## **WRITING, MEDIUM, MACHINE** MODERN TECHNOGRAPHIES

EDITED BY SEAN PRYOR AND DAVID TROTTER

### Writing, Medium, Machine

Modern Technographies

### *Technographies*

Series Editors: Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon

How was it that technology and writing came to inform each other so extensively that today there is only information? Technographies seeks to answer that question by putting the emphasis on writing as an answer to the large question of 'through what?'. Writing about technographies in history, our contributors will themselves write technographically.

### Writing, Medium, Machine

Modern Technographies

*Sean Pryor and David Trotter*

London 2016 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2016

Copyright © 2016 Sean Pryor and David Trotter, chapters by respective authors

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#### Contents

#### Introduction

#### Sean Pryor and David Trotter

'Is not the machine today', asked Enrico Prampolini in 1922, 'the new mythical deity which weaves the legends and histories of the contemporary human drama?' (Prampolini 1922: 236). Prampolini's enthusiastic futurism casts modern women and men as the playthings of mechanical gods that they themselves have made. But his proclamation of a machine age without precedent rather strikingly recalls the myth of origins recounted by the ancient god Prometheus, who, bound above a stage in Athens, announces that he has given to mortals the μηχανήματα or machines which shape their lives (Aeschylus 2009: 494). In classical Greek legend, after the gods had made human beings, animals, and other life-forms, they allocated to two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus, the task of distributing among these creatures the various gifts of nature (Plato 1924: 128-33). Stupid Epimetheus gave all the best ones to the animals, leaving human beings naked and defenceless. Clever Prometheus, understanding that human beings had somehow to clothe and protect themselves, stole fire from the workshop of Athena and Hephaestus, and donated it to them. Without fire, there would be no art, no craft, and no τέχνη (Aeschylus 2009: 444). To Prometheus we owe not just ships and chariots, but numbers and writing (γράμματα), that aid to the memory and mother of the muses (492). So the literary arts, from history to the theatre, have always been technological. Yet planes and tanks, Prampolini would have said, are machines of a different order from ships and chariots: machines which so massively supplement human agency as in effect to dwarf it. Literature had to get to grips with these new levels of mechanical supremacy, and it did so in part by reconceiving itself as a machine. Yet if technology is modernity's upstart god, it is also older even than the first incisions on a Bronze Age tablet. In *Technics and Time*, Bernard Stiegler draws extensively on the work of the palaeontologist André Leroi-Gourhan, Marshall McLuhan's eminent contemporary, to argue for the essential technicity of human evolution (Stiegler 1998). Stiegler's sub-title is *The Fault of Epimetheus*: by ancient and modern account alike, history is pretty much prosthesis all the way down.

This collection of essays began as a collaboration between the Literature-Technology-Media research group in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge and the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia at the University of New South Wales. Its contents reflect, without being defined by, the original motive for that collaboration: a feeling that the 'question concerning technology' (Heidegger 1977) could and should be posed of modernist literature more variously and in greater detail than it has been hitherto, and in such a way as to enhance rather than to diminish the status and urgency of more familiar questions concerning 'literature' and 'modernism'. Criticism's attention to modernism's encounter with technology is by no means arbitrary. Prampolini, after all, was to hail his new mythical deity in the October 1922 issue of the little magazine *Broom*, which also featured art by Henri Matisse and writing by Blaise Cendrars, together with a drawing of Vladimir Tatlin's projected monument to the Third International.

It is not unusual for critics and theorists today to reach for a technological vocabulary when describing and analysing works of art. We happily speak of the mechanism of narrative, whether or not the novel in question attends in any depth or with any insight to particular machines. This can seem a relatively new state of affairs, the product of an interest spurred by the ubiquity of new technologies in contemporary social and economic life. There has certainly been a surge of interest in modern literature's interactions with the technologies of its historical moment, from Hugh Kenner's *The Mechanic Muse* (1987), through Tim Armstrong's *Modernism, Technology, and the Body* (1998), to a great many monographs and collections published in the last decade (Daly 2016). But though that surge shows no signs of abating, the discursive strategy – the freedom and the eagerness to speak of literature in technological terms – is not new.

As early as 1904, Charles Sears Baldwin praised Edgar Allan Poe for having simplified his 'narrative mechanism for directness of effect'. This represents 'the clue to Poe's advance in form, and his most instructive contribution to technic' (Baldwin 1904: 19). The language of machines allows Baldwin to measure Poe's aesthetic success, because a machine typically performs its work efficiently and repeatedly. The machine allows Baldwin to think of form as performing work upon content, and to relate the traditional forms which Poe inherited to the new forms which Poe bestowed on his successors. A similarly general notion of mechanism was useful to William Wordsworth, when in the 1802 version of the preface to *Lyrical Ballads* he explained why so few of his poems employ 'personifications of abstract ideas' (Wordsworth and Coleridge 2005: 295). 'I have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of style', he writes. Here, too, a technological discourse presents a form which can be put to work repeatedly, on a variety of materials. But for Wordsworth this automatic mechanism proves, very often, culpably indifferent to particulars: the machine means aesthetic failure. Instead, he concludes, 'I have wished to keep my Reader in the company of flesh and blood'. If Wordsworth thus invokes a common opposition between organism and mechanism, the human and the inhuman, this was and is only one of technology's possible connotations. 'The association of machines with ugliness or discomfort or pandemonium is very strong', Ezra Pound once remarked (Pound 1996: 59); and he recommended that, nevertheless, the aspirant artist 'might, in our time, more readily awaken his eye by looking at spare parts and at assembled machinery than by walking through galleries of painting or sculpture' (57). We 'find a thing beautiful in proportion to its aptitude to a function', he explained (69). And in the 1800 preface, offering an account of the development and psychology of the poet, Wordsworth writes: 'if we be originally possessed of much organic sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced that by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits we shall describe objects and utter sentiments of such a nature [that the reader] must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated' (Wordsworth and Coleridge 2005: 292). Here the blind automatism of the machine enables flesh and blood, and this efficient mediation means aesthetic success.

Whatever their connotations, such abstractions stand at a considerable remove from the machines characteristic of the day, whether the steam engines of 1800 or the electric trams of 1904. This level of generality is common and powerful. To take a much more recent instance, consider the shrewd and historically informed reading of T.S. Eliot's quatrain poems in Vincent Sherry's *Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence*. Sherry argues that Eliot's rhymed tetrameter quatrains present 'an extreme regularity of cadence, formalized by often strong rhymes', and that this generates 'an energy of palpably mechanical character' (Sherry 2015: 253). Sherry is careful to note that Eliot's contemporary critical writings demonstrate some interest in the mechanical aspects of literary technique, to acknowledge the influence on Eliot of Gautier's 'recognizably mechanical cadence' (253), and to link Eliot's mechanical prosody to the Great War, 'the negative apocalypse of modern technology' (254). The 'machine-made feeling of these tetrameter quatrains' thus reflects an age in which 'the machine has lost its discernibly human value or utility and stands as the sign of antihuman times' (253-4). Moreover, Sherry's readings distinguish the mechanical regularity of, say, the first stanza of 'Sweeney among the Nightingales' from the 'variable cadence' of the last stanzas of 'Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar' (259). The heavy caesuras and enjambments in the latter poem produce a much less mechanical effect: 'To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights, / She entertains Sir Ferdinand // Klein' (Eliot 1969: 41). For Sherry, writing thus confronts technology not through representation, but through the mediations of form.

There seems reasonable warrant for thinking that Eliot associated the modern machine with inhuman automatism, most famously in the 'automatic hand' of the typist in *The Waste Land*, who reaches to put a record on that symbol of mechanical reproduction, the gramophone (69). In a sense, the fact that Eliot's quatrain poems refer so rarely to new technologies necessitates Sherry's turn to prosody. Nevertheless, the 'hundred A.B.C.'s' in 'A Cooking Egg' – the tearooms of the Aerated Bread Company in which 'weeping multitudes' consume 'buttered scones and crumpets' (45) – do invoke the mechanical method of making bread invented by John Dauglish in 1862. Dauglish 'aerated' or leavened his bread, not by using yeast, but by dissolving carbon dioxide into the mix. There was thus no need for fermentation or for kneading by hand: the process could be automated, and the costs of labour were greatly reduced. But as an emblematic modern technology, aerated bread is very different from the Vickers machine gun. If both are consequences of industrial capitalism, the one suggests mass production, the other mass destruction. Other technologies appear in these poems, too, with their own histories and their own social meanings. When Sweeney 'Tests the razor on his leg' before shaving himself in 'Sweeney Erect' (43), Eliot deploys a tellingly anachronistic technology, for by 1919 the modern safety razor had displaced the traditional cut-throat razor. Much like an A.B.C. crumpet, the disposable safety razor represented mass production, and the Gillette safety razor had, in fact, become the market leader during the Great War, offering soldiers a convenient and effective means for staying clean-shaven on the front (Boddy 2015: 8). Sweeney's antiquated razor seems as good a figure for the sharp wit and repressed violence of Eliot's rhymed tetrameter quatrains as contemporary military apocalypse.

To think of a poem's prosody as reflecting the machine as such or the machine gun in particular, even before the poem is broadcast on the radio or coded as HTML, is to think of writing mediated by technology. But the converse, we want to argue, is equally important: writing mediates technology. It does so because writing is itself a τέχνη or art. Rhymed tetrameter quatrains are a form which can be put to work repeatedly, on a variety of materials. Eliot's form is what Baldwin calls a 'technic': the technology is in the technique. Though it seems reasonable to think Eliot associated the modern machine with inhuman automatism, it is not necessary to associate inhuman automatism with a poem's regular cadences. Rhymed tetrameter quatrains without heavy caesuras or enjambments could instead be considered sharp, witty, decisive, elegant, or sophisticated. Our sense of the form is formed, inevitably, by the content it in turn forms. Even quatrains whose lines divide into neat couplets with parallel syntax, and whose lines seem to establish 'an extreme regularity of cadence' –

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees Letting his arms hang down to laugh, The zebra stripes along his jaw Swelling to maculate giraffe. (Eliot 1969: 56)

– make of those constraints the occasion for virtuosic variation: the parallel assonance in a single line of '-neck' and 'spreads', 'Sween-' and 'knees'; the twin stresses of the compound word 'Apeneck', echoed but transformed by the twin stresses of noun and verb in 'arms hang'; the unthinking passivity of 'Letting' matched and inverted by the brute activity of 'Swelling'; the relative lack of stress on the last syllable of 'maculate', giving the last syllable of 'giraffe' a weight quite unlike that of the first three lines' monosyllabic rhyme words; and so forth. Moreover, when Sherry registers the difference between one stanza's extremely regular cadence and another stanza's much more variable cadence, he recognises that the labour performed by the poem's mechanism is far from indifferent to particulars. The making of this verse is not like the production of bread or bullets; a general form and particular contents are instead brought into meaningful relation. Unwilling to reduce literature to the reflex of a particular technology or an abstract concept of technology, the essays collected here take the τέχνη of writing seriously.

Eliot is not the subject of any of those essays. However, we thought it right, given the origins of the collection, to invite contributions which examine the various technical-technological predispositions of other canonical modernist writers. Mark Byron considers the work of Eliot's friend and collaborator, Ezra Pound, exploring the ways in which *The Cantos* emulate the textual technologies of medieval manuscripts, early modern printing, and modern scholarship. In deluxe editions complete with illustrated capitals, in experiments with page space and typography, in the use of textual apparatus such as glossing and citation, and in its adventures in bibliographic history, Pound's poetry foregrounds the materiality of text as an information technology. Paul Sheehan turns in his essay to literature's encounters with another system for communicating and controlling information: encryption. Looking in particular at Stéphane Mallarmé and James Joyce, Sheehan rethinks the perennial problem of modernist difficulty by examining how these writers developed an aesthetic of the coded word. Unlike the famous Enigma machine used by the Germans in the Second World War, modernist encryption, Sheehan argues, is a machine not for securing but for multiplying meanings. The difference between literary and other modern technologies is also a theme in Sean Pryor's essay on the poetry of Pound, Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, and others. Pryor's essay begins by linking the increasing prominence of measuring instruments in life and in language – from thermometers to 'business barometers' – to the efforts of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century acoustic scientists to graph performances of poetry and so to develop a materialist metrics. Responding to the rise of empirical measurement, which seemed to many to reduce all things to mere quantity, the measures of modernist poetry asserted the necessary and mutual mediation of quantity and quality. Through analyses both of metrical verse and of free verse, Pryor shows how this poetry understands itself anew as its own form of measurement technology. In comparable fashion, Kasia Boddy's essay first details the history of electrical tabulating machines used, from the 1890s onwards, to gather census data in the United States. She then reflects upon how new technologies for measuring populations affected the aesthetic techniques and ambitions of the Great American Novel, most notably in the work of Sinclair Lewis and Gertrude Stein. Here, too, as Boddy argues, literature is put to work in mediating between quantity and quality, generating in the process new forms of aggregation and abstraction.

