Excess and writing have in many ways become impossible to understand in the terms of one another. The boundless capacity of the internet, and even a modest personal computer, to register, store and move textual matter, along with interface illusions such as the infinitely scrolling page, means that it becomes ever more implausible to think of a technological limit to writing. This is problematic, not least because human rhythms and capacities are increasingly measured and set against those of technology. Terms such as “limitless potential” are used interchangeably with regard technology and cognition to imply an infinite financial wealth within the mind which need only be unfettered by faster and more efficient devices, and greater intimacy with them.
INCOHERENCE
In The Interface Effect (2015), Alexander Galloway proposes four regimes for art, based on their political and aesthetic incoherence or coherence. Ideology for example, is proposed to be politically coherent – aligned to a dogma – and aesthetically coherent – it makes sense. Galloway finishes by proposing that it is to the “dirty regime” of Truth, where works intersect political incoherence and aesthetic incoherence, that we must look for works which are capable of speaking in non-generic ways about the coercive nature of technology. This, he says is an analogue of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of ‘the whatever’:
“The whatever finds its power in incontinence and transformation, not unification or repetition. Likewise the whatever is politically incoherent because it tends to erode existing territories and institutional routines … No centre exists toward which it might gravitate” (142)
Artworks of the regime of truth, it is suggested, offer a way in which the increasingly coercive and invisible process of structuring by interfaces might be made available for critique: “effacing representational aesthetics and representational politics alike, in favor of direct immanence” (142). The politically unaligned and aesthetically inconsistent work, almost by definition, is one which comes into contact with, and breaches, its limits – the ends of enquiry which match up, hold the work together (aesthetic coherence) and align it with existing social frameworks (political coherence), are left ragged, and the moment of the work is not generic: “neither a universal nor an individual included in a series, but rather “singularity insofar as it is whatever singularity” (Agamben 1990, 1).
Disappointingly though, Galloway posits no singular work that exhibits these qualities – other than a footnote which gestures towards an unpublished work by his colleague Eugene Thacker. In this essay I would like to suggest that Ben Lerner’s poem Mean Free Path exhibits precisely these qualities by disclosing, as a facet of the poems the formerly withdrawn aspects of relation between his testimony on love poem, war poem, and elegy, and the structuring, disorganizing principals of ‘the language of new media’ which allow for it.
I want to use the digital “Codec” as a framework to describe the occluding/revealing process of the enunciation as a structure for testimony. The writing of excess in Mean Free Path (2010) I will argue, does not explode into (and therefore gesture at) limitlessness, breaking down boundaries of decency, rapidity, scale for example, but rather flickers at the limit of what has and hasn’t been said – stammering – hovering in the condition of the unsaid, while continuing to say it.
THE CONTEMPORARY
In referring to the “contemporary”, I am drawing on Agamben’s notion of someone who is able to view ‘the darkness’ of their time (Agamben 2009, 50). Agamben uses the metaphor of the darkness in the night sky, which he says is not the darkness of absence, but rather of those stars which move away from us so fast their light never reaches us – it withdraws: “To perceive, in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot-this is what it means to be contemporary.” I would like to show how the contemporary poet is now one for whom interface effects are retrieved from withdrawal. The darkness of their time, I assert, refers precisely to ‘that which is withdrawn’ in use.
THE WITHDRAWN
Withdrawal is essential to Heideggeran ontology, and Agamben (1973, 71-75) has used the term to affirm a distinction between the human open-ness and animal self-withdrawal of which he says the human-as-animal is composed. I posit a similar move in considering the boundary of human open-ness and technological self-withdrawal which makes up the writing subject. For Heidegger, a tool necessarily withdraws into invisibility while we express our own being through it – using it to our ends. Galloway similarly has written of the invisibility of media and interfaces thus. The better they work, the more invisible they become. To look at the other side of the coin: our experience of devices is precisely and uniquely the experience of their failure. This, what Heidegger called un-readiness-to-hand (Heidegger 204-207), when a tool becomes unavailable, broken or unwieldy is a moment in which the tool discloses itself in relation to someone who would use it. Importantly, this disclosure is specifically related to an aspect, that is, the nature of its unsuitability in-relation-to.
