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Humans and/as machines:Beckett and cultural cyberneticsSeb FranklinPublished online: 07 Jan 2013.

To cite this article: Seb Franklin (2013) Humans and/as machines: Beckett and culturalcybernetics, Textual Practice, 27:2, 249-268, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2012.750085

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Seb Franklin

Humans and/as machines: Beckett and cultural cybernetics

This essay engages with the aesthetics and politics of digitality through aparallel study of Samuel Beckett’s writing and the development of the elec-tronic digital computer. By placing these distinct threads in parallel, theessay argues that the digital logic of command and control, in which theexperienced world and the possibilities for future action are parsed, formu-lated as text and expressed as sets of discrete algorithms, represents an emer-ging mode of thought that must be traced through textual as well astechnical practices from the mid-twentieth century onwards.

Keywords

Beckett; digitality; cybernetics; Deleuze; Kittler

Textual Practice, 201327(2), 249–268, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2012.750085

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‘If I had to choose a patron saint of cybernetics . . . it would have to beLeibniz’.1 So wrote the American mathematician Norbert Wiener in hislandmark book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animaland the Machine of 1948. This claim, as much as the subtitle of thebook that contains it, foregrounds the folly of limiting the analysis ofwhat Gilles Deleuze has defined as the control society to the study of thedigital computer and its associated cultural forms. It is easy enough tosee how this type of society – which Deleuze famously describes in his1990 essays ‘Having an Idea in Cinema’ and ‘Postscript on ControlSocieties’ and the interview of the same year with Antonio Negri publishedas ‘Control and Becoming’ – is canonical in the study of digital culture,accounting as it does for a historical turn in the mid-to-late twentiethcentury towards a society whose organisational language is digital incontrast to the analogical language of Foucault’s disciplinary societies.2

While Deleuze writes of computers and informatic machines as emble-matic of control in these texts, however, it is clear from his accounts of‘equilibrium’ and ‘metastability’ in the workplace, the precise modulationof wages, the emergence of debt over enclosure as a social correctiveand the replacement of the notion of the individual with that of thedividual that a broader set of socio-political transformations than thesimple emergence of the computer characterise the socio-political erahe describes.3

What this makes apparent is that the logic underpinning Deleuze’ssocieties of control must be traced through dual, if interrelated, historicalthreads. On the one hand, one must chart the logical and technical historyof computers that incorporates the stepped reckoner, calculus ratiocinator,and characteristica universalis described by Leibniz, Joseph MarieJacquard’s programmable loom of 1801 and Charles Babbage’s analyticaland difference engines as well as the range of developments throughout thetwentieth century that will be discussed shortly.4 On the other hand, theemergence of a cybernetic mode of political-economic thinking needs tobe traced through a range of historical approaches to the modelling ofcomplex social systems in order to render their outcomes predictable.One might include the battlefield modelling work carried out by FrederickLanchester in the 1910s that developed into the field of operationsresearch, the economic game theory developed by John von Neumannfrom the mid-1920s onwards and Jay Wright Forrester’s system dynamicsapproaches, which can be applied to armed combat or industrial logisticsinterchangeably, as but a few examples of this project. The broad modeof thinking that coalesced into cybernetics, as the subtitle of Wiener’sbook suggests, is not concerned with machines alone, but with the concep-tualisation of humans and machines as functionally interchangeable. Inaddition to giving us computers, software and networks cybernetics, as

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the French collective Tiqqun have argued, ‘proposes to conceive biological,physical, and social behaviours as . . . integrally programmed andreprogrammable’.5

If one takes this dual conceptualisation of cybernetics seriously, thenDeleuze’s claim that Franz Kafka’s The Trial stands ‘at the point of tran-sition’ between Foucault’s disciplinary societies and a new type of societycharacterised by ‘free-floating’ forms of control appears not as an anachron-ism – in the light of his earlier positing of ‘computers’ and ‘informationtechnologies’ as emblematic of control – but as a recognition thatcontrol societies are above all characterised by a certain historical logic.This logic, which produces both digital technologies and modes of think-ing and expression that are related but not tied to such technologies, iswhere one must concentrate one’s efforts if a historically rooted analysisof the present situation is to be attained.6 That the later form of societyDeleuze describes has proved highly productive in critical writing ondigital cultural politics does not mean that control societies are caused bydigital technologies. By placing Kafka’s writing at the transitional pointof his periodisation, Deleuze would appear to make this obvious. His insis-tence that each type of society is not determined by its emblematic machine(thermodynamic machines in disciplinary societies, computers in controlsocieties), but rather that machines ‘express the social forms capable ofproducing them and making use of them’ reinforces this point.7 Fromthis, one can take an essential methodological cue: the emergence of cyber-netic logic within culture must be examined through both the developmentof computation and the tracing of this logic within non-computationalculture.

Following this, the examination of an artist whose work proceeds anddevelops across the period of development and distribution to ubiquity ofthe computer might prove extremely useful in positing the logic of controlas both technical and social. This essay approaches such a project throughthe historical parallels that exist between the writing of Samuel Beckett andthe emergence of computation as a technical and cultural form from the1930s to the 1980s. Beckett’s work, from Watt onwards, extends thelate-disciplinary bureaucracy overseen by the analogue media of Kafka’swriting through the period in which digital machines emerge to replacetheir thermodynamic, analogue predecessors in industrial societies.8 Atthe same time, this body of work progressively manifests many of thelogical and formal characteristics that are definitive of cybernetic modelsof behaviour and thus of the control society. It is the purpose of thisessay to track and define the crucial components of this isomorphism.This is not an archival or genetic project looking to find material connec-tions between Beckett’s writing and the computer, since there is simply noevidence of such a connection existing. Rather, it is one of comparative

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cultural history that examines the shared formal components of twosystems, one literary and one technical, in order to create an indicativepicture of the cultural-political terms that define the present era ofcontrol and ubiquitous cybernetic systems.

