Algorithms, traces, and solitary work

Digital algorithms and software raise fundamental questions about writing. And so it should be, since most things don’t look the same when you turn to the logic of digits. For a start, the environment in which inscription takes place is no longer that of a trace immediately noticeable.

Source: The Renegade Writer

A text written using the keyboard of a computer appears to a viewer as an inscription already finished. That’s because the erasures that come with versions and drafts are no longer perceivable, the way they were in environments dominated by the work of pen and paper. Pencil corrections, and even those made by typewriters, stay on paper; they travel along with the text. Visually, they are inextricably part of it. Their presence is proof of the text’s evolution.

The archaeological gesture of tracing

This is not to say that digital writing dismisses the possibility of tracing. It’s only that traces are not immediately visible in digital composition. They don’t stay on the screen as such, not like the marginalia on a page pre-occupied by what is considered to be ‘the primary text.’ If they do stay somewhere, this somewhere is a place where the material traces, in order to be seen, must be dug out, unearthed in a gesture that is archaeological in nature.

Archaeology is about digging-in-order-to-find. It is about dealing with the underground and with the undergrowth. And as such, one would be tempted to say that even the tracing of analogue texts (marks on paper) is subjected to the processes of unearthing. Which is very true. But also incomplete. Because analogue writing shows the signs of a draft without requiring an effort of visualisation. This is why a digital text always appears as completed, even when it is work-in-progress. On the computer screen, all signs look definitive. They look as if they had no past and no future. To put it differently, an analogue text is diachronic (it flows, it progresses along a continuum that is permanently discernible), while a digital one is synchronic. Its stasis is caused by the absence of versions, insofar as versioning doesn’t take place on the screen. More precisely, the surface of writing is moved somewhere else. It is not the screen that plays the role of this surface but the electronic apparatus that registers the impressions of one’s fingers and of one’s intentions. And that apparatus remains, in most cases, unseen.

A form of writing that is always elsewhere

Metadata, which is precisely an assortment of traces left by a digital text, brings about the very possibility of this gaze that sees into a text’s past. But the tracing of digital signs requires a technological apparatus of its own. The reading of code is not the same thing as the reading of a short story or of a shopping list. Code exists beyond the surface. Code is brought to the screen only if the writer/reader is directly implicated in the writing/reading of a line of code. But otherwise writing and reading take place under the surface of composition. What I mean here is writing that is other than code-writing. The simple (in digital terms) composition of a short text on a computer screen requires the work of software, which comes prior to the compositional act. From the keyboard that transforms mechanical, electrical, and digital processes into letters to the word processor that enables the transformation of keystrokes into images on a screen, the technical aspects of composition remain largely unnoticed and unacknowledged, but not unimportant because of that.

Source: Penn State

As with all technologies, the functioning of a writing apparatus becomes apparent when it ceases to work as programmed. The business-as-usual standard does not provide a model for the acknowledgment of technological processes. But what’s truly important is that business-as-usual presupposes a subject who thinks he/she is working alone.

A subject who works alone is a subject who doesn’t need the presence of external factors to tell them how the work needs to be carried on. This, though, can only happen when the technology on which the subject is reliant functions without interruptions, i.e. when the subject forgets that there’s technology around, believing they worked alone, without actually doing so.

There’s an ideology behind something that works

Well-functioning technologies are, for this reason, of the ideological order. Only an ideology without hiccups can persuade a subject of its absence, so as to work efficiently beyond (or under) the surface, unseen, unnoticed, unacknowledged. It’s important for an ideology to remain invisible and thus to persuade by means of its apparent absence. The subject of ideology is a subject convinced that they are not ideology-driven; that they are free.

The same goes with technologies in general, and the digital ones in particular. In our case, it is crucial that code stay in a territory that’s largely unacknowledged, or where access is permitted only to specialists. (Code-writers are the technocrats of the digital age.)

It is interesting to note that, precisely because technology (as the Other) presents itself as non-present, the subject goes about doing business-as-usual as though they were working alone. They don’t share the tasks of writing with anybody else. They dwell, for this reason, in a symbolic time and space that are anachronistic when regarded from the perspective of, say, Foucault’s theory of the author as a function rather than a real person. Prior to Foucault, authors did not cross the threshold of individuality. They performed their tasks unhindered by any acknowledgments of the Other. Foucault brought external factors into the picture. He brought the Other to the centre of writing. After him, the apparatus can no longer be thought of as something to do things with. It is something that contains the very act of doing, and the doing subject at the same time. A writer writes within an apparatus of which he/she is a cogwheel of sorts. Not that writers are less special, but they are special in a different way: a way that acknowledges the multiplicity that characterizes their very work.

Anyway, the conclusion is that it’s kind of impossible now to think of a writer as someone who can work alone.

