Cyborg poetry and the post-humanization of language:: from technological externalization to the recovery of human agency

Abstract

If post-humanism interrogates the exceptionality of the human, and if, on the other hand, verbal language is an expression of such exceptionality, then the post-humanization of language reveals a fundamental tension: understood as the externalization and automation of verbal language by means of computational devices (programmed to generate linguistic utterances in a relatively autonomous way), the post-humanization of language disturbs not only the centrality of the human, considered in the framework of the Enlightenment tradition, but also the notion that language is an exclusively human phenomenon. This article reflects on automatically generated language from the perspective of literary studies and draws on some of the central questions that emerge from the cross between cybernetics, language and literature. What happens to language when it is algorithmically processed and generated? How can the processes of symbolic representation and production be thought of in the context of artificial linguistic agents? When and how does an automatically generated text become a poem? By means of the analysis of a poetic experiment that can be considered as post-human, in the sense that it makes use of algorithmic tools and processes for the generation of language, we will highlight some of the tensions between computational devices and authorial writing, questioning the possibility or the impossibility for the literary to enroll in the cybernetic field of automation and demonstrating the limits of the humanization of machinic language.