The approach pursued here owes a great deal to the work of theGerman media theorist Friedrich Kittler. In his Discourse Networks1800/1900, Kittler defines two periods that correspond in character, ifnot exactly in time, to the disciplinary and control societies outlined byFoucault and Deleuze. Kittler’s second period can be productivelydescribed as the extended period through which disciplinary societiesdevelop into control societies. This second period in Kittler, whichbegins some 40 years before the development of the first digital computers,and perhaps 80 years before the personal digital computer becomes a ubi-quitous technology, primarily concerns the way in which the discretisationof text enabled by analogue media such as the typewriter marks a crucialstep towards computation and the discretisation of the real. In DiscourseNetworks each of Kittler’s periods, the ‘kingdom of sense’ of 1800 andthe ‘kingdom of pattern’ of 1900, is prefaced by a definitive mathematicalequation: the first, from Leonhard Euler in 1735, produces a sine wave –an analogue signal; the second, from Bernhard Bolzano in 1830, producesa binary, digital output.

e ix = cos x + sin x − Leonhard Euler

y = (+a) + (−a) + (+a) + (−a) + · · · − Bolzano.

Friedrich Kittler: epigrams from the 1800 and 1900 sections ofDiscourse Networks 9

It is immediately notable that these equations precede the periods theydenote by 65 and 70 years, respectively. In Kittler’s technical approachto cultural history, the mathematical or theoretical principles underpinninga technology always mark the start of the era it defines. This is why analysisof Leibniz, Kafka, and Beckett emerge as productive in the theorisation ofthe transition from disciplinary to control societies, regardless of the devel-opmental state of the digital computer at their respective times of writing.Extending this periodisation, the identification of a parallel movementthrough Beckett’s writing and the development and distribution of compu-ter technology proves highly instructive in theorising the progressionthrough Kittler’s second period – towards the control societies of thelate twentieth century and thereafter.

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In order to pursue such a project, working across the technical and thecultural, a degree of formalism is required even if it is (perhaps thankfully)ultimately destined to fall short of a full systematisation of the subjects inquestion. The striking parallels that exist between Lev Manovich’s tripar-tite formalisation of new media technologies and three progressivelanguages that Deleuze identifies in Beckett in his essay ‘The Exhausted’present a fascinating framework in this regard. In The Language of NewMedia Manovich sets out a three-layered model for the analysis of digitalmedia, stating that the new media object is ‘digital on the level of itsmaterial’, ‘computational (i.e. software driven) in its logic’ and ‘cinemato-graphic in its appearance’.10 Putting arguments about the stability of such arigid, formal model aside for now, a historically tiered deployment of thisstructure serves as a useful framework for the analysis of computation’stechnical and cultural development, since each corresponds to a majorperiod in the development of the computer. Each of these three movementscan be clearly corresponded to the progression through three languages inBeckett observed by Deleuze. Deleuze’s ‘language I’, where ‘enumerationreplaces propositions and combinatorial elements replace syntacticrelations’, has its definitive example in Watt.11 ‘Language II’, a languagethat ‘no longer operates with combinable atoms but with bendableflows’, develops from the novels into the theatre and finally ‘blares forth’from the radio pieces.12 ‘Language III’, ‘no longer a language of namesor voices, but a language of images’, corresponds historically to the emer-gence of graphical computing and moves from How It Is in 1961 to a pointin the early 1980s where it finds the ‘secret of its assemblage in television’.13

Placing these two tripartite models of periodisation together, the firstperiod in Beckett according to Deleuze (‘language I’) corresponds histori-cally and formally to the early theoretical and technical developments ofcomputation carried out by Alan Turing and Claude Shannon in thelate 1930s and is concerned with the formalisation of the real as dataand algorithmic processes. The second (‘language II’) emerges from thelate 1940s with the novels of the trilogy, and develops alongside the emer-gence of programming languages and the early developments in analogue-digital conversion, introducing a user-centred layer that sits above thenonetheless still-present algorithmic processes – a ‘bendable flow’ inplace of ‘combinable atoms’. The final language (‘language III’) corre-sponds historically and formally to the development of computer graphicsin the late 1960s, develops throughout the late prose into the televisionpieces and adds a layer of visuals above the preceding languages; asDeleuze notes, ‘language III can bring together words and voices inimages’.14 In each instance the historical-formal parallels with one of thethree layers of digital media set out by Manovich are clear. Each languagepresents a cultural correlative to a stage in the progressive technical

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development of user-centred computational systems that parallels theemergence of the control era.

Beckett’s Watt was first published in 1953, but writing began on it 11years earlier.15 In an examination of the text’s ‘Cartesian sentences’ in TheMechanic Muse Hugh Kenner makes the observation that, in the processesof the novel’s central character, ‘we’re close to the languages of digital com-puters, which weren’t heard of till a decade after Watt was written’.16

Kenner’s somewhat general statement ignores the significant publicationof the mathematical and technical fundamentals of digital computation,Alan Turing’s ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to theEntscheidungsproblem’ in 1936 and Claude Shannon’s Master’s thesis ‘ASymbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits’ in 1938, althoughhe does acknowledge the algebra of George Boole which forms the basisof both works. By the time Watt was completed, corresponding to theperiod Kittler examines at length in the second half of the ‘Typewriter’section of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Turing and Shannon’s workhad intersected in the construction of the codebreaking machines thatwould win the Second World War, leading directly to the constructionof the first computers in North America in the period immediately follow-ing this war. Watt, then, was actually written in the middle of the mostcrucial development in the movement from disciplinary to controlsocieties, the foundation of computing through the mathematicallyproven possibility of abstracting a series of ‘on’ or ‘off’ states from arange of logic problems and, by extension, discretised text.

