james joyce notes – Page 3 – Little Bristling Soul

Within the virtual exist all the possible forms it can acquire, all the possible meanings it can represent; therefore, error, as one of these possibilities, constitutes a part of virtuality. The machine holds within it a potential for the glitch, with the possibility to generate unforeseen results.

Therefore, “malfunction and failure are not signs of improper production. On the contrary, they indicate the active production of the ‘accidental potential’ in any product”, as Paul Virilio noted.^[5] Accepting error as something inherent in the machine brings us to the original meaning of the word error: a wandering in a different path, without a purpose, that can give unexpected results. In Greek, lathos originally meant something that remains hidden and imperceptible. The error reflects a lack of efficiency, but not a lack of meaning -the meaning is there, lanthanon (hidden).

“THE WILDERNESS IN THE MACHINE”: GLITCH AND THE POETICS OF ERROR | CHRISTINA GRAMMATIKOPOULOU

Susan Friedman

The writer’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own.

Evelyn Waugh

Modernity has drawn a line. A line around voices. A line under the past. It has circled, encompassed, enclosed voices, in order to separate them, in order to order them, in order to set them one against the other.

–Eloise Knowlton, Joyce, Joyceans, and the Rhetoric of Citation

Homi k. Bhabha, Nation and Narration

Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring [ancrage]… . What would a mark be that could not be cited? Or one whose origins would not get lost along the way?

Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context, 185-86