What the contemporary must bring back from withdrawal – the darkness which is the light which moves away – is the withdrawn technological and its relation to the human language it produces subjectivity with. In writing at limits, the contemporary poet in particular is in a position to retrieve those formerly withdrawn aspects of the technological process which structures their enunciation.
TESTIMONY
Testimony is associated with speaking at limits, especially as it relates to speaking trauma. In Remnants of Auschwitz (1999, 144-146), Agamben distinguishes between the living being and speaking subject. In this distinction, we have the opportunity to observe how the technological inculcates itself as an element of subjectivity at the moment of the enunciation. The enunciation as the horizon on which the “possibility of speech realize[s] itself as such”, has to do with the techné of language production – the interface is now then the apparatus which allows the testimony to appear as such.
CODEC
But what the structuring processes of the technological against which the testimony becomes an excess? The model I would like to use is that of Codecs. Codec (compression-decompression/coding-decoding) is a process which allows for the most salient features of New Media – namely its sampling and quantifying, and the subsequent tropes such as modularity and variability (Manovich 2002, loc 646- 800).
The low-order language in which a digital media item is stored is called data, that protocol which allows for it to be shown, the interface. Codecs such as those having the file extension .jpg, .tiff, .raw, store visual information as data, in a string of alphanumeric figures. Before being run by the Codec interface, the data itself does not conventionally exist on the plane of the human subject, and after, both the interface and data are withdrawn as the a-priori to what we see.
Two aspects that are important to note about this relation: 1) both the storage format of data and the structuring interface used to make the image immanent ordinarily occlude themselves in revealing the image – they are the unsaid which is in the saying of the image. 2) The data of the storage format stakes no claim to being the originary, or ‘essence’ of the image, being only precisely the a-priori, not containing either the exhaustive information with which the image can reveal itself (for it requires the interface for that), nor to contain everything that will be shown (for any viable interface could show a singularly different version of it), nor having any privileged relation to the real (being structured like a language).
The salient innovations of Glitch Art bring aspects of both the data and the interface in a Codec into immanence. Artists such as Rosa Menkman (2008) and Nick Britz (2011) have forced the Codec to disclose itself, by editing the source code of data or interface in order to produce situations wherein they fail to articulate or stammer their data. The resulting media then literally exceed their data, being added-to by patterns, colourings, warps from the interface; while also becoming diminished, half-withdrawing from view in favour of the ‘darkness’ of their structure.
MEAN FREE PATH
I want to read the way in which the Amercian poet Ben Lerner, in his 2010 collection Mean Free Path, willfully enters the enunciation of his work into the disorganizing principals of new media, in effect making the structuring relation of data-interface by which we access his testimony critically present in a work “singularity insofar as it is whatever singularity”.
Sampling
In Mean Free Path the poem is broken into the unit of the phrase and reformed as stanzas, each of a uniform number of lines and line-lengths. Each phrase appears to us as a singular ‘bit’, reappearing in any number of different contexts throughout the poem. In the systematic incoherence generated by these contexts – their failure to determine a singular meaning – what Lerner crafts in the work is a distinction between ‘traditional language’ (whose ‘sampling’ we might associate with the literary technique of parataxis), to the more violent sampling of linguistic units by the computational.