In Watt the coding and patterning processes that Watt engages inwhen at the house of Mr Knott are basic, commensurate with the earlystages of computer technology that the novel corresponds to. Watt pro-cesses events in the world algorithmically by branching through everypossibility, a reduction of experienced events to binary algebra. Kennernotes this in The Mechanic Muse when he expresses a paragraph of text con-cerning the visits of Mrs Gorman as first pseudocode then a series of con-ditional statements. It is notable that Kenner likens the procedure of thissection to the programming language Pascal. Pascal, an imperative, pro-cedural programming language developed by Niklaus Wirth in 1968which forms the basis of early Apple Macintosh assembly languages, isbased on the ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language) family, which is especiallysuited to pseudocode examples for the written description of algorithms.17

In short, the fundamental basis of Pascal is in a language designed to makealgorithms readable by humans rather than machines. The paragraph inquestion proceeds in Beckett’s text as follows:

Mrs. Gorman called every Thursday, except when she was indis-posed. Then she did not call, but stayed at home, in bed, or in a

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comfortable chair, before the fire if the weather was cold, and by theopen window if the weather was warm, and if the weather was neithercold nor warm, by the closed window or before the empty heath.18

This passage is expressed by Kenner as the following algorithm:

Mrs. Gormancame, yes/nodidn’t come, yes/no;if she didn’t come then she stayed home:in bed, yes/noin chair, yes/no;if in chair, thenby hearth, yes/noby window, yes/no;if by hearth, then fire burning, yes/no;if by window, then window open, yes/no.19

This is only one example of the logical processing of events and pos-sibilities carried out by Watt in Beckett’s novel, and the suitability of theseprocesses for direct conversion into code. Watt contains a large number ofthese passages, both more and less extensive than the one concerning themovements of Mrs Gorman.20 Watt’s formalisation of Mr Knott’s mealarrangements and the days on which leftovers should be given to a dogis amongst the most extensive of these algorithmic processes, taking up14 pages of the novel and including two passages (the composition, insti-gation, and execution of Mr Knott’s arrangements, and the identity, selec-tion, and ownership of the dog) that are comparable to subroutines incomputer programming, where a process that is relatively independentof the overall program occurs within it.21

As Turing and Shannon each demonstrate in the five years immedi-ately preceding the composition of Watt, even highly complex problemscan be formalised and solved through binary algebra provided they canbe broken down into definable, discrete units. This is not to say,however, that in Beckett we find an uncritical deployment of a similar prin-ciple. In Watt it is the occasions that exceed complete formalisation thattrouble the ‘hero’, and that serve to draw a distinction between the perfectlycodable signal and the signal-plus-noise that denies computation. Suchoccasions are suggested in the early stages of the novel when Watt overhearsa song whose two verses each recount a recurring decimal number,52.285714 and 51.142857. These numbers, corresponding to the simplecalculation of the number of weeks in a leap and a regular year, respect-ively, are infinite and, therefore, pose a problem of formalisation to the

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computational power of humans, if not of actual computers.22 For Watt, asKenner observes, it is in the aspects of communication that relate to impre-cisely definable states that provide the experiential equivalent of thesenumbers later in the novel; how Mrs Gorman feels, for example, when inher bed or chair, in front of window or hearth, and so on.23 Here thecentral concern in Watt, one that recurs throughout Beckett’s writingthat points towards a form of critique that is optimised for the culturallogic of control, emerges as the tension between the possibility of formalis-ing analogue experienced reality into algorithms and the exclusion of non-computable noise that is essential to this process. Put simply, the relationbetween that which can be coded and that which cannot emerge as a crucialpolitical distinction in theorisations of the control era.

The third section of Watt literalises a crucial implication of Shannon’sinfluential 1948 text ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’: thatcommunication, in the period of transition from disciplinary to controlsocieties, becomes conceivable as statistical and meaning-indifferent,employing coding and patterning in place of interpretation. In thissection, as its narrator Sam observes, Watt begins to reverse the order ofthe words in his sentences, then the letters in his words, then the sentencesin the period, then both words in the sentence and the letters in the word,and so on. From the perspective of Shannon’s theory each of these modesof communication are identical, since they are patterned in a way thatenables their perfect reconstruction. There is not much in the way of soph-isticated cryptography here.24 The idea of intelligibility to a human readeror listener is not a consideration in ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communi-cation’, only the optimisation of signal strength; as Shannon’s states, ‘[the]semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineeringproblem . . . the system must be designed to operate for each possible selec-tion, not just the one that will actually be chosen since this is unknown atthe time of design’.25 From a technical rather than human-interpretive per-spective, the patterns of speech in the third section is not a deterioration ofWatt’s mental state but the emergence of an output stage that correspondsto his method for processing input. If, in the second section of the novel,Watt strives to formalise all continuous experience as a sequence of discretestates – an act only theoretically possible for machines, and not at all forhumans – in the third section he extends this process into a mode of com-munication that is optimised for machines rather than people.

