Mirroring Tears and the Re-Reading Continuum: Notes Towards a Non-Algorithmic Criticism

On May 19th 2011, at the E-Poetry Festival, digital poet and theorist John Cayley and art scholar, curator, and practitioner Penny Florence present Mirroring Tears: Visages (Collaboration on Mallarmé), an artwork whose sets of textual and contextual collaborations, in the authors’ view, “explore the potential of digital poetry as critique and translation, hypothesising an analogy or stronger between the Mallarméan text and the digital, and, more broadly, the present and early Modernism. An ideal metonymy for the complex net of discourses surrounding contemporary digital literary practices, Mirroring Tears exposes scholars to a fundamentally problematic separation of digitization, born-digital creation, encoding, programming, database modelling, multimedia authoring, and interface design into distinct fields of inquiry. By using selected methodological hypotheses for forms of computational criticism (human reading, distant reading, scalable reading, and topic modeling) for Mirroring Tears, my presentation illustrates some opportunities for literary studies to explore the e-literary as engaged in forms of meaning processing that exceeds the traditional characterization of meaning as mere abstract, conceptual entities. I use the theoretical perspective of Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP), the philosophical tradition that largely builds on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, to see such an impossible task as an opportunity to recast the act of reading beyond the traditional hermeneutic activity typical of literary studies. The un-coded model of meaning I discuss is currently part of my current manuscript project about what I call an Ordinary Digital Philosophy, a theory of meaning for digital artworks that sees the digital not as a modality in which language takes shape but sees the digital as language itself made of both linguistic and extra-linguistic manifestations. Seen through OLP, Mirroring Tears offer the possibility of a larger reflection on how electronic literature as a whole seems to require to shift textual interpretation practices from linguistic expressions to the overall expression of digital works, from seeing the work as a proxy for meaning to seeing aspects of the literary work, from looking at the work as having a meaning to conversely dealing with it in a meaningful way. You can experience Mirroring Tears at: http://programmatology.shadoof.net/movies/mirrorTearsAssociative.mp4 http://programmatology.shadoof.net/movies/mirrorTearsDeveloped.mp4 http://programmatology.shadoof.net/movies/mirrorTearsInitial.mp