Function is found in dysfunction

But writing-as-if-technology-did-not-exist is an illusion. We all know how important apparatuses of writing are in the process of composition. Let’s think no further than the moments when we seek a power plug for our laptops, or the simple gesture of pressing the power button on the writing machine before anything else can happen. These simple gestures are often forgotten, and their role in the generation of text is ignored. That’s for two reasons.

1. As mentioned above, technology works best when it doesn’t seem to work. This apparent not-working obliterates technology, and thus propels it towards well-working.

2. We forget the simple gestures of digital writing because we are already accustomed to the logic of the other technology that predetermines writing: the technology of pen and paper.

Source: Nation States

The work done by means of pen and paper is only slightly different. It’s only different in that it employs analogue technology. But that only means one thing: that it is not technology-free. The fundamental similarity is that, like digital technologies, pen-and-paper involves techné, which is at the same time craft and trick. The trick of the pen and paper is that they obliterate their dependence upon one another and, more importantly, of the writing subject on both of them at the same time. Once again, in order to gauge the depth of this illusion all one needs to envisage is an interruption of business-as-usual. A pen that’s run out of ink or a pencil whose tip is broken are rendered un-operational exactly like a laptop whose battery has run flat. Dysfunction lays bare the ideological foundations of function. All it takes is for a piece of technology to cease working as expected in order for it to become fundamental. If it cannot facilitate, it impedes. And impediment is outside the scope of the good functioning of ideological reassurance. That is why a good algorithm is an algorithm that yields symmetrical results. Once this condition is fulfilled, the user is likely to give in to the argument of efficiency, and so the algorithm is likely to be left to work alone.

Writing and power

Writing is one of the most efficient forms of taming. Not because of its being a perfect vehicle for the dissemination of power discourses, but because it features important characteristics of power itself.

Handling the abstract

Systems of power interfere between world and subject, so as to direct the gaze of the latter away from the former and concentrate attention on the discourse of power itself.

Source: Elite Daily

Writing marks precisely this kind of interposition. Prior to the written sign (in what Walter Ong called "oral cultures"), the link between the subject and their world was an unmediated one. In order to speak, the speaking subject referred straight to things. He/she inhabited the utterance, as well as the world. Once the written sign comes about and once it starts acting as a representation of the world, this direct link is lost. Henceforth, the subject no longer refers to the world but to the sign. The world is lost behind a veritable barrage of signs, which now exercise their tyrannical influence over the subject by limiting their choices to that which can be written. The unwritable is ugly, undesirable, underdeveloped.

The myths of representation date back to the installation of these abstract signs. And it is perhaps not without significance that the earliest forms of writing were instruments of power, available only to the king and the temple.

The very foundation of our concept of history depends on writing and its attributes. The straight line, the undeterred progression from point A to point B, the development of a logical argument, the organization of events along a common trajectory, the sense of evolution – all of this is a product of writing. Indeed, Darwin would not have existed without the alphabet. To reach the stage where we can think of ourselves as products of evolution we need, first and foremost, to have had an idea about how things can progress, how they can order themselves linearly, how they are subject to causality. These are possible only after writing; writing, which cuts through the chaos of the world and separates things from signs, concrete objects from abstract representations.

The straight line and the promise of survival

It is when the linearity of writing is put under question that we come to realize how important it really is. In Mallarmé's throw of dice, in Apollinaire’s calligrammes, in all the efforts of Concrete Poetry, the experiment, the taking of the rule unseriously, is felt like a discomfort. Having to devise a new geometry for the poetic space (for the very space of writing itself) appears as a transgression. It is with this transgression and the feeling of discomfort that comes with it that power asserts itself as unavoidable.

Source: Sewaholic

Power is advertised as an ideal place of eternal bliss. Power promises the comfort of the commonplace, the corner where the mind ceases to be restless, irregular, and chaotic. There is pleasure in transgressing the predicates of power, no doubt, but this pleasure is one of the masochistic type: it takes pain as a premise.

Every discourse contains in itself the ability to turn into tyranny. And this tyranny, this ultimate assertion of power as unavoidable, is achieved through techniques of control, but also through claims to eternity. Constraint and generosity: the two major mechanisms through which power is maintained in place.

What's interesting is that, at some point, writing's major promise of infinite preservation ceases to be a promise and becomes a naturalization, a right. It becomes what-things-really-are: a fact, an argument, a certainty.

Writing promises to be lasting, and ultimately – ever-lasting. Writing preserves what otherwise would be lost in a sea of speeches. Writing is, in other words, the real solution to the problem of the Tower of Babel. It posits itself as evidence of what-things-really-are.

Life without writing is unavoidable. This kind of ultimate declaration can be found in the foundational statements of all systems of power and their accompanying ideologies.

Road traffic without road signs is impossible.

Life without a system of economic exchange is impossible.

