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Kodwo Eshun
The Algorithmic Poetics of @GlissantBot
Against the recent Anglophone preoccupation with the
ontology of opacity formulated by Edouard Glissant1, Louis
Chude-Sokei’s recent theorization of black posthuman
technopoetics2 turns to rethink the Glissantean theorization
of creolization developed during the 1970s3 Critical thinking
around creolization has tended to emphasize what ChudeSokei describes as the “externally imposed and internally
generated notions of mixture” that “cluster around the
Caribbean like a squall.”4 Critical attention has celebrated the
commitment to the ‘mutable’, and the ‘catachrestic’ within
the Caribbean lineage of creolization.5 What sets ChudeSokei’s thinking apart from the familiar critical focus upon the
creative and resistant agency of créolité is his emphasis upon
Glissant’s much less-remarked-upon commitment to creolization as a process of evolution or “synthesis-genesis” that is
“never complete”.6 It is this formulation of synthesis-genesis
that opens the way for Chude-Sokei’s rethinking of creolization as a process of technogenesis or coevolution between
humans and machines. Chude-Sokei moves in and with the
movement of thought of synthesis-genesis until it begins to
reconfigure the traditional figures of the cyborg, the posthuman, evolution, and computation and finds itself reconfigured
by the movement of its thought outside of itself. In The Sound
of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, ChudeSokei argues that Donna Haraway’s influential formulation
that the “boundary between human and animal is thoroughly
breached by the late twentieth-century in United States
1 Glissant, Edouard, 1997. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press. pp. 189-195.
2 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black
Technopoetics. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press
3 Glissant, Edouard, 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J.
Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia
4 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016. p. 148.
5 Chude-Sokei, Louis, p. 168.
6 Glissant, 1997, p. 174.
Kodwo Eshun
The Algorithmic Poetics of @GlissantBot
scientific culture”7 is rendered inaccurate by the “Caribbean
lineage of creolization and its hostility to conventional borders
and antinomies.”8 Inaccurate, Chude-Sokei insists, because
the ontological, anthropological, and technological context
of North America that delimits Haraway’s speculations on the
“border wars” between animals, humans and machines is
itself thoroughly breached by the transformational capacities
of creolization through which “we can see that the mingling
of experiences is at work, there for us to know and producing
the process of being.”9 If, as Haraway points out, the differences between organic human bodies and machines have
become increasingly untenable, then the history of bodies
and the history of machines not only intrude upon each other
but become mutually constitutive. This mutual co-constitution, Chude-Sokei argues, exemplifies the process of creolization at work.10 According to Chude-Sokei, Glissantean
creolization can be understood as a “metahistorical process”
that can in turn be re-described as an “analog for evolution”
that brings into existence a “world destined to synthesis” in
and through “the contact of civilisations.”11 The Atlantic slave
trade engenders the process of creolization that subjects
blackness and other modes of subjectivity to possible, if not
imminent, technological transformation.12 Against the grain
of Afro-Pessimism, Black Studies and Critical Race Studies,
each of which would reject the term ‘contact’ and the term
‘civilization’ in the concept-metaphor ‘contact of civilizations’
as terms insufficient for thinking through the ramifications of
the racial terror that organized the Middle Passage, Glissant’s theory of creolization entails thinking with the “realm
of possibility”13 that emerges in and through and by way
of enslavement. Glissant argues in Caribbean Discourse
that “Western thought… although studying it [slavery] as a
historical phenomenon, persists in remaining silent about the
potential of the slave trade for the process of creolization.”14
Glissant’s attention to creolization as the product of colonialism and the evolution of technology is not intended as a
provocation, but rather as an effort to think with and by way
of its temporal transformation that works through racism as
much as resistance, in the wake of but also in spite of slavery,
racism, and colonial power.15 This Glissantean thought of the
possible conflicts with contemporary forms of knowledge
epitomized by Saidiya Hartman’s influential theorization of
the afterlife of slavery. Hartman argues that the focus on the
afterlife of slavery emerges “not because of an antiquarian
obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long
memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were
entrenched centuries ago.”16 For Glissant, the necessity to
think through the “sometimes ugly and often unequal process
by which cultures come into contact” is inseparable from the
understanding of creolization as an “indifferent, transhistorical process” that is a “method and not a state of being” and
which “can never be accomplished nor can we go beyond
it.”17 Glissant’s affirmation rather than critique of the process
of creolization, Chude-Sokei insists, “should not be taken to
be blindness to its historical conditions.”18 On the contrary, he
argues, Glissant is “very attuned to the fact that the synthesis
of master and slave was a traumatic coming together of the
human and the inhuman, of the putatively technological with
the supposedly natural. The latter was subject to the former
and consistently unequal in relation.”19 What Chude-Sokei
draws attention to is the impersonal aspect of Glissantean
94
7 Haraway, J. Donna, 1985. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and
95
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in: Simians, Cyborgs and
Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. p. 151.