These essays treat a variety of devices: punch-card machines, kymographs for imaging speech, enciphering and deciphering machines used by the military, microfilms for preserving and reproducing medieval manuscripts. Many of the collection's other essays dig down into the rich array of machines, devices, tools, procedures, and other τέχναι shaping the world in which modern poems and novels went to work, which is also the world on which they worked. The English term 'device', in particular, is for our purposes a rich one: its senses range from mechanical invention through emblem, masque, or witty conceit to will, fancy, and desire. Our topic is not literature and technology, then, but writers left to their own devices. To that end, we have also encouraged contributors to focus on the sorts of technological device to which writers might have been left, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Kristen Treen traces the history of the stereopticon from the 1850s and 1860s, when it was used both for entertainment and as therapy for the mentally ill. The stereopticon offered an ordering mechanism: its images brought audiences together, represented objects in spectacular detail, and gave those objects a remarkable new solidity. But as Treen shows, the fiction of the time expressed concerns that the stereopticon might show too much: that it might reveal the individual's innermost desires and thoughts. And for William James and Stephen Crane, the stereopticon's magnification, dissolves, and other effects offered metaphors for the experience of consciousness. James Purdon's essay turns from visual to textual technologies, beginning with the invention of mechanical printing telegraphs in the 1840s. These in turn led to the development of the teletype machine later in the century, a once ubiquitous technology now almost entirely forgotten. Examining advertising materials, technical descriptions, and appearances in literature and film, Purdon shows how the teletype established its own social rituals and rules. In the newsflash, moreover, the teletype helped to reconfigure twentieth-century media around the idea that an instantaneous transmission could at the same time be an historical record.

Robbie Moore approaches a similar phenomenon in his essay on the stock ticker, first introduced at the New York Stock Exchange in the 1870s. The stock ticker was both a machine and a network; it allowed instantaneous transmission, but the quick movement of its tape meant not a permanent record but a constant anticipation of the future. As Moore argues, the novels of Frank Norris, Will Payne, and others imagine the ticker-tape reader as a heroic figure who could grasp capital in its totality. And in the 1930s, Archibald MacLeish and Bob Brown look to the peculiar temporality of ticker-tape to reconfigure literary form itself. Finally, Beci Carver's essay explores the influence on twentieth-century literary form of a very different device, the slot machine. But like the stock-ticker, the slot machine represents capital: it dispenses commodities for coins, and its interior workings are inaccessible, unknowable. Canvassing works by Elizabeth Bishop, Louis MacNeice, John Rodker, John Steinbeck, H.G. Wells, and others, Carver traces the history of the slot machine as a site of mystery and arbitrariness, the object of fantasy and frustration.

It is this focus on the archaeology of specific devices which distinguishes the essays we have collected from research conducted under the rubric of 'literature and science'. Scholars have built informatively on the work of Gillian Beer (Beer 1996) to describe the circulation of concepts and models between or among scientists of one kind or another and writers of one kind or another, and to show how this circulation helped to bring about a 'vibratory modernism' (Enns and Trower 2013). Despite significant emphases to the contrary (Latour 1990), such studies have on the whole tended to subsume into the knowledge produced the instrument that led to its production. Our willingness to attribute agency to devices as well as to people squares with recent developments in the history and theory of a further cognate term: media. Over the last ten years or so, the conversation about the literature of Prampolini's modern machine age has broadened significantly to include various and inventive enquiries into the development of the major storage and transmission technologies which achieved institutional status as mass media during the first half of the twentieth century: cinema, radio, telephony, television (Trotter 2016). The main focus of research has been on media understood as inherently powerful systems for the distribution of messages and meanings. More recently, however, a different understanding of what constitutes τέχνη has begun to throw a critical light on the reification of modern technological mass media as that which literature is doomed either to resist or to embrace.

Recent media theory has undertaken a fundamental re-examination of the idea of a medium: that's to say, of what it means to be *in the middle*. It now speaks of a mediality which includes, but is not restricted to, systems for the distribution of messages and meanings. McLuhan's once-inflammatory insistence that all media are bodily 'extensions' has begun to look like confirmation of an enduring sense of the absolute centrality of the medial dimension of human life (McLuhan 2001). When John Durham Peters claims that for many philosophers there is no such thing as a 'media-free life', he has in mind Friedrich Kittler, the most influential media theorist since McLuhan, as well as Kittler's great precursor, Martin Heidegger, but also Emerson, Thoreau, and William James (Peters 2013: 45). John Guillory, by contrast, has traced the history of mediation as an intercession between alienated parties back to the mythology of the self-sacrifice of Christ the Redeemer and then forward again through Hegel and Marx. The economic, social, and political complexities consequent upon runaway industrialization gave rise to a theory of mediation in general as a way (the only way) to grasp both the scale and intensity of the relations thus newly established. It became the habit in modern Western thought to present mediatory agencies as '*necessarily* characteristic of society' (Guillory 2010: 343). In the twentieth century, media assumed the shape of entertainment industries. Now they are once again what they always were: 'modes of being' (Peters 2015: 17), 'world-enabling infrastructures' (25). According to Peters, all complex societies have media 'inasmuch as they use materials to manage time, space, and power' (20). Media, in short, have been ontologized, pluralized, and back-dated to the dawn of civilization.

There are, of course, many different shapes and sizes to life's medial dimension, and media theorists have taken an interest in most of them. The times we live in seem nonetheless to demand increased attention to a mediality beyond the human scale. Peters's 'philosophy of elemental media' borders on anthropology, zoology, and theology. According to him, earth, water, fire, and air, while not 'media in themselves', become so 'for certain species in certain ways with certain techniques' (49). Some theorists prefer to speak of 'cultural techniques' rather than of media. A cultural technique creates the end to which it will come to be regarded as merely the means. Bernhard Siegert, the leading exponent of the theory of cultural techniques, describes these concatenations of mechanism and gesture as 'operative chains' that precede the media concepts they generate (Siegert 2015: 11). In them, as Cornelia Vismann has put it, resides the 'agency of media and things'. Their purpose is the 'execution of a particular act' in accordance with a built-in scheme or manner of proceeding. No wonder, then, that they should seem to possess an 'almost algorithmic dimension' (Vismann 2013: 83, 87). There is a connection, here, with the study of science and culture, or at least with Bruno Latour's actor-network theory. Siegert compares cultural techniques to Latour's 'immutable mobiles': sets of standardized data which can be transported intact from one site to another (Siegert 2015: 122-3, 148-9, 209).

Here is a little story culled from the theory of cultural techniques. Human beings decide to civilize themselves by building a city. They use a plough to draw a line in the ground which marks out the city limits. The line generates the distinctions between inside and outside, culture and nature, 'us' and 'them', necessary to the creation of a new order. Everyone forgets about the plough – until media theory, which is here to remind us that 'the agricultural tool determines the political act; and the operation itself produces the subject, who will then claim mastery over both the tool and the action associated with it' (Vismann 2013: 84). The theory of cultural techniques does not hesitate to put the cart before the horse. Indeed, it puts the cart before the animal that controls the animal that pulls the cart.

While none of our contributors has (yet) signed up as a theorist of cultural techniques, the tendency in media theory exemplified by the work of Siegert, Vismann, and others does find echoes here. John Attridge, for example, begins his analysis of the fiction of Henry James by drawing attention to the ways in which *What Maisie Knew* blurs the line between things we would not find it hard to describe as telecommunications media and things that at first seem to belong in a different category altogether: a wink, a roll of the eyes, a compression of the lips, a 'quick queer look', a small child. Attridge is able to demonstrate that telegraphy – the pre-eminent telecommunications medium of the time – functions in *The Ambassadors* and *The Golden Bowl* as a foil to a more expansive (more vibratory) understanding of medium as *milieu*, as life's general condition. James's thinking about technology is technical: it shapes the dialectic of plot and impression, incident and character, which in turn shapes the novel. Ruth Abbott starts, as it were, from the opposite end of the spectrum: from the emergence of cinema as a mass medium. The films D.W. Griffith made for the Biograph Company between 1908 and 1913 are usually taken to represent the subordination of devices hitherto displayed as attractions in their own right to the demands of narrative continuity. Abbott argues that the innovative patterns of their editing were in fact 'written into' them by the rhythms of the lines of poetry Griffith loved to read and recite, some of which he took the trouble to incorporate into decisive and resonant intertitles.

The need for theories of technology and media has of course been exacerbated by the establishment of the digital computer or network of computers as the ultimate universal machine. It seemed right, therefore, to include two essays which directly address the latest turns taken in the long story of prosthesis. Esther Leslie analyses the rise of the touch screen – in white goods, in the pocket, in the office – as an interface at once permeable and impermeable. The touch screen solicits our swipes, caresses, gestures, yet it remains a hard, glassy barrier. At once a history and a phenomenology, Leslie's account nonetheless returns again and again to the question of writing. The touch screen, she argues, has its own rhetoric. Julian Murphet addresses the ways in which we are all throughout our lifespan in the process of being written genetically. Beginning with the figural play of Shakespeare's *Sonnets*, Murphet goes on to explore two recent works which imagine what it would be like to write in DNA: Richard Powers's novel *Orpheo*, in which a retired composer attempts to use bacterial DNA as data storage; and Christian Bök's xenotext experiments, in which a one-line poem is subject to the processes of coding, recoding, transcoding, and decoding DNA in the living matter of a unicellular bacterium.

We are, in all of the essays collected here, in the domain of the device: the mechanism-conceit which articulates will, fancy, and desire. Each essay approaches that domain from an angle of its own. But one way to characterize the domain itself would be to adopt and develop the term which names the series of which this book is the first: technography. The domain of the device is that which consists of, and gives rise to, technography. The term attempts to recuperate some of the strangeness that has been lost in the course of the long naturalization of the idea of 'technology'. Originally a genre of writing – a treatise on a practical art or craft – 'technology' came to denote the material end product of such arts and crafts. Its eventual primary association was with industrial machinery or equipment.  What began as a term for a discourse or a way of thinking has ended up as a term for an object or a set of objects. By contrast, 'technography' came into use during – and possibly in reaction to – the late-nineteenth-century turn from words to things. A technography is a description of technologies and their application with primary regard to social and cultural context. Technography, itself technologically mediated, like all forms of writing, is a reflection upon the varying degrees to which all technologies have in some fashion been written into being. It examines the crucial role writing has played, not just in the description of technological objects and their functions, but in the inscription of technologies within social and cultural life. Technographies describe the history and theory of those transformative occasions on which writing confronts its own enabling opposite internally.  In the essay which opens this volume, Steven Connor takes on the role of technographer in order to argue that all literature is technographic in so far as it engineers in writing the particular kind of engine of writing it aims to be. He sets our scene, too, in proposing that modern literature is modern by virtue of its will, fancy, or desire to become ever more technographic.

#### Works Cited

1

#### How to Do Things with Writing Machines

#### Steven Connor

I want here to argue that literary techniques, far from being the opposites or adversaries of calculation or mathematical procedures, are in fact typically much closer to this kind of procedure than other kinds of communication. Modern literary writing is moving ever closer to this kind of procedural operation. A technography may be defined as any writing about any technology that implicates or is attuned to the technological condition of its own writing. I will try to push through the claim that technography is not just one mode among others of literary writing; that all literary writing is in fact technographic, in the sense that it constitutes what, following George Spencer Brown, I will call an injunctive operation, the engineering in writing of the particular kind of engine of writing it aims at being. So modern literary writing is ever more technographic, not in the simple sense that it is concerned with other kinds of machinery, but in the sense that it is ever more taken up with the kind of machinery that it itself is. Oddly, this may mean that technography comes into its own against technology, that is the notion of a technology-in-general or technology-as-such. Technography is particular where technology is general; technography is immanent, exploratory, and procedural rather than declarative. Technography is not up to phrases like 'The question concerning technology'. This allows technography to operate both beneath and beyond the threshold of technology. Technography does not know yet for sure what a machine is or could be. I want to say that there is a particular kind of machine that literature has always aspired to be, which is a calculating machine (though all machines are in fact kinds of calculating machine).