‘Language I’, historically corresponding Watt to the early develop-ments of computation, develops into ‘language II’ in the movementfrom Watt through the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and TheUnnamable. In the passage from The Unnamable to the radio plays thatconclude the period of ‘language II’ for Deleuze the significant develop-ments in computation move from the first electronic computers to the

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development of programming languages at one or more levels of abstrac-tion from machine language.26 The development of programminglanguages instrumentalises the indifferent binary logic of the computer,since it allows for a mediation of human intent with machine-optimisedformalisation. It is essentially a process of abstraction that is orderedfrom the perspective of the machine; in the same way that a homevideo, viewed as a stream of binary 1s and 0s, appears at a high level ofabstraction to a human user, a programming language consisting of any-thing but electrical variations is at one or more levels of abstraction fromthe perspective of the computer. All programming languages are, ineffect, an abstraction of the computer’s technical function in order tomake it universal, useful, and accessible – as Kittler and Chun havenoted – and ultimately allow the abstractions of the social, cultural, politi-cal, and economic world which define Deleuze’s control society.27 Inexamining the texts definitive of ‘language II’ in Beckett, it is possible toset up a correspondence between this translation process, where theattempts at machinic formalisation seen in Watt give way to an instrumen-tal mediation of this formalisation, and the parallel developments in com-puting history.

An example supplied after that of Watt and its Pascal program that‘doesn’t give the computer anything to do’ in Kenner’s The MechanicMuse is instructive in moving from ‘language I’, data and coding(‘atoms’) to ‘language II’, high-level programming and software (‘bendableflows’). This example is taken from Endgame, written in the periodbetween ‘as early as 1952’ and 1956, the same time that FORTRAN, argu-ably the first high-level programming language, was being developed byIBM in the USA, and concerns the exact positioning of Hamm’s chairby Clov.28

HAMM: Put me right in the center!CLOV: I’ll go and get the tape.HAMM: Roughly! Roughly! [Clov moves the chair slightly] Bangin the centre!CLOV: There![Pause.]HAMM: I feel a little too far to the left. [Clov moves the chairslightly.] Now I feel a little too far to the right. [Clov moves thechair slightly.] I feel a little too far forward. [Clov moves chairslightly.] Now I feel a little too far back. [Clov moves the chairslightly.] Don’t stay there [i.e. behind the chair.]29

Here, at roughly the same time that high-level programminglanguages emerge in the labs of IBM, the machine-readable formalisations

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that produce no output in Watt are replaced with an imperative languagethat enacts a similar process, but that produces action in the worldthrough communication that appears centred on humans. This growinghuman-centrism is critiqued by Kittler in his essay ‘There is no Software’;for Kittler it is not the case that software fundamentally relates to anyless of an algorithmic, nonhuman process than hardware, but ratherthat it abstracts the algorithmic away from machines and towardsinstrumentality for human users. The same holds true for the levels ofprogramming language; a program written in a high-level languagesuch as C, the same program written in a low-level language such asx86 assembly and the same program again written in binary code funda-mentally resolve to identical hardware operations. There is no technicaldifference between these levels of language for the machine, only forthe user.30

As Kenner writes, in issuing orders in the manner of Hamm onecomes ‘even closer [than Watt] to the spirit of programming languages,FORTRAN and Pascal and their many siblings, since they are unique inhaving but one mood, the imperative’.31 In the passage of Endgame repro-duced above instructions are given for the procedural movement of anobject, in a way that precludes any of the direct communication withdata and algorithms that might be thought of as madness. BeyondWatt’s institutionalisation for prefiguring Shannon’s mathematicaltheory of communication, a prospective ideological connection betweenan interest in hardware-level programming on the part of the user andinsanity is critiqued by Kittler in ‘Protected Mode’, where he cites atrade publication’s claim that ‘even under the best circumstances, onewould quickly go crazy from programming in machine language’.32 AsKittler continues, ‘at the risk of having gone crazy long ago, the onlything one can deduce from all this is that software has obviously gainedin user-friendliness as it more closely approaches the cryptological idealof the one-way [i.e. irreversible] function’.33 In other words, the furtherwe go towards high-level programming and software applications, thefurther we move away from the technical function of the machine andthe possibility of going mad, from the perspective of the billion dollar soft-ware industry that is definitive of control-era economics. In the same way,the further into ‘language II’ in Beckett we look, the further we movetowards the instrumentalisation of Watt’s algorithmic processes and thecloser we come to the underlying conditions of the control-era culturalform. At the same time, as the problems of positioning Hamm’s chair inthe above-quoted sequence from Endgame indicates, the noise thatemerges from the relation between algorithmic, computational processes,and the emergent aspects of their use by humans is that which can beneither coded nor eradicated.

