspect) is ‘natural to human beings’ (Ong 2002, 82), then this implies that human beings have the capacity to remake and transform not only our cultures but with them, ourselves as humans.viii This includes language as ‘the means by which experiences think within us’ (Johnston 2016, 41). Language enters into blocs of becoming with voices and accents, with lips, mouth, tongue, glottis, larynx, and lungs, to form speech. This assemblage generates the sonorous appeal of poetry and by this means language perpetuates itself, propagating itself through its capacity to seduce 9 humans – for example with clichés, whose catchinessix outlasts the objects and technologies to which they so often refer. ‘Language is using us to talk’, writes Harry Mathews: ‘we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents’ (1988). (He is referring here to the way grammar and syntax interpolate us into their structures and produces us as subjects). The coupling of language with surface via alphabetic technologies from scrolls through tablets, pages and walls to the ‘complex surfaces’ (Cayley 2005) of digital media enable the life of language to be further perpetuated – and transformed - in writing. The visual seduction of type and digital textual animation call to the human eye and ensure human attention. But it is in its encounter with data that text has made a quantum leap and is now beginning to appear as a data-driven life-form with its own kind of (nonhuman) consciousness, since metadata now endows text with memories of its own itineraries and allows it to know precisely where it is in the network at a given moment in timex (Johnston 2016). As Johanna Drucker writes, In a cultural world where complex systems theory has emerged as a property of the very conditions it arises to explain, and a post-vitalist paradigm erases simplistic conceptions of an essential property intrinsic to ‘life forms,’ the idea of the ‘living condition of language’ no longer suggests a metaphor, but points to an actuality. (2012, np) We now inhabit what Brian Rotman calls a ‘regime of the enacted’ (2002, 427) in which notational or symbolic media are being replaced by motion capture technologies for storing and retrieving information (or, more simply, by technologies for performance). Under this regime and in its conjunction with the algorithm, writing has become a technology which produces a happening event, generating liveness and duration as a form of habitat or milieu. This represents a new nature, which mines – including literally, in its dependence on minerals – the natural world to take it into its own perpetual life. At this point, Friedrich Kittler claims, we ‘can no longer dream of writing as the expression of individuals or the traces of bodies [because there the] very 10 forms, differences and frequencies of its letters have to be reduced to formulas’ (1990, 16). Lynne Barwick’s work qualifies that view, insisting on physical space on a human scale and on human readership – though it stretches the latter to its physical limit, turning and turning with increasing dizziness and trying not to jump lines as we turn, trying to follow a line as we are also fuzzily aware of other bodies, turning dizzily in the same space, until the space itself seems animated with these turning bodies, dervish-like in their singular absorption, set in motion and enchanted by the dictates of the text in its relationship to space. We are not so much walking a visible line here as turning lines, or having them turn us in their visibility, their sonority, and all the affective resonance of the sense we make of them. These lines are turning us, but into or towards what? To stave off such dizziness, another way to read this text is to sample it digitally just as we must do with the digital instantiation of Queneau’s potentiality. What draws our attention – the affective force of a particular phrase or the distorted and very particular shape of lettering on just that part of the wall level with our eye - will also affect the way we sample. The phrase I used earlier, ‘the writing on the wall’ which directs us to the context of ‘the present’, also assumes the actual wall as passive material support for inscription, even while, the longer one looks at the work, the wall’s capacity to modulate the formation of letters and determine the wavering direction of lines of text becomes more and more visible. I say visible, but of course what happens is that we apprehend mimetically the nature of the effort involved, abstracting from the visible trace of the gesture of writing in all its awkwardness and translating it into incipient motor organisation in our own bodies so that we feel (not just see) something of the effort involved in negotiating this uneven surface that directs and redirects the gestures of both writing and reading. It is not simply that the text takes on the shape of its supposed support – a glitch here, a barely legible word or jumpy letter there but rather that the assemblage of wall, crayon and writer produce words and letters in singular forms. These are the result of negotiations between the surface of the wall and the gestural rhythm of the writer, and they inflect our apprehension of the text, giving it, at certain moments, a very particular 11 affective colouring. Our own movement also increasingly inflects it the longer we watch, so that we are participating in it, part of the assemblage, not simply standing outside it to get a handle on it, to comprehend it, and thus to capture it. With this text, we are in the dynamic flux of reading, and what it means to read has been transformed – or rather, revealed. This is what writing can do. The insistence on materiality