{"id":597,"date":"2015-01-01T09:07:44","date_gmt":"2015-01-01T07:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/?p=597"},"modified":"2023-04-04T12:39:34","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T10:39:34","slug":"algorithmische-einfuehlung-nick-montforts-megawatt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/algorithmische-einfuehlung-nick-montforts-megawatt\/","title":{"rendered":"Algorithmic Empathy: Nick Montfort’s ‘Megawatt’"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

On January 10, Frohmann Verlag will publish my novel Durchschnitt (“Average” \u2013 I will make an English version at some point), my conceptual take on the canon. In the context of 0x0a, conceptual digital literature has mostly been discussed\u00a0as either leaning towards poetry or lacking\u00a0any genre \u2013 in any case, removed from\u00a0the realism that tends to reign in the novel. Yet it is worth exploring what digital literature might contribute to the novel itself (or the other way around).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n


\nEvery year since 1999, November has been America’s National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. As a collective enterprise in self-discipline, it is supposed to help amateur authors “dust off their literary ambitions and finally write that novel they’ve always dreamed of.” The condition: To produce a novel of 50,000 words or more in a month, regardless of coherence, relevance and overall quality. On NaNoWriMo.org<\/a>, one can find incentives in the shape of boyscoutish “badges” for word milestones already achieved.<\/p>\n

What is interesting about it is that the novel writing month, acting prophylactically\u00a0against procrastination, uses two types of constraint: the time limit and the word target. These are reminiscent of the self-limitations typical of conceptual literature. However, these constraints don’t touch upon the formal aspects of the novels, which often end up as fan fiction things or \u2013 more augustly\u00a0\u2013 as exactly that type of realism the ‘great novel’ is meant to achieve, even if in reality it is nothing but a simulation of the gestures of seriousness that the\u00a0literary field considers exemplary of\u00a0‘high’ fiction. In the US, this includes the boot-campishness of what’s called creative writing, which conceives challenges like the NaNoWriMo’s as an obstacle courses one fights through to arrive at realism (No Plot? No Problem!<\/em> is the title of the literary self-help book by NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty \u2013 which doesn’t intend to keep the writer\u00a0happily plotless, but to encourage\u00a0him to just sit down, write, and let it\u00a0emerge).<\/p>\n

Of course, this form of literature is conceptual in potential only. One could simply add on formal limitations, so as to encourage a flurry of\u00a0conceptual novels, a yet-to-be founded NaCoNoWriMo. Or one could limit the means of production itself, as did code artist Darius Kazemi<\/a>. His version is called NaNoGenMo \u2013 National Novel Generation<\/em> Month<\/a>. Transferring the “creative” from the\u00a0novel\u00a0to a novel making code, it lets the machine\u00a0do the writing<\/a>. Already for the second time, hundreds of code savvy writers pledged to design scripts and programs that would generate just that 50,000 word novel instead of writing it themselves. (‘Novel’ is understood pragmatically, paratextually: If it’s called a novel, it is one.) The results have been surprisingly varied, and some of them quite extraordinary. In the coming weeks, I would like to look at some of them, hoping to find out something about digital literature, what it is, how it works \u2013 and, above all, what it can do for the novel.<\/p>\n

I’ll start with a captivating work by Nick Montfort (recently<\/a>\u00a0mentioned here as a practical-minded code historian of, among others, Brion Gysin). He generated the novel Megawatt<\/a><\/em>. Both reconstruction and intensification of Samuel Beckett’s highly artificial novel Watt<\/em>, Montfort’s novel takes passages from the original that exhibit systematic mannerisms, and simulates them with a Python<\/a> script. But instead of simply generating automatically what Beckett had written manually (which would already be \u2013 Pierre Menard style<\/a> \u2013 quite extraordinary), he took Beckett beyond Beckett and extended these passages according to the immanently derived rules of the urtext. There is, for example, a short passage at the beginning of Beckett’s book, in which the protagonist, Watt, is unable to follow what’s being said to him because he hears voices in his head:<\/p>\n

Now these voices, sometimes they sang only, and sometimes they cried only, and sometimes they stated only, and sometimes they murmured only, and sometimes they sang and cried, and sometimes they sang and stated, and sometimes they sang and murmured, and sometimes they cried and stated, and sometimes they cried and murmured, and sometimes they stated and murmured, and sometimes they sang and cried and stated, and sometimes they sang and cried and murmured, and sometimes they cried and stated and murmured, and sometimes they sang and cried and stated and murmured, all together, at the same time, as now, to mention only these four kinds of voices, for there were others. And sometimes Watt understood all, and sometimes he understood much, and sometimes he understood little, and sometimes he understood nothing, as now.<\/span><\/p>\n

After a quick glance, you will notice that Beckett employs one of the simplest rules of generating text: the permutation of combinatory possibilities from a finite set of elements (just as Gysin had done in his permutation poems<\/a>). The voices have four possible states \u2013 they “sang,” “cried,” “stated,” and “murmured” \u2013 which they can adopt alone or together with other states, and Beckett runs through their combinations. Additionally, Watt understands “all,” much,” “little,” and “nothing” of what they say.<\/p>\n

