The Semiotic Roulette Wheel

It is true that the Fabulists are not, at present, a well funded outfit. In light of this, and perhaps also hinting remonstratively at the evident overabundance of time and an accompanying dearth of organization which is epidemic amongst our ranks, someone recently suggested that the Fabulists endeavor to raise money through gambling, for surely, any organization which has unambiguously aligned itself with the forces of probability should, under the very auspice of such an alliance, prosper in games of chance. And indeed, it is true that the Fabulists are immersed in probability: uncertainty is the dynamic at center of the Fabulist cosmology, and we are already up to our necks in the consequences, never entirely foreseeable, of the things, and, in particular, of the words which we choose. The fallacy that the physical universe appreciates irony, though, is akin to that scrofulous strain of determinacy which insists on a certain rigidness in the material world, immune to the deterioration of expectations which is a symptom of predicting and knowing. You might say that only a percipient with a consciousness and the apparently connected capacity for knowledge can really appreciate the significances which sometimes arise in the coincidence of a set of outcomes. I would not say that, though; in fact, in the true Fabulist spirit, I would reverse that idea and say that a universe full of information must necessarily result in perceptive entities exhibiting an imperfect degree of certainty and a penchant for irony.

All information is the outcome of events associated with a degree of probability, which is to say that data only arise from situations which are not certain. By turning this statement around, it becomes self-evident: if the complete outcome of an event is absolutely certain, then all the results pertaining to that event, including any miscellaneous data which are themselves results, are known beforehand. Since the premise of information is itself epistemological, the information can only really be said to have come into existence in the instant in which it is first knowable. Thus, by the time a datum is associated with a predetermined outcome, the information already exists: the knowledge of it is implicit in the certainty of the event which it indicates, and we need to look back to the last germane outcome which was merely probable to discover the actual origin of the information.

The literary implication of this reasoning is that a text, which is really just a kind of bestiary of symbols, is the product of some process fraught with uncertainty. The writer’s role in the production of a text is, by this model, as the engineer and operator of the process. Like the architect of some ingeniously or infernally prevaricated marble shoot, the writer sets the process in motion and then culls the results into a field of compatible data in the form of a text. Any consequent text is only one aspect of one possible conclusion to the process, remitting a likelihood which could just as well be associated with the outcome of a horse race or a lottery, and the mechanisms encompassed by the term process include the entire procedure from the inception of the project through to the physical production of the document and everything else leading right up to the optical nerves of the reader. Indeed, in this sense, one might argue that processes are only ever ongoing or ending, never really starting.

In practice, the arena of the literary process which is described here is often simply the writer’s own brain, but the brain is a wonderful probabilistic engine, converting the perceptible edge of hard reality into purer forms of expression through the exercise of its billions of equivocated circuits. As such, many writers find altered states of mind an efficacious technique of literary production. Some examples of this practice have included:

-Go to Africa, do a bunch of drugs, cut your book up, then paste it back together
-Get together with friends, go into a trance, and write whatever comes to mind

The Paris-based group Oulipo is a confederation of writers devoted to the production of literature through a battery of constraints, often of a relatively formal nature. Their goal is to use literary equations, usually applied on the scale of individual characters, words, or, at most, phrases, to generate a high degree of what they describe as potential in their output. Works generated in this milieu have included Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, which describes the same incident in 99 different ways, Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, which performs a mathematical dissection of the anatomy of an apartment building, and Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, which is apparently difficult to appreciate in English, though one might argue that translation itself is merely a further degree of constraint which can only enhance the potentiality of the resultant text. And what, in the end, is the difference between potential and chance? Every process remits likelihood, and, while Oulipo does not necessarily directly address or even acknowledge the random dynamic of literature, it is an organization which is tangled up in uncertainty just the same.

In this blog, I intend to examine the ramifications of the probabilistic nature of text in a most rigorous way, but, having staked everything on my own certainty in the fallibility of predetermination, I must necessarily set out with only a glimmering of what is to come. In the end, I suspect that every text can be calculated, so to speak, and associated with a degree of likelihood based on the various potentials of the process by which it was produced. At the root of this prediction is the idea that every information-producing process is a constantly bifurcating pathway beset with choices which are determined in the relationship between a writer’s brain and the corollary reality to which it’s rigged. What does it mean to say that some texts are less likely than others, though? Surely, in the neutral calculus of semiotics, in the lapse of truth which arises when intentionality evacuates information, one symbol cannot be better or more appropriate than another. I’ve become aware of the overwhelming degree of chance and choice associated with every word which I decide to write, and as a result, I can’t go on. With each keystroke, I take enormous risks of reducing my work, addled, as it is, by jargon and convolution, to such an infinitesimal degree of likelihood as to become incomprehensible. I lurch forward with premonitions of agnosia, fearing that every proclamation, apology, ransom note, and love letter I’ve ever composed is really just an obsolete betting slip.