Présentation dans le cadre de la conférence du CCLA - A Research-creation Episteme? Pratice-based Reseach and Institutional Critique - 2023 à l’Université de Trent et en ligne, 30 octobre.
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Here is a manifesto for the misuse of writing.
For the sake of timing, I’ll explain this idea through a tutorial in 4 steps plus one (and the third will surprise you):
Today, we're going to learn how to write by no longer writing.
First step: admit to yourself that you don’t write anymore #
[a]s one knows without saying, we do not write anymore.
In the 1990s, Media Studies pioneer Kittler proclaimed that we can no longer grasp, capture, seize our writing, either through our understanding or our perceptions.
From the 19th century onwards, the media record reality beyond our capacity to perceive it, beyond human perception
- the Gramophone records sound vibrations not perceptible to the bare ear
- the typewriter increases the speed of writing, writing faster than any other hand
We have been dispossessed of our writing, and the new system of inscription is now what I call de-writing.
Second step: shift your perspective regarding the machine #
Our expropriation of writing does not have to be a cruel fate, but rather an opportunity to change the way we look at what we used to think about writing: perhaps writing is not exclusively human, and perhaps boundaries between human and non-human are not as absolute as we thought.
In his article Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing presents the imitation game, a thinking experiment where the machine is able to imitate other behaviours, including human ones. Turing used this experiment to reverse the often-asked question, which is still being asked today about ChatGPT: Can machine think, write ?
The original question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. (Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950)
Turing’s conclusion is this: we have to give the benefit of the doubt and intelligence to the machine, that means that yes, possibly a machine writes.
Third step: listening to the noise #
New media have the ability to record everything: record the noise of the universe, even what doesn’t make sense to us.
All this noise, in writing environments, belongs to our writing: my writing is now the noise of the machine’s materiality.
So I have to listen to it.
Fourth step: learning the machine language #
For Kittler, the solution to dispossession lies in learning new media languages, scripts and codes.
To write, you need to master programming languages.
Well… I’m not sure it’s that easy
Maybe we can think of a better ending
This radical response cannot be the solution, or at least not entirely,
so I suggest an alternative:
Step 4 plus 1: the hijacking or the misuse of writing #
Rather than reading programming language manuals, I propose to tweak, to experiment, to explore, to fail a lot, to perhaps achieve something, in other words, to subvert a way of dealing with the machine.
Misuse implies not so much an advanced knowledge as a somewhat sassy approach
it’s about disrupting a medium
This echoes Shimamoto’s theory of the curse of the brush (1957):
Paint cannot be liberated until the brush has been broken up and thrown away and distance has been gained from it. Paint does not start to live until it is liberated from the brush.
If we transcribe this curse of the paintbrush to digital writing, writing sets itself free, when the machine crashes, when it’s reached its limit.
Misuse is therefore potentially, and this is how I ended my tutorial, a search for the bug or a possible malfunction.
Of course, when you tinker, you’re no longer writing in the classical sense of producing signs, sentences and works of art. You’re no longer working as a writer, you are de-writing….
So according to my estimations,