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Alongside the emergence of programming languages, there is a secondmajor development in the information technologies of the control societythat accompany the period of ‘language II’ in Beckett; the emergence ofmethods for digitising analogue signals such as recorded sound and, ulti-mately, images. Deleuze does, after all, note that ‘language II’ culminatesnot in writing but the ‘blaring’ sound of the radio pieces. The first ofthese pieces, Embers, was completed in early 1959, a year after Beckett’sapplication of tape-recorded voice for the first time in Krapp’s Last Tape.This places the ‘recorded voice’ pieces at a point where techniques forpulse code modulation (PCM), under development since the late 1930s,were well established, and work on the fast Fourier transform that wouldenable the digitisation and micro-level analysis of analogue signals fortheoretically perfect noise reduction was close to applicability.34 Workon PCM was in progress at Bell Laboratories since the discovery in 1943of a patent held by Alec H. Reeves since 1938;35 its technical developmentis simultaneous with the movement from ‘language I’ to ‘language II’ inBeckett. As collected in a 1948 paper by Shannon, B.M. Oliver andJ.R. Pierce, a basic technical account of the PCM process is as follows;in order to move beyond the necessary transcription of messages intotext before they can be discretised, a two-stage technique is applicable.The first stage is concerned with the sampling of an analogue signal,giving a discrete value for the time variable (x axis) of the signal. Thesecond stage allows the discretisation of the signal’s amplitude (the yaxis) through its reduction to 32 incremental values, each expressed asfive on/off states.36 It must be noted that after the techniques of PCMattained widespread use through the distribution of transistor technologyin the 1950s, allowing for the prospective application of Turing and Shan-non’s theoretical work to all analogue signals, Beckett begins to work pri-marily with voices instead of text. This marks a major stage in themovement towards the crucial language in Beckett in terms of contempor-ary cultural production, ‘language III’. This final language, where allelements of text and voice, data, and algorithm are placed in step withimages, is of particular historical interest because of the way it coincideswith the emergence of ubiquitous computing. After the techniques forPCM make analogue to digital conversion possible (albeit through pro-cesses of discretisation that necessarily eliminates any aspect of the objectto be digitised that cannot be adequately coded), the prospect of the com-puter as a multimedia machine emerges. After Beckett’s writing movesfrom the formalisation of data and algorithms to their execution ofliteral action and the subsumption of the analogue under the digital, andfinally to images, the historical movement of his work alongside the emer-gence of the computation that technically defines the cultural conditions ofthe control era is complete.

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There have been some attempts made in the last 25 years to connectthe works characteristic of Beckett’s languages I and II to the function ofcomputation; these include Kenner’s above-mentioned translations ofWatt into Pascal, Richard N. Coe’s attempt to find the act of linguistictranslation and the function of code analogous in ‘Beckett’s English’,Damian Gordon’s attempts to teach fundamental computing throughKrapp’s Last Tape and Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haar’s creation of a com-puter program that generates new arrangements of Lessness.37 The shortfallof this language-based approach, in terms of grasping the political signifi-cance of the abstract relationship between non-digital cultural productionand computation, lies in a failure to comprehend a fundamental aspect ofmachine code, namely that such code is meant to be ‘read’ by computers,not people. From Watt onwards it is possible to see a progression in Beck-ett’s writing that reflects the technical developments within the ‘kingdomof pattern’, the discourse network of 1900. The major trend in this move-ment is towards retaining algorithmic processes whilst masking data andalgorithms under the modes of human-centric analogue media. It is notthat the novels, drama or the radio plays that define ‘language II’ eliminatethe algorithms that are on the surface in Watt, but rather that they hidethem behind layers of narrative and sound. The final language in Beckett’swriting as read by Deleuze marks the culmination of this process, whereimages are added to the assemblage of data, algorithm, and interface.

Beckett’s ‘language III’, for Deleuze, begins with How It Is and culmi-nates with the television plays. The period of work that constitutes‘language III’ thus also spans the technical development of graphical com-puting, from the earliest experiments to the array of software interfaces thatare synonymous with computation today. Beckett completed How It Is in1961, the same year that Ivan Edward Sutherland begun work at MIT’sLincoln Labs on his Sketchpad system, the first graphical user interface.38

In 1963, the year Sutherland submitted work on his system, Beckett wroteFilm, followed by Eh Joe, the first of his television pieces. By the time ofGhost Trio (1975) and . . . But the Clouds . . . (1976) the Xerox Alto Per-sonal Computer had been built, employing the modern GUI and thedesktop metaphor for the first time. From this period to the early 1980smarks the emergence of the commercially available computer and theassociated graphical software packages. Quad (1982) coincides exactlywith the release year of the Intel 80286 microprocessor which motivatesKittler’s critique of graphical, software-based computing in ‘ProtectedMode’.39 In line with this historical correspondence, it is Quad that pro-vides the most telling manifestation of the specific form of visuality thatemerges after cybernetic logic, and that most keenly interests Deleuze in‘The Exhausted’.

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At the very start of the GUI era, Sutherland’s Sketchpad removes notonly the need for the user to programme in low-level or machine language,but the apparent need to programme in the sense of inputting discretesymbols (be they the presence or absence of holes in a punch card orsequences of letters) at all. Presenting an interface based on pointing, click-ing, and dragging to draw lines the system combines the analogue physicalinput of the user with analogue visual output (quite literally, since it uses avector rather than a raster screen). Following this, if Beckett’s ‘language I’coincides with the theoretical and technical possibility of computation, and‘language II’ with the instrumentalisation of computing through the firsthigh-level programming languages, the emergence of software and thepossibility of analogue-to-digital conversion, then ‘language III’ coincideswith the emergence of interfaces that both motivate user action and allow itto be captured and algorithmically expressed without requiring the user toenter code of any type. If the passage of Watt and its corresponding stage ofcomputer history is concerned with the discretisation of the real, and thepassage from Endgame and its corresponding stage of computer history isconcerned with the abstraction of pure algorithmic logic through impera-tive commands that resemble natural languages, then the period and theBeckett work after How It Is removes the trace of algorithmic conversionand presents input and output as simultaneous and inseparable. Asnoted above, this final language finds its clearest connection between for-malisation and visuality in Quad.

