Report: #MLA19 Presentation – Exploit, Code-Switch, Glitch

Exploit, Code-Switch, Glitch

I’d like to open with two quotes to situate my paper within a DH, perhaps para-DH discourse, that is primarily speculative in its intervention. First, a quote from [SLIDE] “Critical Unmaking: Toward a Queer Computation,” by Jacob Gaboury, we must “acknowledge how futurity has been colonized by the cultural logic of contemporary technology, and as such [contemporary technology] cannot serve as the primary vector for queer computational critique. Thus, rather than mobilize queerness as a useful technological apparatus, we might deploy it as part of a critical practice of unmaking.” Second, a quote from Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”: “We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages” (35).

Inspired by these texts, I want to explore the glitch aesthetic as a post-screenic discourse in DH praxis. Two questions underly the work that follows. What does it look like to critically unmake via text-based glitches? How does one speak with a forked tongue when code and natural languages combine?

I approach these questions from a visual-linguistic standpoint, and speak to two levels of their operation.