14 Glissant, Edouard, 1989, p. 14.
8 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016, p. 179.
15 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016, p. 202, p. 198.
9 Glissant, 1989, p. 14.
16 Hartman, Saidiya, 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave
10 Chude-Sokei,Louis, 2016, p. 141.
Route. New York; Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. p. 6
11 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016, p. 199, 141. Glissant, 1989, p. 6.
17 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016, pp. 140-141.
12 Chude-Sokei, 2016, p. 207.
18 Chude-Sokei,2016, p. 141.
13 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016, p. 140.
19 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016, p. 141.
Kodwo Eshun
The Algorithmic Poetics of @GlissantBot
thought. Where Glissant differs from Black Studies is his
emphasis upon the decentering possibility that emerges from
creolization understood as “one of the ways of forming a complex mix-and not merely a linguistic result” that is “only exemplified by its processes and certainly not by the ‘contents’ on
which these operate.”20 It is this formulation of creolization as
“a broader evolutionary process without man at its centre”
that reconfigures the Atlantic slave trade not from the perspective of the slave or the position of the slavemaster but
from the metahistorical perspective of “synthesis-genesis”
that unfolds at a scale indifferent to the human qua human.21
From this inhuman perspective, it is as if creolization narrates
its own evolution as a transhistorical process that uncouples
itself from the agency of the human, excludes the agonies of
the human and appears indifferent to its histories. Against
Haraway’s insistence on situating knowledge from a specific
perspective, Glissantean creolization is a poeticist universalism that situates itself nowhere, speaks from nowhere
and speaks for no one. Creolization, Glissant insists “can
never be accomplished, nor can we go beyond it.”22 It is,
and has always been, a world process that is present “in all
contexts.”23 From the perspective of this view from nowhere,
creolization is not so much Haraway’s “god trick” as it is an
identification with an immanent process of evolution.24 Creolization is another name for the Anthropocene or more precisely, the Capitalocene, or more precisely still, the Plantationocene. The inhuman indifference of creolization appears as a
grammar of already emergent futurity narrated from a perspective that evokes the grand science fiction of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,
1930 or Starmaker, 1937. If Glissant’s grand theme is the
making of the Caribbean in, and through the enforced mutation of landscapes, oceans, languages, and peoples whose
planetary time-scales are oceanic and geological just as
much as they are historical or biographical, then creolization
is the term for the capitalogenic world-making processes that
are dramatized throughout his poetry from the first volume
Les Sang rive in 1947 to Les Indes: Poeme del’ une et
l’autre terre in 1955 through to the final volume Les Grands
Chaos in 1993.
It is Chude-Sokei’s emphasis on the transhistorical and
indifferent process of Glissantean creolization that informs
the project of @GlissantBot.25 @GlissantBot began to tweet
at 22.15 on the evening of 14 April 2017 and will continue to
do so every fifteen minutes, day after day, night after night for
as long as the Twitter platform operates.26 The existence of
@GlissantBot opens a vector from computation to creolization. It aims to mobilize the impersonal process of creolization at the scale of the TwitterBot. The tweets tweeted by @
GlissantBot are composed from Glissantean sentences
extracted from paragraphs, chapters, and poems selected
from Le Discourse antillaise, 1981, Caribbean Discourse,
1989, Poétique de la Relation, 1990, Poèmes Complete,
1994, The Poetics of Relation, 1997, Faulkner Mississippi,
1999, The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant, 2005 and
Philosophie de la Relation: Poésie en étendue, 2009. The
sentences from these poems and essays are scanned, converted by optical character recognition, and entered into a
Google Spreadsheet that is called a ‘corpus’. @GlissantBot generates tweets from this corpus. It uses a Markov
Chain algorithm to calculate the probability that specific
sentences and specific parts of specific sentences from the
corpus will be followed by other sentences and other partial sentences. It calculates statistical regularities from these