“I’m not above being understood, provided
The periodic motion takes the form of
Work is done on the surface to disturb
Traveling waves.” (48)
The misfit in semantic units and phrase-unit across the poem is a continual smeering and bluring of the edges of the unit, producing a sense of leaking or liquidity of relations in the stanza – a sense that the uniform is being exceeded by the potentiality of its content. Very rarely will a full-stop or line break relate to a semantic gap in the work, whereas such gaps announce themselves seemingly randomly throughout. All the way up, zooming out of the structure of the poem, we anticipate a form to emerge, but this finale or closure is continually offset by the confusion of structuring and content which bring it into existence:
“I planned a work which could describe itself
Into existence, then back out again
Until description yielded to experience
Yielded an experience of structure
Collapsing under its own weight like
Citable in moments: parting
Dusk. Look out the window. Those small
Rain. In holding pattern over Denver
Collisions clear a path from ground to cloud” (49)
Variability
In the drama that plays out across the book, it is as though the enunciation of each stanza is a bank of the same data subject to a new interface, activating a variable version of what is willed to be said – each refusing to reinforce the other, as with these elements from the first two stanza:
“But not how you mean that. The slow beam
Opened me up. Walls walked through me
Like resonant waves”
[…]
“Imperceptably into gift shops. The death of a friend
Opens me up. Suddenly the weather
Is written by Tolstoy, whose hands were giant
Resonant waves.” (39)
The system of relations between the what is sayable and unsayable in each stanza then, is continually deferred by virtue of the numerous ways in which the component phrase-units and stanzas might be read across and with one another. What is clear is that something is escaping us in each version:
“There must be an easier way to do this
I mean without writing, without echoes
Arising from focusing surfaces, which should
Should have been broken by structures” (40)
Mean Free Path does not exist without the structure which disorganizes its content. Its poetic making is precisely in the interplay of this content and that disorganizing structure to which Lerner testifies – what the poem says, is what is unsayable:
“And that’s elegy. I know I am a felt
This is the form where my friend is buried
Effect of the things that I take personally
A gentle rippling across the social body
I know that I can’t touch her with the hand
That has touched money, I mean without
Several competing forms of closure” (56)
We have observed several motifs of ‘aesthetic incoherence’ in Lerner’s work, and this kind of approving denouncing ambivalence toward the disorganizing principals of new media (and “money”) is what Galloway refers to as the ‘political incoherence’ of the regime of truth. Lerner’s poetry is sustained by the rhythms, tactic and tropes of new media, without which it simply wouldn’t exist on the plane of the contemporary; but then what it testifies to, is the impossibility of testimony (or elegy) under these very conditions.
CONCLUSION
What I will call the Glitch Poetic as the writing of an excess, is not human attainment surpassing the speed and efficiency of new media. Nor is it the human testimony explicitly falling short of the demands made of it. It is rather the moment produced when the sampling, quantifying activity integral to new media (Berhard Steigler’s “grammatisation”, Heidegger‘s “technological-understanding-of-being”, and Galloway’s “interface effect”) does not exhaust that which it structures. Sampling and quantification as new media structuring devices are a new poetic form, and by reading poems which work in excess of this form, we don’t mean that the form breaks, but rather the sayable in them is tangibly corrupted by its emergence through that form. The Glitch Poetic, is in this sense, a call to and a performance of the irrational in language, a Romanticism to parlay against the new-Empiricism of code.
Excessive research 
October 24, 2015 at 6:44 pm
Hello, Nathan. First of all, thank you for pointing at Agamben concept of whatever-singularity. I was unaware of its Comming Community text and I find it quite relevant to think about post-digital society in general.
I would like to enhance what you kindly have withdrawn on Heidegger’s un-ready-ness-to hand of a tool that fails. You say that this discloses ‘the unsuitability in-relation-to’ someone who would have used it. Indeed, the relation is invisible when the tool works, and becomes visible upon its failure. What is more, the failure is what reveals the relation of the tool [as Zuhandenheit] not only with a subject, but with a Dasein within a network. When Heidegger is discussing inherent spatiality of Dasein he states that
“The familiarity [the character of inconspicuous familiarity] itself becomes visible in a conspicuous manner only when what is at hand is discovered circumspectly in the deficient mode of taking care of things. When we do not find something in ‘its’ place, the region of that place often becomes explicitly accessible as such for the first time” [Being and Time, section 22].