The reciprocal of this claim about the technicity of text would be that there is something textual about all technology. If all writing is a kind of machinery, why might it be plausible to see every machine as a kind of writing? Because every mechanical or technical action can be seen as a procedure as well as a mere proceeding, where a procedure means a replicable operation. So a technical procedure is the styling of a process and, as such, the declarative performance of that process as iterable procedure. Every machine declares of what it does: 'this is the way this action may be performed'. A technic, or technical procedure, is a writing in that it tracks its own technique, following in its own tracks.

There is a fundamental distinction within philosophy of mathematics, between mathematics as discovery and mathematics as invention. Philosophers of the first persuasion believe that all mathematical relations exist already and that mathematics consists in their uncovering. Philosophers of the second persuasion believe that human beings engineer the mathematical relations they appear to unearth. Plato is the patron saint of the first kind of mathematician, Wittgenstein a principal exponent of the second.

If most people are inclined to credit the idea of mathematical discovery, there is one respect in which the mathematical experience of most people may actually incline them towards the idea that mathematics is a making, not a making manifest. For most people, mathematics is something that has to be done, rather than displayed. Sums are procedures, to be performed, often with difficulty. Mathematics is worked out, as exertion, often as *ordeal*, the etymology of which, from Old English *adaelan*, to divide or separate, implies the allocation or dealing out of a penalty.

As such mathematics requires mediating objects. Even Plato, demonstrating to the slave at the beginning of *Meno* that he already in some sense knew how to construct a square *b* of exactly twice the area of a given square *a*, required a stick and a patch of sand for the demonstration. The demonstration is a procedure that is articulated in stages, and cannot be shown all in one go. And this procedure requires – indeed, in some important sense, actually *is* – an apparatus. It is a technography: a writing out of an operation that consists in the work of that writing.

What is a calculation? It is an operation performed by some means, through some intermediary machinery – fingers, or toes, or the calculi of the abacus from which calculation derives its name. ('Abacus' sounds as though it might be abecedarial, but in fact may derive from Hebrew *abaq*, sand or dust, referring to the surface in which figures would be inscribed.) Calculation machines are a kind of writing, because they have, because they largely are, memory. They allow quantities to be stored, processed, and moved around – as we say, 'carried across'. One might note that there is a secondary calculation module in the mnemonic chant that may accompany these operations, subvocally or out loud.

Calculations perform work, the work of sorting. One does not need stones (*calculi*) in particular, but one does need some apparatus, something prepared or made ready, something that is hard and external, precisely in order that it can allow for manipulation. No play without a plaything: no work without workings. The soft requires the hard, variation requires the invariant.

Calculation is performed with what are called figures, arranged spatially in diagrams. These diagrams make a machinery of the page-space, or exploit its machinery for what is called 'working out'. Calculations are a sort of primary technography – the writing out of a mechanism, the mechanism that functions through a particular machinery. The earliest mathematical notations – lists of quantities and equivalences, records of amounts – all seem to have in common the manipulation of visible space. Almost all numbering systems, for example, render the first two or three digits as simple tallies of straight lines, like the I-III of Roman numerals.

The passage of mathematical notation from words across to numbers is not accomplished easily or straightforwardly, and calculations were much impeded in the Greek and Roman worlds by the lingering attraction and interference between words and numbers. But, as numbers and number functions become more autonomous, so it becomes easier to perform calculative operations upon them directly, as though they were the actual objects of the calculation, which could be moved about on the space of the slate or page.

Wittgenstein's mathematical constructivism involves the view that mathematical operations do not refer to anything in the world in such a way that they may be said to be true or false. Mathematical operations are wholly syntactic, having reference only to the procedure they apply or the game they may be said to be playing. The fact that numbers do not refer to the world means that they are wholly present in a way that signs are not: '[n]umbers are not represented by proxies; numbers *are there*' (Waismann 1979: 34n.1). Because the signs of numbers are also the numbers themselves, mathematical operations are not signified by arithmetical notations: '[a]rithmetic doesn't talk about numbers, it works with numbers' (Wittgenstein 1975: §109). This means that 'mathematics is always a machine, a calculus' and a 'calculus is an abacus, a calculator, a calculating machine; it works by means of strokes, numerals, etc.' (Waismann 1979: 106). 'In mathematics, *everything* is algorithm and *nothing* is meaning: even when it doesn't look like that because we seem to be using words to talk about mathematical things' (Wittgenstein 1974: 468). 'Let's remember that in mathematics, the signs themselves *do* mathematics, they don't describe it. The mathematical signs *are* like the beads of an abacus. And the beads are in space, and an investigation of the abacus is an investigation of space' (Wittgenstein 1975: §157). Again: 'What we find in books of mathematics is not a description of something but the thing itself. We *make* mathematics. Just as one speaks of "writing history" and "making history", mathematics can in a certain sense only be made' (Waissman 1979: 34). Wittgenstein will also declare that 'Language is a calculus. Thinking is playing the game, using the calculus. […] Thought is the actual use of the linguistic calculus' (Wittgenstein 1980: 117). The meaning of such a statement changes over the course of Wittgenstein's writing. Having begun by believing that language could be reduced to the kind of logical calculus provided by Russell, Wittgenstein came to believe that there were many games or calculative operations at work in language.

Calculations become possible in the graphematic space of mathematics – and only there, for they do not take place so much in a space, as with space, because of the self-referentiality of the symbolic machine of mathematics. Calculating procedures are themselves kinds of spatial machinery. Sums and accounts have in common with abacuses the manipulation of space. Since space and place have numerical significance, the movement of numerals across and between spaces performs operations. The simple arrangement of numbers in particular configurations is enough to effect mathematical operations, not just to display relations. The zero is the most important mediator between sign and function. The zero signifies not just a void or gap, but an active holding open of a space, the effect of which is to change the values of the numbers adjacent to it. In effect, inserting a zero has the effect of multiplying the number to its left by ten and dividing the number to its right by ten (or whatever numerical base is being employed). The zero is both the indication of this relation and the injunction to make this shift to left or right, just as one would in an abacus. The zero materialises the space that previously would have been just that, a space left between two numbers. This spatiality is one of the most important latent affinities between sums and poems.

I want to claim that the writing we progressively come to think of as literary mimics and in recent times increasingly approaches this condition. I propose to call mathematical expressions which perform the functions they actively figure *operatives*. This is in the model of John Austin's performatives – utterances that do not represent a state of affairs but carry out a function or procedure. You read a book, but do a sum; but perhaps literature is the name for that kind of text that wants to be done as much as read.

A good example of the operative function of mathematical figuring is the Sieve of Eratosthenes, a procedure designed to find prime numbers. The numbers are arranged in rows from 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, and so on. First of all multiples of 2, which are in alternate columns from 4 onwards, are struck out. Then the same is done for multiples of the next three numbers, 3, 5, and 7 (4 and 6 having already been struck out). Once all the multiples of these numbers have been removed, the remaining numbers will be all the primes below 121. The sieve is one of the earliest forms of the number square, which has been used for many purposes.

One is able to 'run' as well as to show the sieve in an animation, because its operations have been coded. We can say that code is the mediator between sign and function, *dynamos* and *energeia*, in that a code is a set of instructions for performing an action. A sieve is, of course, literally a kind of riddle, something used to sift and sort, a suggestive coincidence given that riddles of speech can also be seen as mechanisms for sorting the right answer from mistaken ones. Sadly, the two kinds of riddle have different roots, the one deriving from *reden*, to give counsel, yielding the word *read*, the other from a root cognate with Greek *krinein*, to separate; but the latter affiliation does allow us to see *riddle* as first-cousin to *crisis* and *criticism*.

Riddles, puzzles, and poems are closely cognate; sometimes, as in *Oedipus Rex*, a riddle is seen as central to the operations of a literary text. One of the earliest and most influential collections of Greek poems, the *Greek Anthology*, mixes poems (some of them early examples of 'pattern-poetry' or poetry set out in shapes that correspond to their subjects, like eggs, swords, and wings) with epigrams, enigmas, and mathematical puzzles. Whatever poems were thought to be at this date, it seems clear that they were regarded as things to do things with, to be worked with or operated upon, more hopscotch than well-wrought urn. Fibonacci's *Liber Abaci*, or *Book of Calculation* (1202), mixes description of the Hindu-Arabic numerals and the methods of calculation (without the use of an abacus) that they allowed with practical puzzles and conundrums. Many calculative or diagrammatic procedures pass across to literary writing from magical or religious usages, such as Psalm 19, the so-called Abecedarian Psalm, in which each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

The most literary form of calculative puzzle is the crossword, which came into being remarkably late, but is perhaps the modernist technographic form par excellence. The first crossword (or 'Word Cross' as it was intended to be called) was by Arthur Wynne and appeared in the 'Fun' section of the *New York World* on 21 December 1913 (Danesi 2002: 62-3). The techniques of the 'cryptic' crossword clue were developed during the 1920s, again in the US, though it has become a speciality of British crossword puzzles. The classic cryptic clue couples a definition with a set of instructions for constructing the solution word. It therefore requires a kind of double vision; the apparent reference suggested by reading the whole clue must be ignored in favour of what might be called the principle of modular construction, in which the elements of the required word are decomposed and then recomposed in turn, following a series of coded functions. Among the most common of these codes is that any word suggesting revision, disordering, or scrambling is likely to be an injunction to reorder the letters of one or more words, that is, to construct an anagram to reveal the solution. There is always a kind of magic implied in the anagram. Perhaps the most amazing of all crossword anagrams was that effected by the *Guardian*'s Araucaria, the pseudonym of the Rev. John Graham: 'O hark the herald angels sing the boy's descent which lifted up the world (5, 9, 7, 5, 6, 2, 5, 3, 6, 2 3, 6)' has as its solution 'While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground'. Literary writing has rejoined these kinds of game-like procedure in the work of Queneau, Perec, and the Oulipo group, which in its turn anticipates the developments in electronic text of recent years.

#### Sorting

Reading and reasoning are both conceived as a kind of sorting, which has always had an unusual status. Sorting has links with divination, through the practice of the *sors*, in which a text, usually a sacred or prestigious text such as the Bible or Virgil, would be used as the source for divinatory wisdom. This gave the action of sorting considerable prestige – sorting was not only divinatory, it was also literally regarded as the action of a divinity, as in the seventeenth-century expression, evidenced in *The Merchant of Venice* 5.1, 'God sort all' (Shakespeare 2010: 379). J.C. Maxwell puzzled mightily over the apparent paradox that a hypothetical demon guarding a trapdoor between two chambers containing a gas of a given temperature might be able to open the trapdoor selectively to let through more energetic molecules, and thereby create a thermal differential between the two chambers, which would then be capable of performing work. The apparent puzzle lay in the fact that this would have created the possibility of work (that is, reduced the entropy of the system), from nothing, or from the simple action of sorting, which would contradict the second law of thermodynamics, and indeed make it possible for there to be perpetual motion. The pseudo-problem (as it has always seemed to me) is generated by the assumption that the act of sorting does not itself do any work, or thereby introduce any energy into the system. But of course the demon has to do some kind of work in opening the valve, unless we are to assume that the mental act of distinguishing the molecules is enough to cause their physical separation. There will have to be some kind of work because there is some kind of sorting. Maxwell introduced this molecular bureaucrat in a letter to P.G. Tait of 1867, as 'a very observant and neat-fingered being' (Knott 1911: 214), and the fingers, or their equivalent, seem as important as the observant eyes. But we seem to have a strong prejudice against seeing the simple act of arranging as any kind of work, or operation in itself. Of course, I may have to perform some physical work in going through my filing cabinet and deciding which files to shred, walking over to the shredder and feeding them in, and so forth. But our tendency is to feel that the sorting is here being put to work, rather than constituting work in itself. Against this, we should probably set Michel Serres's principle that, not only is all sorting a kind of work, but in fact all work amounts to a kind of sorting (Serres 2007: 86).