96
97
25 @GlissantBot exists at https://twitter.com. @GlissantBot was conceived and
produced by The Otolith Group and was coded by Joel Myers. @GlissantBot
20 Glissant, Edouard, 1997, p. 89.
was commissioned by the curators Asad Raza and Hans Ulrich Olbrist for the
21 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016, p. 141.
exhibition Mondialite at Villa Empains, Brussels from April to 27 August 2017. See
22 Ibid.
23 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016, p. 147.
24 Haraway, Donna J., 1985. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in
Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, in Simians, Cyborgs and
Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. p. 189.
http://www.villaempain.com/en/exhibitions/imaginary-frontiers-2/mondialite/
26 The concept of the TwitterBot as a digital instantiation of theoretical research
and the account of the Markov Chain algorithm summarized here is indebted to
the research of Matthew Colquhoun.
Kodwo Eshun
The Algorithmic Poetics of @GlissantBot
syntactical sequences that can add up to sequences ranging
from one character to one hundred and forty characters. The
Markov Chain algorithm is named after the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov who defined the Markov chain as the
process of randomization that occurs in a finite state space
in which the future states of the process are dependent only
on its present state and not upon the states that have preceded it. The present state is called “memorylessness” and
is known as a “Markov property”. Randomization becomes a
chain through discrete time or continuous time, the two kinds
of time that can be found in statistical dynamics. One can
understand discrete time and continuous time as analogous
to the difference between a digital clock and an analogue
clock. The numbers of the digital clock progress discretely
one integer at a time while the arms of the analogue clock
move according to a continuous motion. Time elapses for
@GlissantBot in intervals of fifteen minutes, which means
that @GlissantBot runs on a discrete-time Markov chain
or a DTMC. @GlissantBot returns to the reconfiguration
of poetry, poetics, and poetic knowledge by computation
initiated by Glissant during the 1980s. In De l’information
du poème, a lecture delivered at the colloquium Poésie et
Informatique at Liège in 1984, translated as Concerning the
Poem’s Information, Glissant envisioned, not without trepidation, a future in which “the advent of computers” throws
“poetics into reverse.”27 By “making speed commonplace,”
the sudden flash of revelation celebrated by Rimbaud has
established itself as a norm that is “obliterated within the
unimaginable instantaneousness of the computer.”28 The
computer system, Glissant laments, renders familiar Rimbaud’s flash of revelation. The computer, for all of its processing power, is nonetheless incapable of comprehending
what Glissant calls “multilingual scintillation.”29 Against the
Rimbaudian poetics of revelation, Glissant turns towards the
poetics of Mallarmé, Joyce, and Pound, each of which invents
a poetics or “system” that anticipates the digital future in
which the computer will convey the “speech of all peoples”
and the “ring of all languages.”30 In the Mallarméan search for
the absolute, the Joycean search for totality and the Poundian search for multiplicity, Glissant discerns a Mallarméan
poetics of stitching, a Joycean poetics of synthesis and a
Poundian poetics of derivation that prefigures the computer’s search for totality. If the computer can decipher totality
better than any poem, still, Glissant insists, computers can
only ever decipher language “through a game of signs.”31 It
can neither enter nor play the “drama of language” reserved
for humans.32 Glissant foresees a future in which the screen
hosts a synthesis-genesis between the poetics of Rimbaudian revelation and Mallarméan duration. A future that will
be characterized by the “transcription onto the page (which
is our screen) of an economy of orality.”33 A future in which
orality is transcribed as text and speech is not opposed to
writing but emerges in and through its transcription. An economy of orality constituted by an economy of transcription that
will be enabled and supported by way of the screen. A future
in which “poetic knowledge” will no longer be “inseparable
from writing” and speech will convert into text.34 In this future
of “binary speed”, the “roll of the dice” that is Mallarmé’s
coup de dés will be “endlessly resumed” by the computer
that will carry out the Mallarméan poetic system for eternity.35 When Glissant writes that the “systematics” of poetics
will be “simultaneously stitched together, synthesized and
derived,” he envisages a future in which the computer will
combine Mallarméan, Joycean, and Poundian systematics
into its own systematics.36 Just as the computer can operate unilingual scintillation but not multilingual scintillation and
just as it can decode the poetic search for totality as a game
of signs but not as a drama of languages, here, too, Glissant
98
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., p. 84.