and corporeality distinguishes the work not only from conceptual writing as Reed describes it, but also from accounts of conceptual writing – like those of Goldsmith – that see it, on the model of the conceptual art of earlier decades, as needing to be ‘got’ in the way one gets a joke, rather than actually read in the way on might read a poem or a novel (Goldsmith writes that he wants a thinkership rather than a readership for his own work, as if the two were mutually exclusive). Barwick’s work seems to me to resonate more with the ethos of the new materialisms, in their engagement with the action of the heterogeneous (human and nonhuman) assemblage. While Mel Chen (2012) argues that the powers of language have been underestimated, Karen Barad (2007), taking exception to the linguistic turn of the late twentieth century in its relentless human exceptionalism (buoyed by the idea that language is defining the human), suggests that we have paid too much attention to language and not enough to the performativity of materiality itself. This work offers an antidote to that unqualified assertion, as it offers a demonstration of the animating power of the word, its entanglement in the materiality of bodies and its dependence on the media with which it must couple to come into being. If the writing exists at the limit of communicability, Dworkin argues that this is a zone in which other things become audible: when ‘speech intransitively reaches the limit at which its communication becomes silent, we can hear the body speak’ (2009, 168), he suggests. But in conjuring the idea of ‘the body’, he automatically writes it into a fantasy of a cultural and historical universal, and thereby into the masculine as its representative. Given the history of the metaphorisation of the feminine as passive surface, aligned in the antinomies of western thought with ‘nature’ as resource, it’s perhaps not by chance that this work, Like A Structured Language, so alive to the powers of agencies beyond ‘the human’ is signed with a woman’s name. 12 From “Like a word instead of a thing” to “Like an acknowledged hazard”, it seems that something is trying to come to life in the signs of a language that can only stutter in a procession of steps towards it. This something is not a being but a force. In this, the writing hand is a conduit or collaborator, not an authenticating originator. The process of continual variation through repetition of the simile form only ceases at the point where there is no more surface for inscription, coming to an otherwise arbitrary stop on the opposite side of the garage door from where it began, leaving us in front of an opening. Through which we leave, with the experience of the work still within us. Perhaps, finally it is this point, or possibility of departure, that the work actually investigates: like a structured language (but not a structured language). References: Angel, M & Gibbs, A, 2010 ’Memory and Motion’ in Joergen Schaeffer and Peter Gendolla eds Beyond the Screen Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Germany Angel, M and Gibbs, A 2012 ‘Geospatial Aesthetics’ ‘Geo-spatial Aesthetics: time, agency and space in electronic writing’, Sprache und Literatur, 108:42 Special Issue, eds Joergen Schafer and Peter Gendolla. Angel, M and Gibbs, A, ‘The Ethos of ‘Walking’: digital writing and the temporal animation of space’ in in Philippe Bootz and Hermès Salcedo, eds, ‘Litérature et Numérique: Quand? Comment? Pourquoi?’, special issue of Formules pp151-163. Angel M, and Gibbs, A 2009 ‘On Moving And Being Moved: The Corporeality Of Writing In Literary Fiction And New Media Art’, in Literature and Sensation, eds H Groth and A Uhlmann, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 13 Barad, Karen. 2012. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Benjamin, Walter. (1986). ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’. In Reflections, 333-336 New York: Schocken. Burroughs W 1960 ‘The Ticket That Exploded’, in James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg eds Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader. London, Harper Collins, 1999. Caillois, Roger (1984). “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”. October 31: 16‐32. Caillois, Roger. (2003) letter of 27 December 1934 to André Breton. In The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. 84–86. Edited by Claudine Frank. Durham, N.C, and London: Duke University Press. Clemens, Justin. (2015). “Boom Boom”. Australian Humanities Review 58. 111-19. Cayley, John. 2005. “Writing on Complex Surfaces”. Accessed 15 May 2017. www.dichtung-digital.org/2005/2-Cayley.htm Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies. Durham: Duke University Press. Drucker, J (2012) “Beyond conceptualisms: poetics after critique and the end of individual voice.” Harriet: a poetry blog (Apr/May): n.p. Accessed 20/7/12. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/conceptual-writing-wasintriguing-and-provocative/ Dworkin, Craig. 2009. “The Stutter of Form.” InThe Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, edited by Craig Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff, 166-183. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dworkin, Craig. 2013. No Medium. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 14 Fitterman, Rob, and Vanessa Place. 2009. Notes on conceptualisms. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling. Gibbs, A 2005 ‘Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: Engendering Differences’ TEXT Vol 9 No 1 www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/april05/gibbs.htm Gibbs, Anna. 2006. “Writing And Danger: The Intercorporeality Of Affect”. In Creative Writing: theory beyond practice. Edited by Nigel Krauth and Tess Brady. 