Indeed, the history of one of the key terms in thermodynamics, energy, seems to enact this interchange between the informational and the physical. The word *energy* enters English through Philip Sidney's usage in his *Apology for Poetry*, as a term signifying force or vigour in language, so is rhetorical rather than mechanical. Sidney is comparing the mere assertion of love with the kind of writing which is likely actually to have some desired effect:

But truly, many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistible love; if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love; so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers' writings (and so caught up certain swelling phrases which hang together like a man which once told me the wind was at north-west and by south, because he would be sure to name winds enough) than that in truth they feel those passions, which easily (as I think) may be betrayed by that same forcibleness, or *energia* (as the Greeks call it) of the writer. (Sidney 2002: 113)

Sidney is here referring to the discussion in Aristotle's *Rhetoric* III.xi of the means whereby metaphors make us see things, which, for Aristotle, depends on using expressions that represent things in a state of activity. The word *energeia* that Aristotle coins for this, and which he tends to use interchangeably with his other coinage, *entelechy*, has been translated by Joe Sachs in Heideggerian fashion as 'being at work': 'the thinghood (*ousia*) of a thing is what it keeps on being in order to be at all (*to ti ēn einai*) and must be a being-at-work (*energeia*) so that it may achieve and sustain its being-at-work-staying-itself (*entelecheia*)' (Sachs 2005: 14-15).

The dynamism of such verbal operations often depends upon the conjunction of words, letters, and numerals. Ciphering (derived from the Arabic word for 'zero') often involves the numerisation of the alphabet, such that one series of letters is translated into another by some regularly-applied principle – at its simplest, something like transposing each letter into another letter a given number of letters along in the alphabet. More complex forms of transposition may involve the use of a key, to move each letter according to a different number, corresponding to the letters in the keyword. This was elaborated in the German Second World War Enigma machine by a series of gearings, which shifted letters along. The Enigma machine was indeed an actual physical device, and work on breaking its code was materially advanced by the capture of particular examples. But breaking the code depended on the puzzling through of the interaction between different kinds of components or machinic processes, some of them having to do with the structure of language. The weakest part of any code lies in the fact that it must produce an output that can be translated back reliably into language – and language is full of redundancies or machinic elements, iterable modules about which it is not necessary to think, which may then provide ways in to understanding the code. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park were able to make considerable headway with the recognition that there must be something like a zero-degree formula that was frequently exchanged, since in any human communication there is a great deal of this kind of thing: the formula 'Keine besondere Ereignisse', or 'nothing special to report', proved to be an important point of entry into the code (Smith 2007: 38-9).

The essential principle here is *alphametical*, to adopt the usual name of a kind of puzzle invented by Henry Dudeney in 1924, in which the idea is that the reader has to reverse engineer the code that allows for an operation such as the following:

#### SEND +MORE= MONEY

The operativity of this puzzle depends upon the fact that the alphabet is in fact a numerical series – an ordered sequence of reorderable because equivalent elements. Claude Shannon demonstrated the stochastic nature of word formation by applying a series of sieving operations to a randomly generated series of letters, first of all applying the probability of letters like T and H clustering together, then the probability of three letter combinations, then the probability of these letters clustering in words of typical letter-length.  (Shannon 1948: 7)

Literary writing is commonly thought of as being at the other extreme from how-to books, instruction manuals, and other uses of writing to assist mechanical or other procedures, whether recipe books, almanacs, changeringing manuals, musical scores, prayer-books and liturgies, horticultural guides, almanacs, or all-purpose guides such as Joseph Moxon's *Mechanick Exercises*, the second volume of which is devoted to the arts of printing, that is to say, is an operation upon itself. As Moxon remarked: '*by a* Typographer […] *I mean such a one who, by his own Judgement, from solid reasoning with himself, can either perform, or direct others to perform from the beginning to the end, all the Handyworks and Physical Operations relating to* Typographie. *Such a Scientifick man was doubtless he who was the first Inventor of* Typographie' (Moxon 1683: 36). As the name suggests, manuals are intended to be held in the hand while other kinds of procedure (other kinds of procedure than reading, that is) are conducted. But this physical involvement in the designated action, along with the implied breaking-up of the reading process required by the action of putting the recommended actions into practice in the way recommended, blends or interleaves text and action. As with the working out of a calculation, or the keeping of a ledger of transactions, the book does not merely describe or record some state of affairs: it enters into its operation. It is not an operation described or implied by the book: it is something that one does, as we say, *by*  *the book*. Nothing could seem further away from a literary text than a recipebook; and yet there are respects in which literary texts can be regarded as programming the action of their reading, in something of the same way that a recipe book programmes the making of a pie. A recipe says 'make a pie like this'; the kind of text that we think of as literary seems to say 'try reading me like this'.

There is a long history of overlap between number and the kinds of performative we call 'spells'. These 'mathemagical' procedures are strong indications of the ways in which treating words as numbers makes them operatives, or treating words as operatives helps to make them seem numberlike. One of the most obvious examples of the magical confluence of number and word is the counting-out rhyme, used for centuries worldwide as a way of drawing lots or casting fortunes. The counting rhyme exploits the fact that most human beings lose count very easily. In this respect counting rhymes are really a form of divination procedure. They have in common the fact that they are determinate operations designed to produce indeterminate outputs. They are literally the machinery of the divine, the *machina dei*. But divination is also akin to a kind of calculation, a procedure for revealing a solution or set of relations that is latent in a set of numbers or a statement of relations but not apparent in it. The sifting of a quadratic equation is an operation that is cognitively equivalent to the riddling of grain.

Divination procedures are designed to be magical. Perhaps all machines tend towards the magical, in that they are designed to work by themselves, that is, they work without needing to be worked. This means that we can know that they work without knowing or needing to know precisely how. This makes mechanisms useful in the devising of magical procedures. We may characterise the magical through Freud's formula of 'omnipotence of thoughts' (Freud 1955: 75-99), where the act of thought is supposed to be all-powerful but occult in its workings. Indeed, thinking may perhaps be regarded as the ultimate magical machinery, since all thinking is unconscious thinking, given that I do not know how I do it. I don't mean that nobody has any idea what is going on, for example neurologically, when I perform the action I call thinking, for we are surely much more aware than we used to be of the complex physiological correlates of thinking and are likely to become ever more so. What is magical in thinking is its particular ratio of knowledge to ignorance. I know how to think; I know just how to set myself to the work of reflecting, reverie, calculation of consequences, and so on. What I don't know is how I know how to do this. I do it by just willing it, but I do not know how that act of willing makes it happen. I have to will harder to overcome distraction, but I don't know exactly what I do when I will harder. And willing does not in fact always do the trick – sometimes I have to will myself not to concentrate so hard in order to remember an errant fact or name, and it seems even harder to know how I do that. Magical thinking is thinking that ascribes powers to mental operations – powers for example to make things happen in the world – while keeping hidden the actual operation of those powers. Magical machines often provide the mediation between the known and the known-unknown. There always seems to be some kind of black box by means of which thought makes thinking thinkable.

This is apparent in the huge and systematic confluence between technology and magical thinking. Dirk Bruere's self-published book *Technomage*, to take only one contemporary example, has a chapter entitled 'Machines'. Bruere explains that, despite drawing on quantum mechanics for his theories of magical influence, 'we do not need radio telescopes or the paraphernalia of real science, because we are essentially performing a series of symbolic actions' (Bruere 2009: 92). This unwittingly goes to the heart of the question of what a writing machine is. Is a symbolic machine really a machine, or just the symbol of one? What if the machine in question is designed to process symbols? Can we securely distinguish between a real symbol-processing machine and a symbolic one? (Is the mechanical processing of symbols itself symbolic?)

#### Sit

What is a machine? A machine is a material device that allows the iterable and automatic performance of a specific task in the stead of some performer, usually with some gain in efficiency. A machine performs operations without needing or being able to know how or perhaps even that it performs them. The four defining elements of a machine are iterability, automaticity, specificity, and surrogacy. Machines do specific jobs for us repeatedly. That they have a material form is usual, but not necessary for them. Most especially, machines usually involve what Ian Bogost, extrapolating from the design of videogames to game-like structures in general, calls 'unit operations' (Bogost 2008). That is, machines are assemblages of autonomous components that can be linked together in variable ways. Machines, we may say, are defined by the fact that they do not know everything about themselves – that they contain encapsulated sub-routines or black boxes. A.N. Whitehead points to the importance of what a later generation would begin to call 'object-orientation' in his 1911 introduction to mathematical thinking:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle – they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. (Whitehead 1911: 61)

If there is something machinic about codes and ciphers it is not just because they are constructed mechanically, but because they are also, as we say, 'machine-readable'. HTML code is probably the most familiar of the forms of machine-readable code. Like most codes, it involves a combination of natural language and machine-language, as signified by the pointed brackets which must enclose all the tags. The human reader who is able to distinguish and discount the HTML tags will have the whole of the text available for them, albeit unadorned by any format. The browsers for which HTML is written 'understand' only the tags which tell them how to format the otherwise unreadable text. So, like the crossword clue, the code embodies a difference between reading and processing. Literature is perhaps like HTML in that it is full of visible and invisible marks of formatting. These moments when the text becomes operative are the moments where the text is, or aspires to become, most machine-readable. Puns, for example – 'to catch with his surcease success' – are such stochastic hotspots.

When the term 'word-processing' appeared in around 1967, it was in fact applied to the IBM's 'Selectric' typewriter, which had been launched in 1961. The innovation was mechanical, in the replacement of the cradle of type bars with a golf ball, which in itself increased the speed and accuracy of typing immeasurably, by avoiding the clashing of type bars which inevitably occurred at high typing speeds. The electric typewriter made the transition to word-processing in 1964, when a magnetic tape system was added, to enable the storing of characters. A word-processor was blind to the meanings of words, which it was able to treat as mere blocks of matter, but it could only do this effectively once the words were no longer in fact hard, but soft, that is, once they were encoded, as instructions to display a particular shape in a matrix of dots. This movement from the electric to the electronic (from a machine mechanically powered by electricity to a machine using electricity to encode and decode) meant that the Selectric typewriter became the favoured interface for engineers and computer scientists to input data to computers.

If machine-readable code is to be regarded as a kind of language, in what mood or mode does that language operate? We may say that the language of operation is subjunctive, as in the Latin third-person present subjunctive of *fiat*, let it be made, or *sit*, let it be, in expressions such as 'sit Deus in nobis et nos maneamus in ipso' – may God be in us and may we remain in him. The process of running computer code or putting it into operation moves it from the optative (God rest ye merry gentlemen) to the cohortative (let us pray, or let x be y, or simply, Leibniz's hearty 'calculemus' [Leibniz 1951: 51]). This is the mode in which most mathematical reasoning occurs: that of the 'let it be that'. It also governs the logic laid out in Brown's influential *Laws of Form* (1969), which aims to provide a set of algorithmic notation-procedures, in which the notation is the procedure and the procedure is effected through the notation, for the making out of complex propositions. Indeed Brown declares that:

the primary form of mathematical communication is not description, but injunction. In this respect it is comparable with practical art forms like cookery, in which the taste of a cake, although literally indescribable, can be conveyed to a reader in the form of a set of injunctions called a recipe. Music is a similar art form, the composer does not even attempt to describe the set of sounds he has in mind, much less the set of feelings occasioned through them, but writes down a set of commands which, if they are obeyed by the performer, can result in a reproduction, to the listener, of the composer's original experience. (Brown 1969: 77)

Like Wittgenstein, Brown sees the injunctive nature of mathematical writing as electively tied to the act of writing. That is, the writing of mathematics is an invitation to its reader to actualise the mathematical propositions in a further act of writing. Mathematics thus becomes the injunction notation of an inscription, which will itself be a notation rather than a simple image or representation:

When we attempt to realize a piece of music composed by another person, we do so by *illustrating*, to ourselves, with a musical instrument of some kind, the composer's commands. Similarly, if we are to realize a piece of mathematics, we must find a way of illustrating, to ourselves, the commands of the mathematician. The normal way to do this is with some kind of scorer and a flat scorable surface, for example a finger and a tideflattened stretch of sand, or a pencil and a piece of paper. (78)

The principal logical operator in Brown's scheme is what he calls the Crossing, which is a primary act of self-division whereby one entity is marked out from another. 'The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart', he declares at the outset of *Laws of Form* (v); in the process of course he effects by his declaration the very action it evokes. Brown's mark makes a primary distinction between the inside and the outside of something, and may be thought of as an abbreviated bracketing. 'We take as given the idea of a distinction and the idea of an indication, and that it is not possible to make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take therefore the form of distinction for the form' (1). The making of a mark which distinguishes establishes a form in a kind of self-relation, which accounts for the success of Brown's calculus with biologists like Franciso Varela, who made it the basis for his study of organic autopoeisis in living systems, in *Principles of Biological Autonomy* (1979). The mark is not only at the heart of all form, it represents a fundamental property of the universe, which conjoins knowing and being. For Brown, this property is reflexivity:

we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself. This is indeed amazing. (105)

Reflexivity allows for systems not just to recognise, but also to perform work on and with themselves, this being the fundamental feature, not just of a calculation, or the difference engine that materialises it, but also of language. The power of a language, like the power of mathematics, consists not principally in its capacity to represent the world, but its capacity to signify itself to itself. This allows it to work on the world by working and reworking its own system of representation.