27 Glissant, Edouard, 1997, p. 82.
34 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 83.
36 Ibid.
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Kodwo Eshun
The Algorithmic Poetics of @GlissantBot
insists that the computer can operate simultaneous poetic
systems but cannot access the “vivid contrast among the
languages of the world” from which the “desiring flesh” of
the poem is assembled.37 Each time Glissant insists upon
an anthropic limit from which computation is categorically
excluded. Each time Glissant delimits the computational in
favor of a human reserve that sanctifies the poetic faculty.
Faced with the computational, capacity to calculate a systematics that produces a synthesis-genesis that exceeds the
human, Glissant articulates a defensive poetics that affirms
the fear that the human command over the invention of poetry
will be subsumed by the computer’s capacity to engender
its own poetic knowledge.38 Glissant draws a line between
the synthesis produced by computational systematics and
the synthesis produced by the systematics of human-generated poetics. Glissant then moves past his own limit or
law or nomos by insisting that the computational capacity to
synthesize, stitch and derive poetic systems will, in the future,
be directed towards the poetic systematization of what he
calls the “Whole”.39 The computer will become “the privileged instrument of someone” that is, anyone, that desires
to foIlow “any Whole whose variants multiply vertiginously.”40
What Glissant glimpses at this point is the computational
capacity to systematically generate the Whole or the totality
in its variety or its differentiality. What is clear to Glissant is
that the Whole will emerge from the differential calculation of
its variants or variables. This probabilistic vision of a differential calculus would now be called a data set, or more commonly, big data.
Glissant’s vision of the computational configuration of the
Whole indicates the way in which computers exert a powerful attraction on his thinking. The computer confronts Glissant with the future prospect of artificial intelligence that
obliges him to engage with its implications in the 1980s. The
anthropic limit and the human reserve are borders whose
very existence acknowledges the surpassing power of digital
calculation. The “limitations” of Glissant’s apotropaic humanism can be used as a bridge towards realizing what ChudeSokei calls the “strong implications for artificial intelligence”
articulated in the tradition of Caribbean “pre-post-humanism”
associated with the work of Stuart Hall, Wilson Harris and
Sylvia Wynter.41 @GlissantBot is not an artificial intelligence
but it can function as a thought experiment for extending the
“strong implications for artificial intelligence” that have subsisted in and through Glissant’s speculative thought on the
role of poetics in an age of increasing textual automation.42 It
is a bridge that can be imagined and designed in the form of
the computational vector of the TwitterBot. As Amy Ireland
argues, the automation of writing processes that entails the
“increasing use of algorithms to generate texts is a variety of
excision calculated to minimize the intentionality of the human
author, consequently opening onto an abyss of previously
unavailable formal potential particularly in terms of permutational extravagance, intricacy and evolution and the ability to
rapidly and effortlessly produce unprecedented magnitudes
of textual material.”43 The exponentially increasing textual
automation from which emerges @GlissantBot cannot help
but violate and reassign “the bounds between literature, literariness and illiteracy and between texts and their contexts,
paratexts and metatexts.”44 As Claude Lévi-Strauss argues,
100
37 Ibid., p. 84.
101
38 As Boaz Levin has argued in a personal communication Glissant’s thinking
returns, at this point, to the thematic of the “coup de dés” that is present in
41 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016, pp. 176-182, pp. 198-224.
Mallarmé’s poetic system. The role of the dice, if repeated, can be said to
42 Ibid., pp. 175-178.
equate a model, a statistical simulation that cannot eliminate chance: jamais
43 Reed, M. Brian, 2013. Nobody’s Business: Twenty First Century Avant-Garde
n’abolira le hasard. Mallarmé’s dice is an abstraction of randomization. It is a
Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 41. Quoted in: Ireland, Amy, 2017.
finite randomization or in computational terms, a pseudo-randomization. I am
The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology, https://www.urbanomic.com/
indebted to Levin for this formulation.