157-168. Teneriffe: Post Pressed. Goldsmith, K 2010 Unoriginal genius: poetry by other means in the new century. Chicago: U of Chicago Press. Grosz, Elizabeth 2008 Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth New York: Columbia University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (2011). ‘Matter, life and other variations’. Philosophy Today 55 (SPEP supplement): 17-27. Jakobson, R. 1985). “Metalanguage As A Linguistic Problem”. In Selected Writings, VII. 113-121. Edited by S. Rudy. Mouton: Paris. Johnston, David Jhave. 2016. Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry's Ontological Implications. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1990. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Krämer, Sybille. 2006. “Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media.” Theory, Culture, & Society 23: 7-8. 93-109. 15 Kotz, Liz. 2007. Words to Be Looked At. Language in 1960s Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. London, Scott. nd. “The Ecology of Magic: An Interview with David Abram”. Accessed 15 May 2017. http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/abram.html Mathews, Harry. 1988. City Limits. London, May 26. Mitchell, WJT. 2013. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murphie, Andrew. (2014). “Auditland”. PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 11:2. np. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v11i2.3407. Ong, Walter J. 2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents Series (Terence Hawkes ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Perloff, Marjorie. 1989 ‘Introduction’. Postmodern Genres. Edited by Marjorie Perloff. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press. Perloff, M 1996 Wittgenstein’s Ladder: poetic language and the strangeness of the ordinary (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reed, Brian. (2014). “Conceptual Writing: Poetry as Information Art” paper presented to the seminar of the English Department, University of Sydney. Rotman, Brian. 2002. “The Alphabetic Body”. Parallax 8:1. 92-104. Stengers, Isabelle. 2012. “Reclaiming Animism.” e-flux Journal 36:np. Accessed May 210, 2017 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiminganimism/ 16 Verwoert, Jan (2010). “Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art”. Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, 1:1. 1–7. Warner, Marina. 2008. ‘The Writing of Stones’. Accessed 15 May 2017. http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/29/warner.php i See Gibbs, 2006. Because words are supramodal, having a weak relation to each of the senses, which they can then reconfigure in relation to each other, as WJT Mitchell recognizes in his discussion of ekphrasis: ii One might call ekphrasis a form of nesting without touching or suturing, a kind of action-at-distance between two rigorously separated sensory and semiotic tracks, one that requires completion in the mind of the reader. This is why poetry remains the most subtle, agile mastermedium of the sensus communis, no matter how many spectacular multimedia inventions are devised to assault our collective sensibilities. (2005, 404, my emphasis). iii For example, Jan Verwoert (2010) argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ushers in a new concern with what words actually do. I think he misses the fact that feminist work had already gone there. iv Although Goldsmith writes that the typewriter didn’t encourage transcription work, it actually did: for example, Australian artist Barbara Campbell retyped Conrad’s Heart of Darkness over and over again almost six times on Chinese rice paper scrolls as part of her installation Conradiana (1994), in a feminist intervention which, among other things, dramatizes the work performed by women in the service of artistic production by men. v There is also support for this in some of Lynne Barwick’s other recent work, which more explicitly makes reference to digitality: the placement of painted phrases such as ‘Like A Discharged Subject’; ‘Like An Unregulated Sense’ or ‘Like A Word Instead Of A Thing’; Like A Token Memory’ in diptychs interrupting single canvases along the wall of her 2014 exhibition ‘Afterimage’ (Damien Minton Gallery) and more direct reference of her 2015 work Protocol Malady). vi The dismantling of the discourse/ metadiscourse distinction was already undertaken by fictocriticism from the 1980s, where the collapse of ‘critical distance’ (or, as Barbara Johnson has it, ‘critical difference’) interrupted the usual hierarchical relationship between fiction and theory in which fiction functions as the object of the critical or theoretical metadiscourse (see Gibbs 2005). Though of course we continued – and still continue, in many contexts to pretend this hadn’t happened. While fictocriticism did exert a real pull on 17 academic writing, changing what counted as theoretical writing, its most radical forms remained marginal. vii I refer here to Roger Caillois’ distinction between satanic and Lucferian (the angel who wanted knowledge) shamanism. viii If in this respect we are, perhaps, unique, that is not, in my view, a legitimate basis for human exceptionalism as an ideology. ix ‘Catchiness’ is a term I prefer to the ubiquitous ‘stickiness’ with its origins in marketing, and to my mind, better captures both the contagious and ephemeral qualities of what is caught. x W. J. T. Mitchell writes, ‘images [and writing as image] are life-forms, (...) objects are the bodies they animate, (and) media are the habitats or ecosystems in which pictures come alive’ (2013: 198). 18