Brown insists that this relation of self-seeing is also an act, and an agonistic one: 'We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i.e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself' – and in a cryptic footnote to the word 'act' Brown reminds his readers of the Greek *agonistes*, actor, antagonist, and invites them to 'note the identity of action with agony' (105). One of the striking features of Brown's *Laws of Form* is how easily it slips between abstract logical relations and actual engineering applications, as in his casual remark that the logical calculus he has set out exists in the form of circuits 'presently in use by British Railways' (99), for whom Brown had acted as a consulting engineer.

This active self-relation is, many have thought, a distinguishing feature of the kind of language we call 'literary'. We may say that all executable code, like all arithmetical or algebraic functions, requires something like this primary bracketing or pocketing, in which one set of conditions is first of all set out in a self-contained phrase or clause, and then some operation is performed upon it. The rucked or pocketted structure of code is signalled by the function of what has come to be known as the Enter key, which means 'put what has been proposed into operation'; 'so be it'; 'amen'. The sign for the Enter key is an abbreviation of the carriage return on a typewriter, which would signify the completion of a line. The Enter key performs the function of the 'equals' sign on a calculator keyboard, and, on early computers, was sometimes called the 'Send' or 'Execute' key. The 'entering' of the Enter function derives from the IBM 3270 made in 1971, in which the key was used to input a block of buffered code into a computer, again making the potential actual.

The hangover of all this is the 'Are you sure?' dialogue that is a familiar, wearisome but sometimes merciful routine for all computer users. Having to say 'yes' also allows one to say 'no', and to be able to undo commands. There must be bracketting, the interior delimiting of operations as bounded in extent, for an undo command to be possible – otherwise the whole linked structure could be countermanded. Programming must move by a series of encapsulated hiccups, from the proposed to the disposed, the prepared to the performed, a series of epochs in which a system is put to work to execute itself. The 'Enter' is a version of the 'yes'-function analysed in Joyce's *Ulysses* by Derrida as part of the 'gramophone effect' of an 'anamnesic machine' of utterance in the novel (Derrida 1988: 44). This primary and renewed selfrelation may be regarded as a feature not just of all coded language, but also a feature of all language as such. The principle that a sentence requires a main verb to complete it is the principle of the enter or let-it-be-so. Language proceeds by the semantic rhythm of these gatherings and releasings, preparations and activations.

However, literary language is machine-like and code-like in that it depends on a greater number of processes that may be said to be 'machine-readable' than other kinds of language use, which require and are largely exhausted by the act of communication between a sender and receiver. All language depends upon this kind of implicitness, but literary language is technographic in that the work done by these pocketings of the implicit is greater and more extensive. Another way of putting it would be like this. Any piece of writing can be made available for self-scrutiny and therefore made able to act on itself by being digitised, that is, being rendered in a form that makes it machinereadable – that can, for example, count the numbers of characters or the occurrences of a particular word or even of a clause-structure. The simple sorting of the information contained in the text performs a work on it that allows it to be seen not as an event but as a structure of relations, increasing its visible redundancy. Literary texts are texts that open themselves up more and more to this possibility of machine-reading, even in advance of the existence of any actual apparatus for performing such operations. Indeed, we may say that such texts are literary to the degree that they constitute promissory machines (a promised machine and a machine for promising) for self-sorting that would anticipate the operations we call digitisation.

This is why I think that the kind of writing that tends to be called 'literary' has always in fact had a secret kinship with such technographic forms; for, in both cases, the writing is a kind of notation, which joins in the performance of what it signifies. Technography is not just a modern matter, a feature of texts that happen to arise in a world full of machinery and pay attention to that machinery in various ways. The mediation of other machines assists literature to imagine and start to become the ideal machine it is always aspiring to be. Literature is not any kind of rage against the machine: it is the name for this machinic desire, the desire of this ideal machinery. And, if I am even half-way right, writing has been a machinery of calculation from the very beginning. The particular kind of machinery that has become universal in the modern world is the computer. This machine has become universal because that is what it is, in that it is not a machine for performing one kind of operation (digging, washing up, or adding up, say) but a machine capable of operating any other kind of machine, precisely because of its powers of reflecting on itself, or taking itself as an object of calculation. We may say that the ways in which literary writing has been put to work, as a general form of programming, is a kind of computation. All literature is technographic, not in the sense that it is about some kind of machinery, but in the sense that we tend to call writing literary as it intensifies its attempt to write out, or in Brown's terms to 're-enter into the form' (Brown 1969: 69) of, the kind of machinery it itself is. Its noncoincidence with itself is the law of its form and the motive principle of its action.

Digitisation not only renders words as numerical equivalents, it activates the numerical and mathematical potential latent in literary texts (that is, the texts that tend to qualify as literary, or come to be taken as literary). All nature, we may say, is potentially on the way to number, or lies open to it. Literature is a name for what lies between language and number and moves language towards the multiple equivalences of number. The move towards the mathematical is not, as it is ritually supposed to be, a move in the direction of reduction, but of production. We must remember that the number of number is not one. Numbers are qualitatively invariant, that is, they are all exactly the same kind of thing. But it is this very fact that makes the number of games it is possible to play and functions it is possible to perform undetermined. It becomes clear that literature is a mechanical procedure and, like all mechanical procedures, a calculative machinery, at just the point at which we start to lose our certainty that we know clearly and in advance what a machine is or can be. Literature is a little like, or aspires to be like, the kind of machine a computer is, namely a universal machine – an encyclopaedia or generator of machineries.

So I have had four assertions to make here about writing machines and what they do:

#### Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. 2008. *Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism*. Cambridge: MIT Press.

### 2

#### Stereopticon

#### Kristen Treen

#### A Semblance of Sanity

In May of 1865, a member of the Philadelphia Photographic Society (PPS) spent an evening in the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. Invited rather than committed, the photographer had been given permission to observe one of the stereopticon 'entertainments' with which the Hospital's superintendent, physician and reformer Thomas Story Kirkbride, was attempting to 'cure' the men and women in his care. The treatment seemed to be working, for, with one eye on the stereopticon show and one on the audience, the photographer was 'delighted by what I then saw'. 'The audience', he told his fellow enthusiasts, 'was a model audience, so quiet and so attentive':

Dr Lee read to them from some book of travels in Rome, and as he read, the various scenes about which he was reading were thrown on the screen in a circle of light, eighteen feet in diameter. The dissolving effect was well managed, and occasionally, during pauses of the reading, and while the pictures were being shown, music was introduced to vary the entertainment. Familiar as I am with exhibitions of this class, I never passed a more agreeable evening. ('Photographic Society of Philadelphia' 1865: 120)

The man from the PPS had no problem quietly cordoning himself off from 'them' – the beneficiaries of Dr Lee's readings – and ruining, somewhat, the integrity of this 'model' audience. But he couldn't quite find his way to separating the process that wrought the patients' psychological metamorphosis from the mechanical workings of the machine itself. Ill-equipped to describe the operation with which the stereopticon was meant not simply to amuse these patients, but to restore their powers of restraint and reason, this technologically-minded observer found that a meticulous description of the stereopticon's clear focus, varied display, steady function, and 'well managed' mechanism did just as well. Photographic images of Rome and its treasures were displayed, magnified, on a clean white screen: unremarkably 'familiar' as the account might sound to the seasoned stereopticon spectator, this photographer – and, indeed, the numerous physicians implementing this novel treatment – implied that the operations of a 'model' mind might somehow correspond with exposure to the stereopticon's particular mechanisms, its visual effects. This photographer's account, in other words, let the stereopticon speak for itself.

The PPS photographer wasn't the first rhetorically to elide the stereopticon lantern's novel workings with those of a healthy mind: the stereopticon had been used to exhibit sanity for almost a decade before the PPS photographer paid his call. In fact, its incorporation into Kirkbride's Moral Treatment scheme took place shortly after the invention of its key component, the photographic slide. The stereopticon's story began with the innovations of brothers William and Frederick Langenheim, of Philadelphia, PA, whose experimentation with glass as a material upon which photographic negatives could be developed made photographic lantern slides – or 'hyalotypes', after the Greek for 'glass' – possible (Musser 1994: 30). Where previous projectors relied on hand-painted slides to entertain small audiences public and domestic, this machine brought the marvels of magnified photography to the masses, beginning officially with the Langenheims' audiences at London's Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 (Wells 2008: 13-15; Layne 1981: 195). Glass slides set the scene for the innovation of the magic lantern itself. By 1860, Massachusetts chemist and businessman John Fallon had coined the term 'stereopticon' in naming the large biunial lantern he imported from England and improved significantly. This lantern used powerful calcium limelight, oxy-hydrogen, or electric light to project photographic images of between twenty-five and thirty feet in diameter before music- and lecture-hall crowds (Figure 1) (Wells 2011: 5-6). Remarkable for retaining an extraordinary clarity of image, the stereopticon also delighted audiences with its innovative use of a dissolving effect between slides, which the stereopticon's double lenses, stacked one above the other, made possible. Refining the primitive effects of the older lantern's shake and slide, the stereopticon's dissolve appeared in almost every eyewitness account of the machine's entrancing scenes, including that of the PPS photographer who found himself enjoying their effect among the Hospital's curious congregation.

The Hospital had been reaping the benefits of stereopticon shows long before they became popular with the general public. A chance acquaintance with the Langenheim brothers in the early 1850s led Kirkbride to introduce the stereopticon shows into the Pennsylvania Hospital's pioneering Moral Treatment scheme as early as 1851 (Layne 1981: 196). Before long, photographic displays of European artworks, North American landmarks, and even of the Hospital's own grounds had become staple evening entertainments in a programme of therapy which replaced an asylum culture of commonplace physical restraint and punishment with '[t]he most inflexible firmness […]

Fig. 1. The McIntosh Biunial Stereopticon. 1895. *Illustrated Catalogue of Stereopticons, Sciopticons, Dissolving View Apparatus, Microscopes, Solar Microscope and Stereopticon Combination, Objectives, Photographic Transparencies, Plain and Artistically Colored Views and Microscopical Preparations*, p. 32. Chicago: McIntosh Battery & Optical Co.

combined with never-failing kindness and gentleness and sympathy' (Haller and Larsen 2005: 261; Bucknill and Tuke 1862: 546). Unlike their draconian forebears, proponents of the Moral Treatment believed that mental illness was an affliction that the patient could be helped to manage, given the right habitforming occupations. 'The patient is to be taught habitual self-control, by habitual indulgence', wrote English psychiatrists Bucknill and Tuke, and while the physical routines of gardening and gymnastics had served Kirkbride's purposes well enough, his records of the stereopticon's successes suggest that it was clearly a habit of a different order (Godbey 2000: 36).

Regarded early on as an effective tool in wresting what one Hospital manager described as '"minds diseased" […] from their gyrations, – their never ending rotation upon the point of fallacy', the stereopticon's gift to psychiatry was the rhetoric of its movements, the habits it might pass on to the mentally ill ('Extract of a Letter' 1852: 292).