In Quad, an exhaustive series of combinations are expressed thoroughfour bodies, each with a specific lighting scheme, percussion instrument,passage of movement and footstep sound. It is a defined set of possibilitiesthat is executed procedurally and expressed visually, and because of this itmarks both the clearest expression of ‘language III’ in Beckett and thestrongest point of connection between Beckett and the technical conditionsof the control era. The piece is filmed with a single static camera locatedslightly above the depicted space, and consists of four hooded figuresexecuting a series of movements within a square ‘six paces’ in length.40

Each player must complete a predetermined course based on movementbetween the four corners and evasion of an invisible square set at thecentre. The stage directions for this movement consist solely of theletters given to each corner – A, B, C and D, and appear as follows:

Course 1: AC, CB, BA, AD, DB, BC, CD, DACourse 2: BA, AD, DB, BC, CD, DA, AC, CBCourse 3: CD, DA, AC, CB, BA, AD, DB, BCCourse 4: DB, BC, CD, DA, AC, CB, BA, AD41

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Each course corresponds to one of four hooded figures (one wearingwhite, two in yellow, three in blue, four in red). Through the execution ofthese series four times, with a player added at each repetition, every possi-bility of each course with each combination of players is worked throughalgorithmically. The piece is of interest for two main reasons in light ofthe control era that stands at the end of Kittler’s discourse network of1900; firstly, because the piece as a whole presents a procedural configur-ation of space overlaid with a visual layer whose effect is to mask the pres-ence of an underlying algorithm; and secondly, because the movements ofthe players corresponds to the control mode, exemplified by cyberneticsystems such as proprietary software use or videogame play, where restric-tions on action are enforced not by a human agent but by the technicalimpossibility of deviating from a coded path.

To draw parallels with an example taken from digital cultural pro-duction, the experience of watching Quad is comparable to watching avideogame such as Bomberman in ‘demo’ mode, where output is reliantnot on potentially emergent user input but on coded instructions executedby the machine.42 ON the one hand, then, the formal system manifestedby Quad – comprising the binary coding of all possibility, the renderingexecutable of this possibility and the ultimate visualisation of the overallprocess – is emblematic of the cultural logic of control. On the otherhand, however, a glance at the minimal script for Quad foregrounds animpossibility of perfect execution that parallels Watt’s inability to engagewith non-codable phenomena such as infinite decimals and feelings. Thescript notes that allowances must be made, in the timing of the piece,for ‘time lost at corners and centre’ as well as the problem of a ‘ruptureof rhythm’ caused by ‘three of four players’ crossing paths at the centre.This piece, it is made clear, might function with perfect execution of analgorithmic structure as a mathematical model or simulation, but notwhen performed by human actors (Figure 1).

Towards the end of his 2007 book Gamer Theory McKenzie Warkmodifies a statement from Mark Fisher, aka K-Punk, in order to alignits evaluation of Beckett with the terminology of gamespace, the title hegives to the socio-economic dimension of the contemporary, cybernetic(or control) era:

[w]hat do we look like from [game]space? What do we look like to[game]space? Surely we resemble a Beckettian assemblage ofabstracted functions more than we do a holistic organism connectedto a great chain of being. As games players, we are merely a set ofdirectional impulses (up, down, left, right); as mobile phone users,we take instructions from recorded, far distant voices; as users ofSMS or IM, we exchange a minimalized language often

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communicating little beyond the fact of communication itself (txtsfor nothing).43

Here the cultural politics of the control era are set out in a way thatdemonstrates the underlying algorithmic logic that applies not only tovideogame play and digital communication technologies use but to anentire system of social organisation, production, and management. Thisessay demonstrates that the selection of Beckett as the cultural exemplarof this situation’s emergence is one that is deeply intertwined, both for-mally and historically, with the logic that underpins control. That the pri-vileging of ‘abstracted functions’ over ‘being’ – or an interest in that whichcan be parsed and cast into a more-or-less elegant algorithm over thatwhich cannot – is clearly explicated in Beckett’s late work is suggestiveof a broad series of socio-cultural transformations that are not the sameas the development and rise to ubiquity of the computer, but that are none-theless linked to this universal, emblematic technology through a shared

Figure 1. Samuel Beckett, Quad.47

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historical logic. In the relationship between representation and action pre-sented in Quad the cultural terms of the control society, the ‘kingdom ofpattern’, are clearly manifested. Quad, exemplary of ‘language III’ inBeckett, draws together the three crucial characteristics that developthrough languages I and II and that parallel the three elements of compu-tation. The formalisation of all possibility as data set or algorithm; the ren-dering manipulable of this data through, for example, software; theimplementation of these algorithmic process across the widest possiblereach through the overlaying of visuals. These three elements constitutethe predominant technical-cultural concerns of the present, and the exam-ination of their emergence represents an essential heuristic procedure forthe theoretical analysis of this current situation.

In conclusion, it must be restated that formalisation is only part of theengagement with a form of control-era cultural logic in Beckett. The intru-sion of noise, the only way to understand those emergent elements of beingor experience which cannot be logically captured, modelled, represented ormade executable under the conditions of cybernetic systems, is a constantpresence throughout the texts described above. The components of experi-ence that trouble Watt – such as the recurring decimals produced byattempts to calculate the exact number of weeks in a year number of andthe impossibility of addressing the way Mrs Gorman might be feeling –are clear examples of such noise. While the broader implications of thismust be left for another day, it is not possible to say so simply that Beckett’stexts represent an objective historical process, whereby abstracted functionsreplace being as the subject of human experience. Kafka’s writing, forDeleuze, describes the emergence of perpetual modulations of power.Beckett describes on one hand the extension of this historical process,whereby the object of governance becomes to capture being as abstractedfunctions, to represent human activities as discrete and thus modellableunits, whilst on the other hand foregrounding those aspects of being thatcannot be effectively processed in this way.44 Here Deleuze’s suggestion,made in the ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, that ‘noise’ presents anactive threat to the efficacy of societies of control just as the impact of ‘sabo-tage’ and ‘entropy’ on thermodynamic industrial machinery represented athreat to the preceding disciplinary societies takes on a special resonance –as the principle definition of that which cannot be informatically captured,coded, and modelled.45 As Tiqqun put so simply, for all of the ‘universalenrolment’ and ‘proliferating schematisation’ that characterises control, thefact remains that ‘entropy, considered as natural law’ – that is, as ageneral reminder of the impossibility of capturing, coding, and modellingnoise sequences rather than the specific thermodynamic principle thatimpairs the machinery of the disciplinary era – ‘is a cybernetician’shell’.46 For all of the abstractions, logical formalisations, and algorithms

