Sources and Networks: The Elusive Real

            According to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, an attempt to posit source code as “the ultimate performative utterance” overlooks a network of humans and machines. Multiple entities necessarily mediate processes of computation; the reduction of software to source code obfuscates this mediation.  Combined with “the valorization of the user as agent,” the reduction of computer to code gives rise to “fantastic tales of the power of computing.” (300) I suggest that the fetishism Chun connects to the logic of “sourcery” finds its analog in a particular application of cognitive science to literary studies.  To claim that cognitive science holds the key to revealing the real of a literary text is to fetishize the relation of the textual and the mental. (300)

In moving from Chun’s argument to an engagement with a specific treatment of cognitive science’s relation to literature, I want to look at ways in which performativity provides a common ground for new media studies and neuroscience--a common ground that refuses possible readings of a literary text.

For Katherine Hayles, execution of code equals a change in machine behavior.  Where performative sentences, such as “I name this ship the ‘Queen Mary,’” depend on layers of mediation, code collapses the difference between transmission and action. (304)  As such, the performative finds its purified form not in the speech-act, but in source-code.  (Hayles, 50) Alexander Galloway moves code even further away from a relation to language. “To see code as subjectively performative or enunciative is,” according Galloway, “to anthopromorphize it, to project it into the rubric of psychology...” But Galloway’s assertion carries a possible problem.  Doesn’t “understanding voltages stored in memory as commands/code already anthropomorphize the machine?,” (305)

 The fault line separating thought and its object seems to traverse the computational/linguistic divide.  To think the object is to rip it out of objective space—to colonize it.   To cognize the machine is to erase its alterity.     

 Perhaps then, a hole emerges in the relation between cognition (a network of firing neurons) and computational coding.   But the hole is hard to see.  For example, the conversion of activity into inscription, the concept from which “source code emerges,” also lays the conceptual foundation of a neural network.   In fact, John von Neuman drew from “the conflation of neuronal activity with inscription,” to design “stored-memory digital computers." (308) Just as neuronal firing represents a set of abstract states, code represents a set of abstract operations.  This relation between software and cognition, appears as more than mere analogy.

The appearance might tempt one to think of an author’s brain, then, as a kind of source code.  Just as software can seem like “the invisible whole that generates…sensuous parts” so can the brain appear as the underlying reality grounding a literary text. (300) But this concept falls apart when one attempts to apply it to Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path. 
In a sense, Lerner’s book operates as both an extension of and meditation on its first poem, “Dedication.”  The book becomes “the recurring/ dream of waking with/ alternate endings/ she’d walk me through.” “She,” evidently, becomes the figure of “Ariana,” as the poem ends with “For Ariana./ For Ari”   Now, if one were to conflate this figure with Lerner’s neuronal network representing it, massive problems emerge when Mean Free Path begins to tilt the figure in opposing directions.  An identity of one neural net rather than another depends on a particular constellation of neural connections.  Consequently, if "Ari" operates in opposite or contradictory ways, one cannot identify the figure with any one particular neural ensemble.  To do so would be to posit a real contradiction in a physical structure.

Yet we do find an opposition within trajectories of signification once thematic properties of the text write back, or mediate, the author’s relation to his so-called figure.  Consider, “I woke/ Before I reached the ground like virga/ To find Ari gone./  The flattened stems/ Only because there was no ground/ Allow the words to tremble in the breath/ As such.  There is no way to read this/ Once, and that’s love, or aloud…” “Ari” is on the outside; she is “gone.” Consequently, the “words in the breath”  cannot be read, and Ari cannot be spoken to.  Yet, the speaker tells us “Ari removes the bobby pins/ I remove the punctuation." The repetition of the word "remove" indicates that Ari is both present and absent--not problem for poetry but disastrous for identifying the figure with the author's neural representation.   If Ari is identical with some neural articulation, then she has fallen off the cognitive map.  Ari becomes an impossible thought for cognitive science—one that in no way lodges itself within any definitive neural computation.