This boot camp has been fucked up from almost the very beginning, and I point to the originary temporality from the start of this assignment to mark the very late juncture of this boot camp submission: let’s consider tardiness the primary fuck up of this boot camp, one which strives, as McGann and Samuels argue, to “break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations” (25). Thus my boot camp, while perhaps analytical, is also inextricably linked with its performance of the tardy, and by academic standards, the flawed status the assignment and my overall class grade officially receives; my boot camp is not done, and myConcordia grades remain “incomplete” by institutional standards, where the “INC” can also indicate an aborted “incorrect,” the institution’s designation of my scholarship trajectory defined by missing deadlines, but moreover a failure to adhere to the “critical orthodoxy” with which McGann and Samuels believe deformance engages. Here “myConcordia” makes the system’s critical orthodoxy obvious; linking student, professor and postsecondary institution, myConcordia filters students’ academic experiences through an electronic system network, into which your data and student status is plugged and oriented based on algorithmic input. So just as “[d]eformative moves reinvestigate the terms in which critical commentary will be undertaken” (McGann and Samuels 35), I also wish to reinvestigate the terms under which critical commentary (i.e., academic grading and submission) participates and endorses in postsecondary institutional orientations (by virtue of posting this boot camp, I am requesting a rupture in the official academic structure).

For if Rosa Menkment is correct in her assertion that “[i]n [glitch] theory, noise has been isolated to the different occasions in which the static, linear notion of transmitting information is interrupted” (339), then my boot camp, the late object that attempts to filter informational noise (or Law’s mess, to return to class readings), disrupts the stable, linear notion of transmitting information via the proper, designated channels (submit somewhere by sometime), ultimately requiring the university and course professor’s technological amendment post-term, forcing an “acknowledge[ment] that the computer [and a postsecondary institution’s database] is a closed assemblage based on a geneaology of conventions, while at the same time the computer is actually a machine that can be bent or used in many different ways” (340): just like the glitch, my boot camp necessitates an awareness of conventions and how they construct and close off systems from alternative potential (semesters, end of term deadlines, final papers, boot camps, assignments in general), while also necessitating a reorganization, a “generative or redefining” and hopefully “positive” amendment to my grades based on a softening of the hard deadline (Menkmen 340). Students’ requests for extensions from professors illustrate this tension between the geneaology of conventions and their “bended” uses, and so in some respects my boot camp is predictable and obvious, but my boot camp performs and interrogates these conventions by making them the subject matter of the assignment itself, and indeed producing the assignment through a deformance of the assignment.

And yet, this “deformance” is in fact a “performance,” as truly “fucking things up” through deformance would more closely align this assignment in the “incomplete” rather than “completed, tardy” status. Thus as I reach the end of my “deformance”-cum-“performance,” my hope is that this boot camp will actually raise my grade, rather than provide a more deformative critique of the system of grading itself; this boot camp, like the glitch, begins by dismantling the form of a sanctioned system by refusing to submit to/within its standards (here I use Menkman’s term with intent, and ignore the dynamic of a glitch that has accidentally arisen), but this destabilization ultimately ends: “once it is named [or capitalized upon, its use(s) exploited], the momentum – the glitch – is gone… and in front of my eyes suddenly a new form has emerged” (Menkmen 341). So my “deformance” results in a “performance” of academic thought, inculcated within a social order and its “critical orthodoxies” of actually handing an assignment in and adhering to expected writing rules, rather than saying “I fucked this one up” and giving up. If my boot camp begins by explaining that I have indeed “fucked things up,” the rest of the assignment is dedicated to correcting the fuck-up, to ensuring that I place myself back into academic discourse, suppressing the (non-)creative conditions of my boot camp (its absence come the due date) and hoping to forget the transitory, glitched moment in favour of ratifying the (previously absent) object through and by the system instead of truly deforming it, illustrating how “glitch studies is a misplaced truth; it is a vision that destroys itself by its own choice of and for oblivion. The best ideas are dangerous because they generate awareness. Glitch studies is what you can just get away with” (345).

Works Cited

Menkman, Rosa. “Glitch Studies Manifesto.” Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011. 336-47

Samuels, Lisa, and Jerome McGann. “Deformance and Interpretation.” New Literary History 30.1 (1999): 25–56.