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that Beckett’s work presents, the spectre of that which cannot be measured,counted, parsed or cast into an algorithm remains ever-present, an assertionof those aspects of being that can evade control.

University of Surrey

Notes

1 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal andthe Machine (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1965), p. 12.

2 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1995), p. 178. Also see Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappingsin Politics, Philosophy and Culture, Eleanor Kaufmann and Kevin Jon Heller(eds) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 14–19.

3 Deleuze, Negotiations, pp. 179–182.4 See Martin Davis, ‘Mathematical Logic and the Origin of Modern Computers’

in Rolf Herken (ed.), The Universal Turing machine: A Half-Century Survey(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 150–151. While there is agreat deal of writing on the influence of Leibniz on Beckett’s thought, nonedirectly address the wheel, the calculus of reason that prefigures Booleanalgebra or the idea of a universal lingua characteristica indifferently suitablefor mathematics and communication. For work on the relationship betweenBeckett and Leibniz see, for example, Garin Dowd, Abstract Machines:Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari (Amsterdam andNew York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 129–162.

5 Tiqqun, ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis’, Tiqqun 2 (Paris: Belles-Lettres, 2001), p. 42.6 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 179.7 Ibid.8 For Kafka on the prospect of combining various technical media – such as par-

lograph, gramophone, and telephone – and then connecting these combi-nations with each other across space, see Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice(London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), pp. 167–168. In addition, see Frie-drich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2001), pp. 359–363 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 222–228, and Bernhard Siegert,Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal Service, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 256. The connection between Kafka’swriting and the typewriter is also made briefly by Gilles Deleuze and FelixGuattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Brian Massumi (Minnea-polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 30, 94 n5.

9 Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, pp. 1, 175. As Kittler reveals in aninterview with Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann, ‘both equationsappeared some seventy years prior to the discourse networks which theydescribe. Euler’s formula is from 1735, and Bolzano’s nonconvergent sum isfrom 1830. I wanted to place both systems in the shadow of their mathematical

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do-ability’. Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann. ‘Technologies ofWriting: An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler’, New Literary History, 27.4(1996), p. 735.

10 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge and London: TheMIT Press, 2001), p. 180.

11 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith andMichael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), p. 156.

12 Ibid., pp. 156–159.13 Ibid., p. 159.14 Ibid. Alain Badiou also defines a specific movement in Beckett following How

It Is and concentrated on the image. He finds the preceding forms ‘progress-ively replaced’ with what he deems ‘the figural poem of the subjects postures’.Badiou notes this is a definite progression from the previous works, whichare continuous with Kafka’s writing, supporting the periodisation that placesKafka at the transition between disciplinary and control society and Beckettalongside the ongoing development of control. Alain Badiou, ‘The Writingof the Generic’ in Alberto Toscano and Nina Power (eds), On Beckett (Man-chester: Clinamen, 2003), p. 16.

15 As Beckett himself remembers, ‘I think Watt was begun in Paris 1942, thencontinued evenings mostly in Roussillon and finished in 1945 in Dublinand Paris’. Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 2001), p. 108.

16 Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (New York and Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1987), pp. 91–92. Despite these relative shortfalls in his periodisation,Kenner remains the only Beckett critic to address his mathematical interests interms of computation. The main body of work to address Beckett and math-ematics can be broadly divided into two types; texts that address specific math-ematical concepts that Beckett is known to be aware of through his ownreading and trace these concepts through his work, and texts that apply ageneral notion of, for example, chaos theory to his writing. Chris Ackerley’s‘Samuel Beckett and Mathematics’ (http://www.uca.edu.ar/esp/sec-ffilosofia/esp/docs-institutos/lit-inglesa/mathem.pdf, last accessed 6 January 2010) isan example of the former, and John Leeland Kundert-Gibbs’s, No-thing isLeft to Tell: Zen/Chaos Theory in the Dramatic Art of Samuel Beckett(London: Associated University Press, 1999) is an example of the latter.

17 See Scott Moore, ‘The ISO 7185 Standard Pascal Page’, http://www.standardpascal.org, last accessed 7 May 2009.

18 Samuel Beckett, Watt (London, Montreal, and New York: Calder, 1998),p. 138. Quoted in Kenner, Mechanic Muse, p. 93.

19 Kenner, Mechanic Muse, p. 95. Kenner is an able computer programmer aswell as literary critic, contributing a column to the computing magazineByte in the early 1980s. See Harvey Blume, ‘Hugh Kenner: The GrandTour’. http://www.bookwire.com/bookwire/bbr/reviews/March2001/hugh_kenner_thegrandtour.htm, last accessed 23 April 2009.

