Sunday, February 17, 2008

"What is a Machine?" Sarah asked.

Introduction to Machines

A friend asked me, “What does that mean?” And I told her. And by doing so, I invoked an entire corpus of presuppositions about language. The first of which is the dream that meaning is not somehow on the surface of language, but that it is hidden deep within it like a soul, or a structure. In answering her, I could not bring meaning out, but only cloak it again in new robes, translate it, give it new form, and that in the passage from one instatiation of a given meaning to another, meaning would burst forth, invisible, clear, perfect, uncontaminated by the complicated bodies of sound, ink marks, or digital imprints. But yet somehow meaning exists, or we belive it does.

A glyphmachine is an example of a machine (there are many others). A machine is not a piece of literature. It is not poetry and it is not philosophy or literary criticism. It is a method of reading, a tool for conducting an empirical study of language. It is a way of studying language that is not enfeebled by the strictures of traditional linguistics, or ill-perceived theories of meaning. It is a new branch of science.

As such it adopts a formula for cognition that is unfamiliar to culture. As the inventor of machines, I understand that it is not kind to ask a reader to try to understand something that is incomprehensible by its very intention. So I invite you, if you choose to engage with these machines to practice a different type of reading: one that does not aim to understand, but that merely watches, follows, notices, reads without purpose, without even the assumption that marks, drawings or signs may yield meaning.