That is, the failure not only highlights the familiar relation of an object with a subjectivity, but of that object within a co-significant network of other objects,which make sense upon each other (the knob with a door, and with a hand, and with the closed room, and with the possibility of entrance, etc.), what Heidegger names Understanding [Verstehen], an (also hidden) ontological feature of a being-in-the-world.
Being unfamiliar, but curious, with English poetry I noticed that ‘Mean free path’ also belongs to physics’ language, and that there it is related to an erratic behaviour due to collisions. It appears to me that the systematic nature of the poem (I mean, of this particular poem) disagrees with randomness. I guess I could phrase my question as: does uniformity of new media, without exhausting content as you say, has space for randomness when even the gaps are systematically produced? Does ‘the sayable’ gets corrupted in this sense?
I also find interesting how excessiveness and occlusion play together in some of the workshop’s posts, including yours. It appears to me that there is a symbiotic relation between these ideas expressing itself in different levels, and for me it’s certainly outstanding (it seems a contradiction!) that a notion of ‘many’ or ‘too much’ develops silently or in plain darkness.
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October 26, 2015 at 4:24 pm
Hi Nathan
I found the words ‘flickering’ and ‘stammering’ very effective ways of describing this point of limit, and they ways these then resonated in the examples further in the text. I was also interested in Agamben’s theory of ‘whatever’. Does he positions this as either positive or negative, for example, or is it merely a descriptive term? I found it interesting to read the quote in relation to his text ‘What is an apparatus?’, where power exists in the network ‘between’, and here he describes the lack of centre. Trinh T Minh-ha writes ‘meaning can be political only when it does not let itself be easily stabilized and when it does not rely on any single source of authority, but rather, empties it, or decentralizes it.’ This could be an interesting point of cross-over for discussion. Liminality is a key element in my own research and I would enjoy talking more about this at the workshop. thanks, and look forward to meeting you, Lyndsay
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October 27, 2015 at 9:55 am
Dear Nathan,
Thanks for the reading! I found the glitch poetic very interesting. Following your line of thought about excess and writing, would glitch poetic would actually be a way of constraining yourself against the endless excess? And in this way pointing to the liminal of excess? If you understand glitches as “a performance of the irrational in language [/pictures/sound/code]”, I find it very interesting how the limitation of language as explored in glitch poetic, actually becomes an irrational act. As I understand Bataille the irrational is about the excess; that which has no use value, but glitches is about limiting excess(?) and in this way shows how limits can also work in an irrational manner. I don’t know if this makes sense, but I found Bataille interesting in relation to the whatever-theory you are describing.
Best, Marie Louise
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October 31, 2015 at 12:59 pm
Dear Nathan, thx for sharing!
I think it’s extremely interesting to search for the “disorganizing principles of new media” into a text of poetry (or to see them emerging from it) and it makes me think of the trans-boarding of the online into the offline towards a line of translation which mixes media and formats.
On poetry and finance by F. Bifo about the relation between symbolic poetry and algorithmic finance might also be of your interest http://www.amazon.com/The-Uprising-Finance-Semiotext-Intervention/dp/1584351128
Looking forward to meet you!
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November 2, 2015 at 10:28 am
@pablo, thank you for your contribution here extending my reading of Heidegger – useful. Perhaps your point about excess/occluding could be addressed somehow by this element of Heidgger’s ontology: “the region of that place often becomes explicitly accessible as such for the first time” … I need to think about this.
Your comments about Mean Free Path: the mean free path refers to the average journey taken by a unit before it collides, yes – and the text on the back of the book refers to ‘collissions’. It’s an interesting viewpoint to take on this poem, because of its relations to ‘units’ – in the poem the unitary is continually under question – forms of the unitary (sentences, lines) being unreliably defined, and re-defined. It is as though these units are losing their surface tension. The mean free path, being the description of a journey, an average journey _before_ a collission, also brings to mind the spurts of thought, almost philosophising, before the collapse into the following unit.