20 See Ackerley, ‘Samuel Beckett and Mathematics’, pp. 9–12 for a complete list ofthese ‘exhaustive logical paradigms’, albeit a list that does not acknowledge the

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algorithmic procedures that they entail. For some additional, general accountsof mathematics in Beckett see Hugh Kulik, ‘Mathematics as Metaphor: SamuelBeckett and the Esthetics of Incompleteness’, in Papers on Language and Litera-ture 29, and Howard J. Alane, ‘The Roots of Beckett’s Aesthetic: MathematicalAllusions in Watt’, in Papers on Language and Literature 30.

21 Beckett, Watt, pp. 84–98.22 These numbers in Watt have been erroneously classified by Rubin Rabinovitz

and Barbara Reich Gluck as surds – irrational and hence noncomputablenumbers – when both are in fact rational numbers, since they are finitelyexpressible as fractions. See Rabinovitz, The Development of Samuel Beckett’sFiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 153 and Gluck,Beckett and Joyce (London: Bucknell University Press, 1979), pp. 91–92.Turing’s ‘On Computable Numbers . . .’ sets out the definitions of countableand hence computable numbers for a theoretical computing machine,although Kittler queries the consistency of Turing’s definitions in ‘There IsNo Software’; see Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems(Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997), p. 189 n13.

23

Having ascertained these pivotal yesses and noes, the program, like the sen-tence, dies away a little feebly, since it tells us nothing about what happenedwhen Mrs Gorman came, or about her sensations when she did not come. Isshe snug, in her chair, by the fire? Elated, in her chair, by the open window?(Kenner, Mechanic Muse, pp. 95–96)

24 See Friedrich Kittler, ‘Code’, in Matthew Fuller (ed.), Software Studies: ALexicon (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), pp. 40–47, for a discussion ofcomputer code in relation to the history of cryptography.

25 Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communi-cation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 3.

26 See Cornelis Robat, ‘Introduction to Software History’ for a history of program-ming languages. http://www.thocp.net/software/software_reference/introduction_to_software_history.htm#FirstSteps, last accessed 27 April 2009.

27 See Kittler, ‘There Is No Software’ and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘On Software, orthe Persistence of Visual Knowledge’, Grey Room, 18 (Winter 2004), pp. 26–51.

28 S.E. Gontarski (ed.), The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Volume II:Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. xvi.

29 Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990),p. 105. Quoted in Kenner, Mechanic Muse, pp. 100–101.

30Galloway has made the same point in responding to Chun and Kittler,stating that ‘it is foolish to think that writing an “if/then” control structurein eight lines of assembly code is any more or less machinic than doing it inone line of C, just as the same quadratic equation may swell with anynumber of multipliers and still remain balanced. The relationshipbetween the two is technical’. Alexander R. Galloway. ‘Language wants tobe Overlooked’, The Journal of Visual Culture, 5 (2006), p. 319.

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31 Kenner, Mechanic Muse, p. 100.32 B. Edlinger, H.G. Eichholtz, H. Feichtinger, J.P. Jordan, U. Kern, ‘Chip-

Tool-Praxis: Assembler-Programming Auf Dem PC, 1, cited in Kittler, Litera-ture, Media, Information Systems, p. 157.

33 Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, p. 158.34 The crucial paper in terms of practical applications of the FFT is J.W. Cooley and

J.W. Tukey’s ‘An algorithm for machine calculation of complex Fourier series’,Mathematical Computation, 19.90 (1965), pp. 297–301. Also see DanielW. Rockmore, ‘The FFT – An Algorithm the Whole Family Can Use’, http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~rockmore/cse-fft.pdf, last accessed 29 April 2009.

35 See M.D. Fagen (ed.), A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System,Vol. 2 (New York: Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1975), p. 316.

36 B.M. Oliver, J.R Pierce, and C.E. Shannon, ‘The Philosophy of PCM’, in theProceedings of the Institute of Royal Engineers, 36.11 (November 1948).

37 See Richard Coe, ‘Beckett’s English’ in Morris Beja, S.E. Gontarski, and PierreAster (eds), Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives (Columbus: Ohio StateUniversity Press, 1983), pp. 36–58; Damian Gordon, ‘Using the Work ofSamuel Beckett to Teach Fundamental Computing Concepts’, http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Publications/Author/2007INTED/eBeckett.ppt, lastaccessed 29 April 2009; and Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haar, ‘Lessness: Ran-domness, Consciousness and Meaning’, http://www.random.org/lessness/paper/, last accessed 29 April 2009.

38 See Ivan Edward Sutherland, ‘Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Com-munication System’, electronic version available from http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf, last accessed 30 April 2009.

39 See Kittler, ‘Protected Mode’ in Literature, Media, Information Systems.40 Beckett. Complete Dramatic Works, p. 451.41 Ibid.42 Elizabeth Klaver has made a similar remark on Quad, stating somewhat

vaguely that it presents a ‘cycle of repetition which is similar to a computerprogram in loop mode’. See Elizabeth Klaver, ‘Samuel Beckett’s OhioImpromptu, Quad and What Where: How It Is in the Matrix of Text and Tele-vision’, Contemporary Literature, 32.3 (1991), pp. 366–382.

43 Mark Fisher, ‘Cartesianism, Continuum, Catatonia: Beckett’, http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007587.html, last accessed March 2006.Quoted in McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge and London:Harvard University Press, 2007), paragraph 223. ‘Cyberspace’ altered to‘gamespace’ by Wark throughout.

44 For more on the informatic capture of human actions see Philip Agre, ‘Surveil-lance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy’, Information Society, 10.2 (1994),pp. 101–127.

45 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 180.46 Tiqqun, ‘Cybernetic Hypothesis’, pp. 47–48.47 From http://www.trax.it/olivieropdp/mostranotizie2.asp?num=99&ord=20,

last accessed 7 May 2009.

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