Thus, this paragraph resembles two functions<\/a> \u2013 one for the voices and one for the understanding \u2013 which could,\u00a0fully automated, be produced by a script with the same result. This is exactly what Montfort does in the first chapter of Megawatt<\/em>,\u00a0“The Voices.” But since Beckett concedes that more voices are possible (“for there were others”), and because Montfort knows that in a series of permutations the number of possibilities increases exponentially with each additional element, he adds four more verbs to Beckett’s: “babbled,” “chatted,” “ranted,” “whispered.” Likewise, Watt now can understand also “most,” “half,” “less,” and “bits.” As a result, Montfort’s version is, at seven pages, about twenty times longer than the original paragraph. This is just the first page, for which I put in black text the retained original sentences \u2013 you can see how the distances between them increase, because more elements result in longer series of combinations:<\/p>\n

Watt heard voices. Now these voices, sometimes they sang only, and sometimes they cried only, and sometimes they stated only, and sometimes they murmured only<\/span>, and sometimes they babbled only, and sometimes they chattered only, and sometimes they ranted only, and sometimes they whispered only, and sometimes they sang and cried, and sometimes they sang and stated, and sometimes they sang and murmured,<\/span> and sometimes they sang and babbled, and sometimes they sang and chattered, and sometimes they sang and ranted, and sometimes they sang and whispered, and sometimes they cried and stated, and sometimes they cried and murmured<\/span>, and sometimes they cried and babbled, and sometimes they cried and chattered, and sometimes they cried and ranted, and sometimes they cried and whispered, and sometimes they stated and murmured<\/span>, and sometimes they stated and babbled, and sometimes they stated and chattered, and sometimes they stated and ranted, and sometimes they stated and whispered, and sometimes they murmured and babbled, and sometimes they murmured and chattered, and sometimes they murmured and ranted, and sometimes they murmured and whispered, and sometimes they babbled and chattered, and sometimes they babbled and ranted, and sometimes they babbled and whispered, and sometimes they chattered and ranted, and sometimes they chattered and whispered, and sometimes they ranted and whispered, and sometimes they sang and cried and stated, and sometimes they sang and cried and murmured<\/span>, and sometimes they sang and cried and babbled, and sometimes they sang and cried and chattered, and sometimes they sang and cried and ranted, and sometimes they sang and cried and whispered, and sometimes they sang and stated and murmured, and sometimes they sang and stated and babbled, and sometimes they sang and stated and chattered, and sometimes they sang and stated and ranted, and sometimes they sang and stated and whispered, and sometimes they sang and murmured and babbled, and sometimes they sang and murmured and chattered, and sometimes they sang and murmured and ranted, and sometimes they sang and murmured and whispered, and sometimes they sang and babbled and chattered, and sometimes they sang and babbled and ranted, and sometimes they sang and babbled and whispered, and sometimes they sang and chattered and ranted, and sometimes they sang and chattered and whispered, and sometimes they sang and ranted and whispered, and sometimes they cried and stated and murmured<\/span>, and sometimes they cried and stated and babbled, and sometimes they cried and stated and chattered, and sometimes they cried and stated and ranted, and sometimes they cried and stated and whispered, and sometimes they cried and murmured and babbled, and sometimes they cried and murmured and chattered, and sometimes they cried and murmured and ranted, and sometimes they cried and murmured and whispered, and sometimes they cried and babbled and chattered, and sometimes they cried and babbled and ranted, and sometimes they cried and babbled and whispered, and sometimes they cried and chattered and ranted, and sometimes they cried and chattered and whispered,\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Montfort’s own creative contribution consists of the first three words, the merely expositional first sentence. The rest \u2013 Beckett’s text as well as the extensions \u2013 have been generated through code alone. Its output is, first, what Beckett had written (the text in black) \u2013 but then not only what he could have <\/em>written, but also what he must have<\/em> according to his own rules (the gray text). Megawatt<\/em>\u00a0is thus a form of algorithmic empathy, which is not a copy but a reconstructive comprehension which can claim that it was done in the spirit of Beckett with more legitimacy than any epigonal text, any parody or pastiche ever could.\u00a0Megawatt<\/em>, for Watt<\/em>, comes close to what Borges\u2019s\/Menard’s Don Quixote<\/em>\u00a0is for Cervantes\u2019s\u00a0Don Quixote.<\/em>\u00a0It is also \u2013 because it comprehends not only reconstructively but also productively<\/em> \u2013 what Ulysses<\/em> is for the Odyssey \u2013 a beyond that exceeds its model.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, Montfort confirms Jessica Pressman’s<\/a> thesis that digital literature is returning to the constructive mechanisms of the historical avant-gardes while, as “digital modernism,” executing them with more appropriate means and much more consistently; on the other, he also shows how even the strictest re-enactment of rules already contains the seed of productive growth, which might precisely result from the stubbornly narrow-minded algorithm that is uncreative in appearance only.<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

