Bootcamp: Cutting like Cliches
Bootcamp: Music, Text, Image - Playing with cliche.
Cliche by its very definition is a repetitive object; it moves through historical and social formations. Many cliché phrases would be inscrutable without secondary context and therefore exhibit a break in the ostensible linear movement of linguistic evolution. For example “the old ball and chain” is immediately recognizable as a substitution for “spouse,” yet balls and chains are not common prison equipment and have been replaced with ankle monitors and data sensors. In order to understand this cliché the listener must connect ball+chain -> prison -> marriage, an associative chain which relies on secondary social meaning. Cliché has latent potential for broken expectations, the phrases are so deeply entrenched in our society often the ending can be written differently but the brain will still overwrite the text with the original phrase. In this experiment five clichés are used, chosen for their connection to aesthetic based fields like music, writing and art, and to the body’s actions.
1. The older the violin, the sweeter the music.
2. That’s music to my ears.
3. Eat your words.
4. Actions speak louder than words.
5. A picture says a thousand words.
But how to arrange the cliches, or rather how to “deform”? Can they be manipulated into a true deformative action?
In “Deformance and Intrepretation” Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann “deform” a text by reading it backwards, claiming that it “reinstalls the text” as performance (30).
However, their approach is criticized by Mark Sample due to the ultimate return to meaning and appropriation of original text. Sample claims that he “stud[ies] systems that break other systems” (¶14), using the Oulipo constraint of n+7 in his work. Yet even in this case, I wonder if there can be a true deformative work. If it was unequivocally subverting the interpretative method then why is it assembled in book form? Isn’t the method an assemblage that invites old connections to networks of academia and commercialism?
The Oulipo group used constraint based writing in order to produce works of literature; commonly associated constraints are the n+7 poems (as used by Sample), lipograms, and palindrome sonnets. Because of strict rules the poetry often disobeys or plays with common grammatical structures, “glitching” or breaking with modern poetic conventions while simultaneously recalling previous eras’ standards of formalized writing. The methodology is algorithmic, it repeats, redoes, and relistens to previous words and letters. It is therefore this type of repetitive algorithmic movement that I chose to use in order to create permutations and combinations of the clichés.
5 IN LINE METHOD
I used a simple mathematical formula to calculate the possibilities where the five clichés appear one after another in a single line with no repetitions. There are 5! (i.e. 5x4x3x2x1=60) possible combinations which are illustrated in the attached pdf: 5! Cliches. It is not enough to contemplate ‘discontinuities’ for deformative writing but probability. This output was created by writing a simple javascript generator that placed the outputs in this order. It could have similarly been arranged in the opposite direction. I tried to assimilate all of the possibilities but ultimately it was too large, with an output size of 60!. Within the first few steps of my bootcamp I had already failed, even with such a small constraint of arranging 5 lines, my computer was frozen and I was having trouble creating the proper scripts. Perhaps the glitches are less in the function and more in the methodological approaches.
The probability of the output that appears in the pdf is 1/60 or a 1.67% chance of occurrence without external factors. Samuels and McGann states that “a deformative procedure puts the reader in a highly idiosyncratic relation to the work” (36), therefore the true deformative object would be the 1.67% chance, the output’s probability as the final piece of aesthetic deconstruction. It is the user’s/reader’s possible interaction with the output that determines the temporal deformance. The words and numbers ‘1.67% chance’ without context have no meaning, they float without quilting or specific assemblage. In a way the ‘1.67%’ is similar to clichés, it has a function, to describe something but lacks totality of meaning, a postmodern phrase of nothingness.
MANUAL METHOD
I began a manual method of scrambling the words and clichés, hoping that by rearranging the textual components of the phrases a more interesting result might occur.
My initial output:
The older the violin, the sweeter the music. That’s music to my ears. Eat your words. Actions speak louder than words. A picture says a thousand words. The older the ears, the louder the actions. That’s eating to my words. Pictures sweeter than the violin. A music says a thousand pictures. The sweeter the words, the older the actions. That’s action to my speak. Saying louder than music. A sweet speaks a thousand ears. The louder the music, the older the actions. That’s ears to my speak. Violin says sweeter than pictures. A word eats a thousand words. 
At this point I paused, grammatically it was hard to recombine without repeating, not due to size but because of predetermined biases. Because of the small set I then grouped nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, pronouns and prepositions.
The proportion of nouns to prepositions is 7:2 while verbs to articles is 4:2. But what is the point of grouping? Grouping illustrates just how easy it is to “glitch” or “deconstruct” meaning from work. Samuels and McGann similarly analyse Stevens’ “The Snow Man” noting its heavy use of nouns (41), further they rearrange the form to a prose style format (42). But these conscious moves are still tactical, why are the researchers making these choices? Samuels and McGann acknowledge that a critical subjectivity is enacted (45), but this explication does not mollify my uneasiness. This is why I turned to probability; it removes me, the researcher, from the initial phase of deconstruction. However the researcher is indelible, something which has been established through attempts to move toward networks and assemblages. For example, there are 20 words above, therefore if I wanted to use 10 words, the possible combinations would be 184,756, using the formula N!/(K!(N-K)!) where N is the total number (20) and K is the chosen number (10). As a researcher I am still interrupting, a glitch upon the phlegmatic texture of mechanical calculation.
Sample argues that deformative humanities is legitimized as doing and knowing “precisely because it relies on undoing and unknowing” (25). Ultimately my bootcamp attempted to calculate and create permutations and combinations of five simple phrases that have been passed through decades of English language speakers. Although not a technical “glitch” it illustrates the instability of meaning and how an object like cliché can be used in “un”cliché terms. Furthermore it underlines the Western tradition to historicize witnessed in Samuels and McGann unconscious methodological decisions, and in Sample’s claims. Using probability as model rather than “backwards” reading or substitution allows another degree of freedom to the research, at least superficially.
STORING INFORMATION
Rather than uploading and storing the information in text format I decided to save it as several file types, a last step of defiance against the systematic unsystem approach. The information has been saved as a music file form of the pdf 5! cliches, a music file form of the Manual Method cliches, and a word doc that contains only the ASCII information of the 5! Version. The storage procedure is never fully addressed in either essay, but it is an important question. The storage format determines how much information is visible and what type of information is erased. It functions much like the archive, it is the rules and statements that define the object’s movement. The music file format was achieved through an algorithm based program and coding system that determines pitch and sound based on the pixel’s red, green and blue levels. It is usually employed for other purposes, but for this class I decided to ‘fuck it up’ and perhaps shift focus on to the materiality and packing of information. Why is storage secondary? What can altering the storage do to the rest of the relations in the assemblage? Does it change the object itself?
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Sample, Mark. “Notes Towards A Deformed Humanities” SAMPLE REALITY. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2013. <http://www.samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/>.
Samuels, Lisa, and Jerome McGann. “Deformance and Interpretation.” New Literary History 30.1 (1999): 25–56. Print.