On excess “too much” being invisible – think this has been a common trope because the with media there is an inevitable selection being made. Media as a window. Also with digital media, there is always an excess – as illustrated by projects such as http://theghostinthemp3.com/ which reperforms the elements of Susanne Vega’s Toms Diner which are lost. That is the elements of the track which are deemed to be “too much” (and also not enough?) for the medium in which they’re to be sent.
This comment makes me think… Is “too much” ever visible, except as symptoms?
@Lyndsay
Agamben’s theory of the ‘whatever’ is I would say a positive term, allowing as it does something to be ‘whatever it is that it is’. Galloway uses the example of non-generic (without fitting into categories of race, for example) subjectivity online. He’s clear to distinguish this from the priveledged white person’s position of being able to ‘throw off’ their race – rather to say that the whatever is a non-generic form of wearing your race, background etc etc, as a way to be whatever it is that you are.
And Yes, let’s talk liminality and lack of centre!
*
@marie
With regard Battaile and whatever-theory, I think the “soverign subject” certainly shares a lot with Agamben.
*
@Mitra
yes! I am influenced by Bifo on poetry and finance. In a way, I think of my study as the application of some of the potentials he indicates in poetry.
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November 2, 2015 at 11:34 am
I have a brief thought also that I wanted to put here so I remember it! On Marie noting links between Bataille’s sovereign subject and Agamben’s whatever. This also is connected to the Hermeneutics and Communism text as an attack on metaphysics – that truth doesn’t exhaust the potential for what is or can be. It strikes me that this dismissal of metaphysics has links to Heidegger’s dismissal of ‘metaphor’, as David Nowell Smith notes:
“metaphor” can often be used to domesticate a statement that appears aberrant, rather than asking where this aberrance might lead. ” (Sounding/Silence: p16)
So metaphor, like metaphysics, is a tool which undercuts the sovereignty of the subject by submitting it to ‘truth’ (and physical possibility) as the sole arbiter of what is.
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November 3, 2015 at 3:38 pm
Thanks again for your rich presentation. Just to follow up, this is the book by Espen Aarseth I was referring to: https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/cybertext
It provides a vocabulary for discussing text in a different view that suits these texts that somehow reflect the organization of the text, and where their organization reflect their content (as perhaps in Man Free Path). To Aarseth this is a textual understanding that is not new, but perhaps only displaced in Western culture. In the context of literature it is a widely used reference, and perhaps also for that reason worth relating to; though I also think you have many important additions.
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November 5, 2015 at 7:35 am
Hi Nathan, thanks again for the interesting talk. I enjoyed hearing more about Galloway, and your reference to Burroughs. Below are my notes of the comments afterwards:
Aideen – flickering – a moment that flickers, Katherine Hayles book – How we became post human – talks about world is restructured in terms of pattern and noise, ‘flickering signifier’ emerges between the two. computer logic re-expressed mangled, an unlikely cyborg, an imperfect mix
Cornelia – reminiscent of generative works, relationship between method, disorganising principle, and outcome – the poems, if only see the poems without knowing principle machinic logic, how do these relate?
Nathan – Interested in the way the actual work, the poem, exhibits what is unsayable in itself, consciously with Ben Lerner not talking about the interface he used to make the poem but the way the poem exhibits the mark of the way it was said. eg. glitched jpeg – don’t need to know the process to understand an error has occured, nature of way the image is made is revealed in the image.
Christian – reminded of old text, Espen Aarseth – specific vocabulary of textual understanding, talks about texts organised into ‘textons’ and ‘scriptons’, history of textual understanding, precedes internet – good to look at form of literature that reflects the organization of text and vice versa. Q – visual glitch to poetics – codecs comparable with text and image?