For the language of insanity was the language of erratic shifts, abrupt transitions, obsessive gyrations, and lethargic depressions, which filled the

*American Journal of Insanity*'s pages. Nineteenth-century psychiatrists agreed with John Locke's view, expressed in *An Essay Concerning Human Understanding*, that '*mad Men* […] do not appear […] to have lost the Faculty of Reasoning; but having joined together *some Ideas* very wrongly, they mistake them for Truths' (Locke 1975: 160-61). Such was their point d'appui for imagining more precisely the abnormal ruptures, conjoinings, and motions that affected the so-called 'diseased' mind. Prized for its narrative capabilities, and for the startling clarity of its content, the stereopticon struck the psychiatric eye as capable of creating the environment necessary for the cultivation of rational thought, and of projecting the emulable movement of that model thought on screen.

Halting the troubled mind's gyrations, the stereopticon's measured display of slides, fed manually through the machine, assumed a narrative thread of associations with or without an accompanying lecture to bridge the gaps. In fact, thanks to its dissolve effect, the stereopticon seemed to leave no gaps at all as it moved seamlessly between images. There was no potential for darkness and distraction, for the 'lesion[s] in the association of ideas' that physicianphilosopher Louis Francisque Lélut associated with insanity, and that the Moral Treatment sought to suture (cited in Bucknill and Tuke 1862: 75). What was more, the magnification of photographic images brought about an unparalleled reality effect, that, as Kirkbride himself noted, 'give[s] us every object in a landscape, every leaf and twig, every blade of grass […] with a degree of perfection no artist could hope to effect' (Kirkbride 1863: 57). At the same time as it impressed the social responsibilities of the 'model' audience upon its spectators, who often shared their auditorium with Hospital staff and the visiting public, the stereopticon would impress images of reality writ unavoidably large upon the wandering mind, in the hope that the purposeful progress of the life-sized, the face-to-face, the enormously real would leave its mark. The visual shaped the cognitive; the right kind of visions could set the wandering mind straight. 'If new objects of thought are not only presented to, but impressed upon the mind', wrote Bucknill and Tuke of Moral Treatment's claims to rearrange disturbed thought, 'if employment is made to replace inertia, cheerful society and recreation to replace moping dulness, new trains of ideas become the habit of the mind, and the subjects of delusion gradually fade in the perspectives of memory' (Bucknill and Tuke 1862: 555).

Kirkbride would have agreed that 'the subjects of delusion gradually fade in the perspectives of the stereopticon', for the machine seemed not only to correct habits of mind, but also to externalise the healthy movement of thought itself, from one discrete image to another. It certainly wasn't the first time that photographic or projecting technologies had been used to picture thought's daily processes, or the mind's responses to external phenomena. As Emily Godbey has shown, the asylum movement rooted its conception of the healthy mind in the Lockean doctrine of human understanding, which had famously used the *camera obscura* to delineate the relations between 'external and internal Sensation' and the '*dark Room'* of the mind (Godbey 2000: 52-3; Locke 1975: 163). Illuminating the mind's 'Closet wholly shut from light', these sensations projected 'external visible Resemblances, or *Ideas* of things without' into its darkness: 'Pictures', which 'stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion' within memory's slide-box, as it were (Locke 1975: 163).

While Locke separated 'objects of sight and the ideas of them' into an 'orderly' system of images to be reprojected, the proponents of the Moral Treatment drew on theories of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy to make Locke's rigid set of 'pictures' a little more malleable. In its thesis that, together with Lockean sensory accrual, humans were 'born with innate propensities that could be molded by experience', the Common Sense philosophy made it possible to envisage reconditioning the thoughts that strayed from their Lockean arrangement (Godbey 2000: 52). Bringing new movement to the *camera obscura's* magnifications, the stereopticon embodied an intersection of the psychological philosophies that defined American psychiatry at mid-century.

In doing so, however, it became a means – for nineteenth-century practitioners of remedial psychiatry and for media historians alike – of reasserting the enduring conviction that the τέχνη of emerging photographic technologies could be found in their value as *ordering* mechanisms. Ordering mechanisms, moreover, with a claim to authority rooted in the apparent transparency of the photographic image. With transparency comes immediacy: when the rhetoric of the machine converges too neatly with reality's expectations, the medium itself begins to disappear, validating the rhetoric of order into which it disappears. The medium arbitrates successfully – the stereopticon cures and displays curedness – to the point of self-effacement, and the order it establishes is insidious but absolute. Indeed, until now the stereopticon has been routinely incorporated into the line-up of technologies labeled as essential mechanisms within the larger apparatus of institutional power. Kirkbride's experiment has been likened to panoptic surveillance, and his innovative use of photography in the asylum compared with the photographic categorization of mental 'diseases' undertaken by his contemporaries in European psychiatry (Haller and Larsen 2005; Godbey 2000).

Yet beyond the asylum's walls, the stereopticon's beguiling progress would challenge conceptions of consciousness and of order, just as it would leave its audiences with the strange sense that they had been caught-up in the haze of a dream. Untempered by pre-existing discourses of health and sanity, the public's stereopticon was innovator rather than conservator, a technology that gave rise to sensations of dissonance and mixed metaphor in equal measure. Telegraph, flying carpet, rolling clouds, miracle pure and simple: unable to put their fingers on the stereopticon's wondrous transportation of sight and mind, its spectators found that the machine's magnifications and dissolves dispersed and reimagined the possibilities of the real with every passing slide. Indeed, both effects turned the spectator's attention, with a new intensity, to the unseen world around them: to the fibres of existence revealed by the stereopticon's unparalleled magnifications; to the connections that bound individual to audience and to an ever-expanding democratic nation; to the processes driving the mind between thoughts, filling the gaps in a way that the stereopticon's dissolves made suddenly conspicuous. And by the end of the century, the stereopticon had become a linguistic mechanism with which literature and Pragmatist philosophy registered their encounters with the dissonances, the chaotic relationality, of the modern American consciousness.

#### Magnify

At first, the stereopticon appeared to be living up to Kirkbride's rhetoric of improvement. The machine's debut tour had elicited favourable reviews where its instructive potential was concerned. When the stereopticon's inventor John Fallon partnered-up with showmen Peter Abel and Thomas Leyland to exhibit the first public stereopticon lecture shows across the Northeast, the magnifying machine he had developed with his chemist colleagues in mind quickly gained a reputation for the scientific realism it brought to popular spectacle. '*Photographic*, *optical*, and *chemical science* have here combined to bring the very ends of the earth near to us, in something like their natural aspect', declared one enthusiastic reviewer for the *Salem Gazette*, whose accolade appeared in a pamphlet produced by Abel and Leyland's publicity outfit. This was upmarket entertainment, the wonders and curiosities of the world unveiled with an accuracy capable, as the *Gazette*'s correspondent eagerly emphasised, of 'educating and elevating the popular taste'. 'We often lament', repined the same reviewer,

that in a land like our own, where art is yet in its infancy, masterpieces of sculpture and painting are so rarely seen by the masses […] But with the apparatus of which we have been speaking, a gallery of choicest sculpture may be carried to any New England village, and its matchless marbles displayed to all the people […] We are confident that all who are interested in the education of the young, and in the cultivation of a pure taste and love of the beautiful among all classes, whether young or old, will appreciate the claims of the performance upon their approbation. (Haynes and Leyland 1863: 4-5)

As its singular clarity opened America's eyes to the Old World's treasures, so the stereopticon's vast views, accessible to unprecedentedly vast congregations of 'all classes, whether young or old', promised to transform its audiences into an apparatus fit to refine the sensibilities of its individual components, in a way Kirkbride would no doubt have endorsed. Yet Kirkbride had hoped that each individual in the asylum would internalise the restrained behaviours they learned in the shadows cast by the stereopticon's glare. The displays of lecture and music hall were understood, by comparison, to be gregarious in the extreme, generating a vivid sense of a *shared* visual experience. Advertisements boasted of improbably large audiences held spellbound by an impossible lantern of immense proportions, while the *New York Journal of Commerce* compared the stereopticon to its more famous cousin, the handheld stereoscope, noting that the 'delight which one person has when looking through the stereoscope a thousand persons can have at once – so that there is sympathetic and social pleasure' (Wells 2011: 5-6; Haynes and Leyland 1863: 12). The stereoscope induced the observer to peer into its eyepiece to partake privately of its seemingly solid photographic views, 'look[ing] selfishly at the show with your personal eyes', as the *Salem Gazette* admonished. The stereopticon, by contrast, equipped viewers with public eyes: lifting hundreds of faces in unison, it brought into being for the first time a 'sympathetic' collective connected by photographic realism writ large for public inspection.

If the stereopticon was a democratiser, then the democracy was in the detail. The stereopticon's examples of superior realism intensified the spectator's relation to those sitting around them, but they also altered the spectator's relation to the life unexpectedly exposed on screen in all its particulars. To the spectator accustomed to the magic lantern's hand-painted scenes, or what the *Rochester Express* called the panorama's 'eye-trying daub', the photographic feats of the stereopticon laid its subjects bare with a clarity that seemed to make visible the connective tissues of the world around them (Haynes and Leyland 1863: 14). To an extent, this had to do with the spate of overtly scientific shows that fascinated audiences by projecting slides containing microscopic organisms, including fleas, ticks, and even, at one display in Philadelphia, the contents of a small aquarium: fish, water, and all (Godbey 2000: 59, 63; Musser 1994: 32). The sudden disclosure of the unseen physical world was admittedly wondrous and grotesque by turns, but rather than induce audiences to regard what they saw as the stuff of curiosity and freak show, the scientific element prompted uncanny moments of self-examination.

One short story by an anonymous writer for the *Milwaukee Daily Journal* evoked the scientific stereopticon's 'great fiery eye' to imagine the infinitesimal lives and adventures of 'two charming little animalculas' named Ra and Ro. 'An Infusional Romance' began by registering the sense of 'horror' attendant on the revelation 'that, in the indiscreet glare of the magic lantern, the finest maiden's tress resembled the primeval giant of the forest, that the most delicate lace was made of rough cables, and that that romantic storied personage, Mr de Fly, Jr, was a blood-thirsty monster as large as an elephant' ('An Infusional Romance' 1887: 3). In offering a view of the trials suffered by Ra and Ro in their attempts to join (literally) in holy matrimony – at the end of the story the limelight threatens to evaporate their watery world altogether – the story

Fig. 2. 'And next, the Brownies gathered round / A stereopticon machine / That cast its rays upon a screen. / A thousand times it magnified, / Till, stretching out on every side, / An object large and larger spread, / And filled the gazing group with dread.' Palmer Cox. 1890. *Another Brownie Book*, pp. 9-10. New York: Century.

envisioned the infinite expansion of the known world, even as it broached the possibility that the stereopticon was capable of revealing more about life's intimacies than one might care to know. It was a feeling that Canadian cartoonist Palmer Cox captured in an 1890 cartoon for his popular series *The Brownies* (Figure 2). During the Brownies' visit to the Academy (which precedes their visit to Niagara Falls, their trips by locomotive and tugboat, and their excursion up a canal), microscopic becomes uncannily macroscopic: grouped in inattentive chaos beneath a screen that dwarfs them to the size of insects, Cox's brownies wriggle and squirm, larval beneath the stereopticon's glare. The audience is as much of an entomological specimen as the bright beetle, bee, and locust on screen, all of which turn their ocelliform gaze upon the peculiar figures below.

The feeling of being scrutinised beneath a microscope wasn't limited to scientific shows, either, and its insidious influence was connected to the strange optical illusion for which the stereopticon had become famous. Since the stereopticon's first shows, audience members had reported a perceived solidity to the sights they were shown that simply didn't exist. In part, this illusion of solidity (the 'stereo' part of 'stereopticon') had to do with the machine's hybridity where kit was concerned: stereopticon operators often fed one half of the stereoscope's double view before the limelight, and the threedimensional effect enjoyed by stereoscope viewers was transferred visually just as 'stereo' was transferred verbally. The projection of small details, and of art and statuary against black backgrounds, also seemed to throw the photographic subject into relief. Reviews of statuary shows commonly waxed lyrical about the 'roundness' of the ancient marbles on screen. Eager to grasp the stereopticon's miraculous revelations, a reporter for the *Norwich Bulletin* put his finger on the curious quality of the stereopticon's absorbing detail as he reviewed Fallon's display of European art and architecture:

The scenes were various – now a public edifice, minutely perfect, even to the stains and finger marks upon its walls; now a ruin, upon which you could almost trace the depredations of the last visitor; now an interior view of a palace or cathedral, with its beautiful play of light and shade; now a landscape or a waterfall bursting in mist from the canvas; now a statue, more perfect if possible than the original, art glorified by science as it were, dead marble brought to life; […] What pleasure is derived from looking at Stereoscopic pictures is increased a hundred fold in viewing the same pictures as presented in magnified proportions by the Stereopticon. (Haynes and Leyland 1863: 9)

In opening up expanses and interstices, and with them the potential for personal exploration, the stereopticon seemed to match the 'pleasure derived from looking at Stereoscopic pictures'. Or, rather, it bettered it by presenting life-sized spaces into which spectators might project themselves. Offering individuals the opportunity to reassess their grasp of the world before them, the stereopticon's haptic allure became a tool in the manufacture of democratic expansion. Views of southern California drew the gaze of East Coast audiences in 1874 'for the purpose of inducing emigration thither': absorbing manifestations of agriculture and landscape, like those of 'dead marble brought to life', became substitutes for tentative travel, their brilliant progress across the screen guaranteeing Manifest Destiny's advance across the country ('Amusements' 1874: 8).