Wealth without capital is impossible.

A city without streets is impossible.

Identity without Big Brother is impossible.

Afterlife without righteousness on earth is impossible.

All these are statements of power. They are employed in order to reassure the subjects that the system works, that it is efficient, that it is the only option there is. And so writing behaves like power, since it asserts its fundamental capacity to record, to make history, to form consciousness.

And since we're talking about consciousness, it's worth nothing that in an ideal power situation the subject gives away their agency. In writing, the subject loses his/her ability to memorize because he/she gives their ability away to writing, thus asserting writing as a system of absolute storage: the room where nothing ever is lost.

The safe haven

Systems of power create products that reflect back onto the system itself in order to idealize it by means of abstract formulas. See the rules for good writing: the pedagogy of it, the schools and libraries and theaters erected in order to glorify it, the idealization of the things of writing and of the writer's figure, the hierarchization of species of writing so as to highlight the ideal to the detriment of the marginal.

When writers themselves talk about writing, this idealization is at its best articulation. Sylvia Plath:

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt."

Here, on the one hand, writing is put forth in terms of audacity. On the other hand, though, it is judged in terms of its very means of materialization. So it looks like we're talking about two different notions of writing: the technology and the means of expression; the craft and the tools. The overlap is not at all irrelevant, since by employing the tools one justifies the authority of the craft. And why is self-doubt "the worst enemy of creativity?" Because (ridiculously simple!) by not-writing one ceases to be the subject of writing. This self-doubt is the doubt of a self that has been constructed in relation to writing as a system of power. If the writing subject doubts himself, he consequently doubts writing's ability to manifest itself in the subject; i.e., his faith in the ideology of writing is shattered. This is why, as perceivable in Plath's admonition, writing, like all power, comes about with a demand to be employed.

Source: Charlotte Rains Dixon

Access to power is often described as an act of courage. Power absorbs (in order to prevent) the rebellious energies of its factions. And so, dealing with power means dealing with that which is too much for the individual to bear. One needs to have "the outgoing guts to do it" in order to access the apparatuses of power. One needs to be a hero in order to write. With this statement, it is not the subject that is being glorified, but the discourse itself, and the ideology that is an articulation of it. Writing is not only a technology, it is also a safe haven. It is the place where one is promised freedom, provided one has correctly employed the tools.

"You must stay drunk of writing so reality cannot destroy you" (Ray Bradbury).

And so we come to embrace that which writing can give us. We partake in the "joy of writing," in the "pleasure of the text," in the "incredible lightness of being [with words]". There is a lot to enjoy in writing, just like there’s a lot to enjoy in every system of power, in every ideology.

The side that's always bright

What is fairly easy to notice is power's reflective justification. Its apparatus of self-promotion runs on references to a past that has always been directed towards the glorious present. This is the myth of the Golden Age, the narrative that keeps power alive. In the case of writing, it goes like this: without writing we wouldn't have had books, cathedrals, roads, cars, computers, marriages, burials, jobs, conscriptions, supermarkets, cemeteries, cafes, philosophy, ethics, literature, history, cards, the game of Monopoly, cinema, theater, air conditioning, tractors, profit, capital, politics, inspiration, news, distribution of wealth, social welfare, Sunday markets, fast food chains, the beautiful art of calligraphy, Chinese and Japanese pictographs, payrolls, accountancy, urbanism, laws, order.

While this is true (and it doesn't take a double-decker of intelligence to see the truth of the statement), it is also true that without writing we could have had the alternatives. The long list given above (far from complete, of course) is a list of effects of writing. It doesn't prove anything – especially it doesn't demonstrate the unavoidability of writing. It merely catalogs late developments of a system of power. This is a very efficient method of self-assertion, which works perfectly with ideologies, because it glorifies power nostalgically and sets it in stone.

Source: LHS Writing Center

Power doesn't operate in terms of the conditional tense. It is what it is, not what it could have been. There are no if's, no but's, no let's-assume's. What you see is what you get – the ultimate justification of power, its most resounding victory. All could-have-been's are obliterated. They never existed, therefore they could never have existed. Which is false, because any current form of power was, back in its day, itself an alternative, one choice among many, one path to be taken at a crossroads.

Of course, with power things cannot be presented as haphazard. What's more, power falsifies all evolution, to the extent that its current state is presented as the only evolution possible, the only end of the only road ever given. That, once again, is the way power asserts itself, how it rejects all competition.

Power aims towards monopoly, and it is not hard to see, from the above, how that might be the case when it comes to writing. Verba volant, scripta manent. In this, speech is made impotent compared to the alphabet. Hence the confidence in written things: newspapers, books, official notices. "It's true because they wrote about it in the paper" is an argument that still holds, now, in the third millennium. It is the argument of the power of writing; the argument of writing as power.