Nathan – goes beyond framework because is framework poem was produced, but codec is not essential to the argument
Kristoffer – maybe not leave codec, or glitch, but use more metaphorical, historical connections and breaking down the technological. Later glitch art often failed to address structural component of technologies, vernacular of file formats – on structural or material level was more about glitches, when on metaphorical level or poetic level, is it still a glitch? Information is still transmitted, is not broken down in material way.
Nathan – word in visual and sound art practice, tropes exhausted or tired, yet as theoretical tool it’s not exhausted because we are still here talking about possible disappearance of interfaces, still issues around glitch, that glitch addresses an idea, by having them as part of a literature, analytical tool, draw them away from the ways they’ve already been used.
Gazielle – concrete poetry a better material? Structures as well as words being manipulated. Addressing structure is more tangible rather than words, sense or non-sense.
Nathan – looked at it, part of visual art culture, look to bring it towards that. Not fully the technological context i want to address
Scott – language, medium of language, mixed in with other things but couple of different metaphors, for muddled syntax, stammering metaphor for speaking, glitch visual metaphor, while not inapplicable, there is a moving around what the specificity of language in this context might be?
Nathan – specificity of language as media would look to address, article syntax might be a way to unravel some of these issues
Geoff – politics and excess of language – how does it operate politically?
Nathan – refusal of Bifo in the uprising, poetry has interesting status in relation to financialisation of language, stammer or stutter, the link between thought and financialisation. These works speak to Bifo’s ideas.
Mitra – symbolic poetry, rupturing between syntax and semantics, and what is happening in financialisation in society, generates excess that has been datafied and commodified. Glitch and excess, in the comments on the blog, excess of semantics is forcing the syntax and revealing itself, and vice versa, and potentially creating a new space for poetics and politics.
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November 5, 2015 at 12:39 pm
Manovich is such an old reference, and doesn’t really get you very far does it? A far better point of departure seems Bifo’s poetry in excess of the economised language of finance. One might argue the same with glitch that might appear well worn these days. Stammering seems far more productive analogy to indicate how various procedural and protological logics effect language and subjectivity. Given the attention to language, the choices here of what terms might be employed – and their application across different material-discursive systems – seems crucial.
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November 5, 2015 at 12:41 pm
Also check out the execution event at Aarhus in December: http://softwarestudies.projects.cavi.au.dk/index.php/*.exe_%28ver0.1%29
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November 5, 2015 at 4:59 pm
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for you thorough and considered comments, both on-and-offline. During the post-paper discussion I mentioned N. Katherine Hayle’s ‘How We Became Post-Human,’ in which she talks of the ‘flickering signifier’— which to me recalled your flickering/stuttering enunciation of the glitch aesthetic in poetry. It’s possibly less relevant than I first thought, but interesting nonetheless.
Here is the quote, apologies for any loss of context:
“The compounding of Signal with materiality suggests that new technologies will instantiate new models of signification. Information technologies do more than change modes of text production, storage, and dissemination. They fundamentally alter the relation of Signified to Signifier. Carrying the instabilities implicit in Lacanian floating signifiers one step further, information technologies create what I will call flickering signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions. Flickering signifiers signal an important shift in the plate tectonics of language.” (Hayles 30)
If you don’t have a copy, it’s online as a pdf at aaaarg…
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November 13, 2015 at 2:29 pm
Nathan,
I really enjoyed this paper, it’s very clear and does interesting things with language analysis. I wondered about the actual methodologies Lerner uses to construct his poems, whether there are particular ‘tools’ he uses, or maybe this is about the processing of the ‘content’, since we know where it ends up but not how it begins. I was also curious about the title ‘mean free path’. In your closing statement, the new-Empiricism of code is something I would like to hear more about! This is the Australian poet I mentioned to you, can’t recall in exactly what context but she may be of interest. http://quarterlywest.com/?p=2007
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