For literary criticism, Megawatt<\/em>\u00a0should belong to the paradigmatic text-ontological border and example cases that come up in seminars on “What is Literature?” It is the best possible embodiment of how digital and analog literature differ. For this difference lies in a twofold concept of the text: While Watt<\/em>\u00a0literally consists of only one text \u2013 any intertextuality notwithstanding \u2013 Megawatt<\/em> consists of two: the code and the output. So far, I have only talked about the output, the ‘novel.’ But at the end of his book, Montfort shows us the code that created it \u2013 and which you could take and put through a Python interpreter yourself, re-enacting the performativity of the twofold text. What this show is that in the Digital, as is 0x0a’s basic assumption, text is action and<\/em> thought.<\/p>\n

Thus, in Megawatt’s<\/em> appendix, you will find the mere 27 lines of code that generate the seven pages of “The Voices.” After defining the ‘combine‘<\/em> function, which puts together the final text (lines 3-12), Montfort first shows how to\u00a0conceive of Beckett’s own text as a set of elements in a Python array (lines 14-15; non-executed lines are commented out with a “#”); after that, he introduces his own, extended set of elements (lines 16-18). The rest of the script puts these elements together (lines 21-27) and adds the connecting phrases Beckett had used as well (e.g. “and sometimes they,” line 20.)<\/p>\n

 \t1\u00a0 #### THE VOICES\r\n\t2  text.append('\\n# I\\n\\n')\r\n\t3  def combine(num, words):\r\n\t4     final = []\r\n\t5     if num > 0 and len(words) >= num:\r\n\t6         if num == 1:\r\n\t7             final = final + [[words[0]]]\r\n\t8         else:\r\n\t9             final = final + [[words[0]] + \r\n\t10            c for c in combine(num \u2013 1, words[1:])]\r\n\t11        final = final + combine(num, words[1:])\r\n\t12    return final\r\n\t13  \r\n\t14 ## In Watt the voices = ['sang', 'cried', 'stated', 'murmured']\r\n\t15 ## And Watt understood = ['all', 'much', 'little', 'nothing']\r\n\t16 ## Here the voices did eight things and there are eight levels:\r\n\t17 voices = ['sang', 'cried', 'stated', 'murmured', 'babbled', 'chattered', 'ranted', 'whispered']\r\n\t18 understood = ['all', 'most', 'much', 'half', 'little', 'less', 'bits', 'nothing']\r\n\t19 para = ''\r\n\t20 preface = ', and sometimes they '\r\n\t21 for num in range(len(voices)):\r\n\t22    for word_list in combine(num + 1, voices):\r\n\t23        para = para + preface + ' and '.join(word_list)\r\n\t24        if len(word_list) == 1:\r\n\t25            para = para + ' only'\r\n\t26 para = ('Watt heard voices. Now these voices,' + para[5:] +\r\n\t   ', all together, at the same time, as now, to mention ' + \r\n\t   'only these ' + spelled_out[len(voices)] + ' kinds of voices, for ' + \r\n\t   'there were others. And sometimes Watt understood ' + \r\n\t   ', and sometimes he understood '.join(understood) + ', as now.')\r\n\t27 text.append(para)\u00a0\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
This deeper text, the code behind the output, also illustrates the inherent proximity of code poetry and conceptualism \u2013 the relation of idea and execution is analogous to that of code and output. It is, however, only an analogy, not an identity, for the output is determined finitely (as long as there are no random variables). In conceptualism there is still the erratic (or even: expressive) moment in which\u00a0the idea is\u00a0executed, which can yield different results from the same concept (contrary to what Sol Lewitt claimed, the result is not “perfunctory<\/a>” after all).<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/p>\n
Of course, this is simply the first chapter of the book, which deserves a thorough analysis. Its nine chapters, except for the last, are all forms of permutation, which are employed in very different and effective ways \u2013 from a mega-biblical genealogy in the fourth chapter (“my father\u2019s mother\u2019s mother\u2019s mother\u2019s and\u00a0my mother\u2019s father\u2019s father\u2019s father\u2019s and my mother\u2019s father\u2019s\u00a0father\u2019s mother\u2019s [earth]”) to the eighth, an absolute mega-chapter that lists Mr. Knott’s ever changing appearance. It runs from page 25 to page 239 and must be among the longest character descriptions in literature, “to\u00a0mention only the figure, stature, skin, hair, eyes, body type, facial\u00a0hair, and posture.”<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sorry, this entry is only available in German. For the sake of viewer convenience, the content is shown below in the alternative language. You may click the link to switch the active language. In K\u00fcrze wird im Frohmann-Verlag mein\u00a0Roman Durchschnitt erscheinen, mein konzeptueller Kommentar zur Kanonfrage (sp\u00e4ter dazu mehr). Weil bei 0x0a bisher konzeptuelle digitale […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":37,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1691,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions\/1691"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}