Yet lurking at the edges of awe and marvel was a disquieting awareness that the stereopticon might show too much, might be *too* democratic in the details it conjured for hundreds of curious eyes. This unsettling hyper-democratic insight marked the report of the *Norwich Bulletin*, whose descriptions of 'stains and finger marks' blemishing the walls of magnificent edifices, and 'the depredations of the last visitor' upon ancient ruins, left the seamy impression that the Old World's treasures had suffered over-exposure to an eager spectatorship. Saving graces there surely were: of beauty to counter the 'stains and finger marks' of gawking hordes, of 'art glorified by science' to shine where the whimsical plundering of relic-hunting individuals advertised the damage that consumers could so easily do. But even these brought the desires, the impulses of the individual mind into the equation: the desire to grasp, to touch, to claim an embodied relationship to the objects on the screen that not only offered themselves, but overwhelmed the field of vision to the extent that reality itself seemed temporarily removed. Recalling a stereopticon display at master showman P.T. Barnum's Museum, one observer found himself taken in by images of statuary 'so exact that the spectator forgets that he is looking upon canvass [sic], and feels half-inclined to step upon the stage to get a back view of the images' ('Barnum's Museum' 1863: 2). To be lured onto P.T. Barnum's stage – home of 'freak' and grotesquerie – let alone on to any other, was to have one's curiosity turned curio, one's desires unveiled before eager eyes. Therein lay the difference between the haptic allure of the stereoscope's miniature views and those offered by the stereopticon: where, as Jonathan Crary has argued, the parlour stereoscope's intimate play with haptic illusion 'quickly turned into a mass form of ocular possession', the stereopticon's engrossing visions seemed quite capable of possessing the viewer and putting them on display (Crary 1990: 127).

In the hands of author Charles Barnard, whose serialised novel *Applied Science* appeared in Maine's *Bangor Daily Whig and Courier* early in 1888, it was the stereopticon, more than any other modern technology, that had the power to reveal one's innermost thoughts and desires. Here, the stereopticon plays chief foil to the secret desires of the story's protagonist, one Elmer Franklin. Elmer is a dentist-cum-gadgeteer with a penchant for adapting the latest in nineteenth-century technology for his personal use, a quirk that comes into its own as he plots to save his beloved Alma from the prospects of a marriage of convenience to a swindling rogue, Mr Belford. Throughout the narrative Elmer's 'science [is] brought to bear upon rascality' as he uses his various gadgets to gather damning evidence against his rival in love (Barnard 1888a: 4). A camera is quickly produced and put to use as ether-happy Elmer uses the cover of his dentistry day job to swipe a glance at an incriminating letter that Belford is foolish enough to carry around, while Elmer is quick to provide his lady love with a miniature telegraphy kit when she confides to him her fears of meeting with her fiancée alone. Noble as our hero's intentions are, he too has his secrets: namely, a photographic slide bearing an image of Alma, surreptitiously taken as she sleeps.  The sun had sunk behind the hills, and it had grown dark. As the shadows gathered in the room a strange, mystic light fell on the ground before her. A picture – dim, ghostly, gigantic and surpassingly beautiful – met her astonished gaze. She gazed at it with a beating heart, awed into silence by its mystery and its unearthly aspect. What was it? What did it mean? By what magic art had he conjured up this vision? (Barnard 1888b: 4)

Face to face with her magnified and otherworldly self, Alma faints, giving Elmer the chance to smash the incriminating slide upon the hearth, but not before he passionately presses the glass miniature to his lips. With the shattering of the slide the 'clear headed son of science seem[s] to [lose] his self control' and begins 'to turn over his books and papers in a nervous manner, as if trying to win back control of his tumultuous thoughts'. Private thoughts once contained by Elmer's private stereopticon are thrown into chaos when they are exposed before the eyes of another. Overwhelming its subject into unconsciousness, the slide magnifies Elmer's conscious desires beyond all imagined proportion, leaving him in a state of shifted perspective and mental disarray. As it spills its piercing glare beyond the screen to illuminate its audience, the stereopticon lays bare the tangles of feeling, the disordered thoughts, by which even the most 'rational' of minds connect themselves with reality.

#### Dissolve

Responses to stereoptic dissolves speculated still more on the dissonances of the mind's activities. The dissolve effect with which the stereopticon caught modernity's eye had led a primitive existence in the years preceding the magic lantern's sudden development. Like many of the magic lantern's early effects – from the slip-slide through the long panoramic panning movement – the dissolve was usually achieved manually rather than mechanically. With the stereopticon, though, mechanical technique was perfected by way of a dissolving tap, which as Kentwood Wells explains, 'allowed smooth simultaneous dimming and brightening of lights in the two halves of a [biunial] dissolving lantern' (Wells 2011: 6). By adjusting the supply of hydrogen in each of the lantern's compartments, the tap allowed its operator to maintain and gradually to dim the illuminations as the oxygen used to fuel the light's glare was turned off (6). Immersed as we are in a visual culture which has seen the dissolving haze become a staple of cinematic montage, not to mention an effect we might use to check the monotony of a PowerPoint presentation, it is not easy to imagine encountering it for the first time, or encountering it as main attraction rather than ornamental embellishment.

By all accounts, the dissolve's drift of gases – its 'soft, white clouds gathering and rolling themselves about like smoke' – was enrapturing, and not simply in the way it delighted its audiences (Haynes and Leyland 1863: 8). It was enrapturing in the sense that it transported its viewers, carrying them not only from one image to another, but seeming, too, to convey them to another plane of consciousness altogether. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, who attended his first stereopticon exhibition at the Concord Lyceum in 1860, 'the lovely manner in which one picture was changed for another beat the faculty of dreaming' (Emerson 1914: 287). Meanwhile, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr's first encounter with the stereopticon's hazy scatterings prompted an expression of astonishment in a letter to the showman George Reed Cromwell:

To sit in darkness and have these visions of strange cities, of stately edifices, of lovely scenery, of noble statues, steal out upon the consciousness, and melt away one with other, is like dreaming a long and beautiful dream with eyes wide open. A journey with you, is the Grand Tour, *minus* the passport and the bills of exchange. (Cromwell 1870: 26-7)

Dissolving views did away with the faltering business of crossing borders and the messy back-and-forth necessitated by bills of exchange, presenting their audiences with a mode of transportation – a mediating mist – that transcended the restrictions of time and space to bring otherwise disparate images together before the eyes. It was like watching one's own imagination at work, and the literary establishment was quick to adopt the effect as a rhetorical figure for the movements of the mind, not all of which were as carefree and listless as the dreams of Emerson and Holmes, or as reasoned as Kirkbride would have had them. One poet, who may have been responding to the early dissolves of the magic lantern, saw in these unremitting shifts and turns the transience and unpredictable mutability of affective existence. 'Life's Dissolving Views', published in the *Boston Investigator* on 31 March 1858, began by evoking life's natural course: 'Life is but an April day, / Sunned by smiles and blent with showers, / Hope's bright lamp that leads the way, / But lights the thorns amid the flowers' ('Life's Dissolving Views' 1858: 4). Drawing the year's natural cycle and those of 'Hope's bright lamp' together, the first stanza promised to unite natural rhythm and technological mechanism, and in doing so to deliver an ultimate image of order and equilibrium: 'smiles […] blent with showers', and 'thorns amid the flowers'. By the poem's end, with 'Proud ambition […]

Fig. 3. From 'Sketches in New York During the Recent Presidential Election'. 1872. *Graphic*, November 30: 505.

Fade[d] to disappointment's canker', and 'Pleasure […] Changing soon to care and sorrow', the constant dissipations of the inner life have displaced the natural order altogether, leaving the dubious figure of 'Fate' in its place: 'But still although the blisses spread, / Too soon dissolve into each other, / Scarce is one remembrance fled, / Ere Fate's replaced it with another.'

Fate: the hand that feeds the lantern's slide; the force that drives one thought, dissolving it irresistibly into another. Under journalism's purview 'fate' became the inscrutable chop and change of capricious politicians even as stereopticon shows broadcast election returns, and the tide of fickle public opinion, onto the walls of buildings across the nation's cities (Figure 3). 'We know not what may have influenced the President in the selection of officers', wrote the *Christian Recorder* of Abraham Lincoln's ongoing shuffle of military leadership during the Civil War, 'whether guided by the party or by the discovery of their incapacity. […] He has been busy […] creating and disposing of them as a manager would a series of dissolving views' ('Our Failures and Their Causes' 1864: 1). The same was true of public taste, and while Lincoln was chastised for his precarious play with the fate of the country, one columnist for *Frank Leslie's Weekly* confessed surprise that the joys of Christmas hadn't yet fallen prey to the foibles of a fashion-conscious public: 'But in the very teeth of this condition of dissolving views and general tendency of all things old to go out and all things new to come in, Christmas has held its own. Whether we be skeptic or believer, transcendentalist or materialist, we all believe in the creed of a yearly merry-making' ('The Reign of Santa Claus' 1879: 294).

The strange motivation of the dissolve effect became a way of addressing the unfathomable charge that drove the country through civil war and into the marketplace; that drew its citizens together into a newly collective public consciousness, propelled forward by the fashions and fads of a booming postwar consumer culture; that marked, too, individuals' perceptions of their place within a modern nation which drew their gaze with marvels at every turn. To one correspondent for the *Taunton Gazette*, this dissolving state of affairs, as represented by the stereopticon's persistent passage, verged on disorder, on dissonance, on chaos. 'But very queer and bewildering it grows at last', they wrote of Fallon's sensational machine,

this chassezing and winding of scenes through the brain. Perhaps you gaze intently at some historical horse. There is a slight criss-crossing of bars, and a huge steeple blots out the horse, and finally arrives a whole city of steeples. A strange miz-maze, wherein sea views subside into Vatican or Alhambra, and lonely ruins change hands with the palace walls of the Doges. (Haynes and Leyland 1863: 8)

Dissolves ended in solutions: the loosening of rhyme and reason to the extent that the visions moving before the observer's eyes became a chaos of impressions, 'chassezing and winding' in a nightmarish 'miz-maze' of shapes and forms. Yet this dissonance, this chaos, was exactly the solution Professor William James had been searching for as he strove to access the mechanisms of conscious thought that, to his eye, had always been restricted by philosophies of mind which oriented themselves in relation to Lockean doctrine. James turned to the dissolve effect to articulate the notion of consciousness as an ongoing rearrangement of possible relations, a continuous 'flow' of what he called the 'stream of thought'. By 'stream of thought', James referred not only to the 'substantive parts' of the conscious mind – that is, the sensorial images or thoughts that Locke had imagined projected onto the mind's screen – but to the 'transitive parts' as well, with which he denoted 'a passage, a relation, a transition *from* it [the substantive part], or *between* it and something else' (he also called them 'feelings') (James 1890: 1.243). As he attempted to discern the nature of these transitive parts, in all their feelings and relations, James was forced to admit the impossibility of a task which he compared to 'seizing a spinning top to catch its motion' (1.244). The problem with trying to describe the stream of thought, he realised, was fundamentally linguistic. For centuries, the philosophy of consciousness had set its gaze upon seemingly separate and conceptually solid substantive thoughts in a way that had shaped, and been shaped by, the workings of language: 'so inveterate has our habit become of recognising the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use' (1.246). The closest our substantively-biased language could come to speaking of these 'feelings of relation' – constantly in a state of change, of rearrangement, of an ongoing disruption that seemed chaotic because of its namelessness – was in conjunctions, prepositions, adverbial phrases, the play of syntax. 'We ought to say a feeling of *and*, and a feeling of *if*', he wrote, 'a feeling of *but*, and a feeling of *by*, quite as readily as we say a feeling of *blue* or a feeling of *cold*' (1.245-6).