39 Glissant, Edouard, 1997, p. 84.
40 Ibid., p. 84.
document/poememenon/. Accessed 10 August 2017.
44 Interview with Troll Thread, Tan Lin, Harriet. Quoted in: Ireland, Amy, 2017,
https://www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/. Accessed 10 August
2017.
Kodwo Eshun
The Algorithmic Poetics of @GlissantBot
the “intrinsic value of the small-scale model compensates
for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions.”45 @GlissantBot functions as
the small-scale or, more precisely, the interscalar model that
allows the inhuman scale of creolization to acquire intelligible dimensions. Interscalarity allows @GlissantBot to
operate as a proxy of and for creolization understood as a
process of technogenesis in which humans coevolve with
technology. The reduction conducted by the Markov Chain
algorithm upon the Glissantean corpus renders creolization
readable at the miniaturized scale of the tweet. The randomization of reduction by the Markov Chain algorithm adjusts
the indifference of Glissantean creolization to the level of the
legible. @GlissantBot tweets a grammar of creolization that
adjusts the legibility of context, the readability of the paratext
and the intelligibility of the metatext of evolution. The probabilistic regularity of the Markov chain is performed upon the
Glissantean corpus by the continual calculation of syntactical sequences that resemble sentences or simulate poems
or isolate numbers. @GlissantBot confronts the reader with
the recursive question of the constitution of literature. This
question in turn implies the border of literature as it becomes
indistinguishable from the question of literariness and the
condition of illiteracy. What becomes apparent from the miniaturized scale of @GlissantBot is its interscalar capacity to
draw attention to the ramifications of creolization understood
as synthesis-genesis and as technogenesis, defined by N.
Katherine Hayles as the “idea that humans and technics have
coevolved together.”46 Thinking with the co-constitution of
humans with technics opens the vector of the antecedent. @
GlissantBot makes apparent the extent to which the ongoing process of creolization has already carried out operations
of reduction, recombination and regularization upon French
speech and writing, whose outcome has already emerged in
the form of créolité. Creolization creolizes French by evolving
all those who are subjected by and to it. Creolization operates as an evolutionary process that machines voice and text,
speech and writing in a process whose end cannot be determined in advance. If creolization is an evolutionary process
of technogenesis and poetry is already a systematics, then
the human reserve that Glissant sets against the computational is already a technics. The multilinguality that allows
Glissant to distinguish poetic knowledge from computational
information only functions because poetry is already a technics that does not need the computer. Poetry, understood in
this way, is already a medium for technogenesis. What distinguishes poetic knowledge from computational poetics is
not so much the division between the human and the computational as it is the continuous technogenesis that passes
across and between both. Despite Glissant’s categorical
distinction between poetic knowledge and computational
knowledge, the Glissantean corpus is not the human-centered body of texts undergoing probabilistic calculation
that it appears to be. The corpus makes apparent the extent
to which creolization can be understood as an indifferent
process of reducing, recombining and regulating that was,
and is controlled by no one and which operates without
determination. The role of @GlissantBot is not to preserve
the anthropic nomos drawn by Glissant. Its role is to implicate itself in the virodynamics of the Twittersphere. What is
at stake in the algorithmic créolité tweeted by @GlissantBot is not only a question of thinking with and through the
recombinant poetics of machine fiction and robophilosophy
engendered by the genres of ‘algolit’ or ‘botpo’ identified and
analyzed by Amy Ireland. @Glissant Bot can, and should, be
understood as an interscalar vehicle for perceiving the sensible and intelligible ramifications of synthesis-genesis or evolution or technogenesis that includes but exceeds language,
extending beyond poetry, philosophy and fiction, each and
all of which it machines through reduction and recombination on an inhuman and indifferent scale. Creolization tends,
unstoppably, impersonally, towards the ontological transformation of the foundational categories of the human.
102
45 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1966. The Savage Mind, Chicago and London, University
of Chicago Press, p. 62.
46 Hayles, N. Katherine, 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary
Technogenesis, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, p. 10.
103