One solution to the problem of description came to mind. 'As the brainchanges are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other', he wrote, 'like dissolving views' (1.247). It was an assertion he made again in his description of the 'time-parts' of which continuous thought was comprised: while different moments in continuous thought 'melt into each other like dissolving views' to create a 'unitary and undivided' perception, 'no two of [these moments] feel the object just alike' (1.279). Not only does James's hypothesis rely on technological metaphor to find its focus on the *in-between*, the relational constitution of consciousness, it relies too on what the stereopticon's ongoing dissolves make visible to the eye: the ungraspable indivisibility of our ongoing thoughts, a merging which must be understood as pure process, as the dynamic shifting of numberless relations, those '[*d*]*umb* or anonymous psychic states' towards which words don't seem to work. Indeed, the stereopticon provides James with a figure for the analogue movement so integral to his model of the mind: the flowing stream. Its function within his text may therefore have less to do with the symbolic workings of metaphor – the token exchange of one thing for another – and more to do with the very movement of that exchange or semantic relation: the 'carrying' that metaphor does. Calling on the stereopticon's mechanisms, the *effects* it brings to mind, James applies the stereopticon's dissolve to denote the grammar of consciousness, in all its shades of conjunction, preposition, and plays of syntax.

James's metaphor also reshapes the relationships between mind, machine, and order that previous philosophies of mind had sought to preserve. On one hand, the machine metaphor transforms chaos of consciousness into a productive mechanism, an implement with which we might act rather than an abyss into which we might jump. On the other, it locates chaos within the machine in a way that not only prompts a reappraisal of the rhetorical insistence on technological order, but which invites us to re-read the workings of chaos in the same way that James's treatise invites us to re-read the workings of metaphor. So it is that in Stephen Crane's short story 'Five White Mice', the evocation of the stereopticon's dissolve brings us closer to understanding the stream of thoughts engendered by the modern metropolis not as a kind of madness, but as a heightened sense of one's own consciousness. Crane describes the runaway thoughts of a 'New York Kid' who finds himself in a stand-off with a group of shadowy Mexicans on one of the city's dingy streets. As the danger of the other mingles with the milieu of the city's rat-race, the Kid's visions suddenly become frantic, 'perfectly stereopticon, flashing in and away from his thought with an inconceivable rapidity, until, after all, they were simply one quick, dismal impression' (Crane 1898: 328). Crane's adjectival turn recalls James's grammatical one, emphasising sheer effect and with it the Kid's immersion in a moment of pure relationality. It is only a moment: the Kid's mind doesn't disintegrate into fear or madness. Instead it teeters on the edges of chaos and disorder to bring the reader a glimpse of modernity in all the rush of connections, alliances, enmities, and struggles that the city brings, magnified, to the mind. Just as it creates that glimpse, the stereopticon contains it: a snatch of consciousness in all the complexity of its relations, briefly illuminated on a New York street before the slide changes, and the scene dissolves.

#### Acknowledgements

The author would like to express her gratitude to the Wolfson Foundation for supporting the research which made this essay possible.

#### Works Cited

'Amusements'. 1874. *Inter Ocean*, September 28: 8.

'Extract of a Letter'. 1852. *American Journal of Insanity*, January: 292-3.

3

#### The Great American Novel and the Census

Kasia Boddy

I would sing in my copious song your census returns of The States, The tables of population and products –

Walt Whitman, 'Year of Meteors (1859-1860)'

In 1868, a novelist and former Union army officer called John W. De Forest issued a rallying cry for a new kind of 'copious' novel that would create, even as it reflected, the true scope and integrity of the nation (De Forest 1868). Whether such a 'Great American Novel' was actually possible was another matter.

De Forest was writing three years after the end of the American Civil War, a war which he – like many others – believed had made 'countrymen' out of 'people whom we did not know, and only counted in the census' (Emerson 2010b: 316). The end of that war also set the United States on a path of rapid industrialisation and population growth. In other words, De Forest called for a 'single tale' – one that would be recognised by 'every American' as a 'likeness of something which he knows' – at time when the prospect of that recognition was both less likely, due to the speed at which America was changing (De Forest 1868: 28), and more likely, due to the establishment of what John Durham Peters calls 'hard' and 'soft' connective infrastructures – such as a national railway system distributing national newspapers (Peters 2015: 32). But what kind of novel would be 'consonant' with an age which communicated by means of 'the railroad, electric-telegraph, printing-press' (De Forest 2000: 49)?

An answer might be found in thinking about the 'fundamentally logistical' work that infrastructure does (Peters 2015: 37). Peters's examples of 'logistical media' range from 'calendars, clocks and towers' to 'names, indexes, addresses, maps, lists (like this one), tax rolls, logs, accounts, archives, and the census' (37). Focusing on the former group, he does not elaborate on the work of the census or the map, but Benedict Anderson does. In the revised edition of *Imagined Communities*, Anderson considers the map and the census, along with the museum, as 'institutions' of 'nation-building', shaping the ways in which a state 'imagined its dominion – the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry' (Anderson 1991: 163-4). The Great American Novel might be thought of as a comparable institution or infrastructure; indeed one that has learnt a great deal from these other forms of logistical imagining.

The literary critic Thomas Sergeant Perry certainly understood the Great American Novel in this way, and he didn't approve. In 1872, Perry complained of a trend towards the kind of novel (written by the likes of De Forest) that informed readers of the length of the Connecticut River and the fact that 'Vermont has thirty-five inhabitants to the square mile'. For all that they were 'accurate to date' with regard to 'the geology, the botany, the ethnography' of the territories constituting the United States, such novels, he argued, were of only 'temporary interest', and would 'lose value at every census'. The 'real novelist', on the other hand, would 'look at life, not as the statistician, not as the census-taker, nor yet as the newspaper reporter, but with the eye that sees, through temporary disguises, the animating principles […] that direct human existence [....] All truth does not lie in facts' (Perry 1872: 367).

That Perry thought it necessary to issue such a defence of fiction's universality and fictionality is itself an indication of the way in which the American novel had come to be understood, and valued, as a logistical medium, and in particular one that measured national progress in quantitative terms. But if 'the American obsession with size' reached an apotheosis in the late nineteenth century (Clarke 2007: 1), population had been 'integral to how America envisioned itself' from the earliest days of the republic (Prewitt 2013: 35). Each decennial census from 1790 to 1860 saw the population rise by thirty to thirty-five per cent, with notable, and changing, variations between north and south, east and west: in the 1840 census, for example, 'the growth rates in the western states frequently amounted to 100 per cent' while the 1850 and 1860 censuses resulted in the loss of southern representatives in Congress (Anderson 1988: 26, 62). Such radical 'demographic dynamism' meant that the 'imagining' of the nation was as 'inherently unstable' as its political system (62). The only constant was change.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was among those who expressed scepticism about growth as a measure of 'success': 'Our American people cannot be taxed with slowness in their performance or in praising their performance', he noted ironically. 'The world is shaken by our energies. We are feeling our youth and nerve and bone […] We count our census, we read our valuations, we survey our map which becomes old in a year or two.' These remarks first appeared in a lecture that Emerson gave in the 1850s and repeated, with added warnings about 'brag' and 'advertisement', when he published it in 1870 (Emerson 2007: 143, 147). In the intervening years Americans had continued to count their census and to praise their performance. Fewer immigrants and fewer births, as well as an increase in deaths, meant that growth slowed for the four years of the Civil War, but the years that followed more than made up the shortfall. Immigration was a major factor but 'the single most important new development' was a decline in mortality rates (Klein 2004: 143). In 1889, Francis Walker, the Superintendent of the 1870 and 1880 censuses, and a Union Army veteran himself, was able to refer to the War as simply a four-year 'pause' in the 'course of construction and expansion' (Walker, 1899: 41, 206).

Alert to the 'sneer at "mere bigness"' that enthusiastic talk of 'the growth of the nation' was likely to engender, Walker in turn attacked the 'sententious wisdom' of (unnamed) 'moralists' and the devotion of (unnamed) novelists to 'gauzy, almost immaterial' heroines and 'slender' young men with 'a pale, interesting countenance' (193-4). Who wouldn't prefer to read 'the story of our national growth' (207), the 'big' story told by (resolutely masculine) censustakers and novelists alike? Such stories were not only necessary to do justice to 'the length of our rivers, the height of our mountains, the breadth of our lakes and inland seas, our fast-swelling numbers, our wealth springing aloft, almost in a night' (194), they would also, Walker insisted, reflect the fact that 'quantity has for us determined quality' and so 'helped to make our national character what it is' (209).

#### 'An Interesting Alliance of the Abstract and the Concrete'

During the 1840s, the 'infant statistical community' began to lobby for a 'more professional national statistical system', one that could ask and answer more detailed questions about the population (Anderson 1988: 33). This entailed a shift in the unit of analysis from the household to the individual, and the centralisation of the bureaucracies of information-gathering in Washington. Debated in the context of increasing hostility between free and slave states, these proposals generated more than administrative interest. The 1840 census was widely recognised to have been a 'complete fiasco', the product of 'errors, frauds and political machinations' by pro-slavery campaigners determined to prove that blacks could not cope with freedom (Cohen 1982: 177-8). In *A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin*, her compendium of the evidence her novel had drawn upon, Harriet Beecher Stowe devoted an appendix to the 1840 census which she entitled 'Facts vs Figures'. If, in the past, figures did not lie, she noted ironically, 'this arose from no native innocence of disposition, but simply from want of occasion or opportunity' (Stowe 1853: 17). The changes to the 1850 census represented an attempt to restore legitimacy to the process, but they also initiated a broader shift in perspective from households (and heads of households) to a dual focus on the individual and the aggregate. 'Pushing toward a new level of social knowledge, the census forged a direct relationship with named individuals, including women and children' – and, in 1850 and 1860, slaves (Wilson 2008: 7). The changes also led to a massive expansion in data collection, one that as the population grew became increasingly difficult to administer. The 1880 census took eight years of hand-counting to

Fig. 1. 'Electrical Counting Machines'. 1890. *Scientific American*, August 30: detail from the cover.

tabulate, and it became clear that something had to be done if the count was to keep up and Congress was to retain legitimacy (Anderson 1988: 45, 84). An 'interest in demographical data' was also intensifying in many other quarters, from industry to the nascent social sciences (Herbst 1993: 18). Gradually the 'purpose of the census' was changing (Anderson 1988: 85).

The dual needs of a full and fast population count and more complex analysis were both answered by the introduction in 1890 of a mechanised system. After experimenting with a machine using perforated tape, a Census Office clerk called Herman Hollerith adapted a technology that had been used by French weavers since the early part of the century: punch cards fed into an electrical tabulating machine. Enumerators gathered data from around the country as usual, then clerks (mainly women) transferred information about each individual onto a single card which was fed into the tabulating machine (manually until 1900). The tabulator used as 'spring-actuated needles' (one for each hole) over a plate of cups partially filled with mercury: wherever there was a hole in the card the needle dipped down into the mercury closing a circuit (Hollerith 1894: 679). The number of circuits were counted and the data then cross-tabulated. *Scientific American* marvelled that the Census Office had been transformed from a 'great counting house' into a 'vast machine shop' ('Mechanical Work' 1902: 275).

Today we're used to having details about ourselves translated into code, but at the end of the nineteenth century the process seemed miraculous. *Scientific American* wondered at the fact that 'by the special location of a hole within the limits of certain boundary lines on the card it means one thing, and in another position it means another thing'. 'Until its values are explained and understood', the card was simply 'a very insignificant and blind piece of pasteboard' (275). The surface of each card – '3 ¼ inches by 6 ⅝ inches' – 'was divided into 288 imaginary spaces ¼ inch square' (Hollerith 1894: 679). As Hollerith later explained:

To each of these spaces some particular value or meaning is assigned; a hole in one place meaning a white person, in another a black. Here a hole means a certain age-group, there it gives the exact year in that group. A combination of two holes in another part of the card indicates the occupation of the particular individual. (679)