1 In the literary machine that is known as Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce has coined words and phrases that border wildly on nonsense, non-words, or linguistic idiosyncrasies characteristic of schizophrenia. The reader may get a taste of this from one of his sentences which goes:

“the circumflexous wall of a singleminded men’s asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina, —Yard inquiries pointed out —> that they ad bîn ‘provoked’ ay ^ fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak—fast— table; ; acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to=introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ’’ fàçe’e’] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?!”?” (James Joyce 1939/1975, 124)

2How much sense does this make? Reading it, we may experience a sense of titillation, curiosity, or perhaps frustration depending on his or her taste, and some of us may even wonder about the author’s sanity. The reader certainly recognizes the names of accent symbols and punctuation marks in the quoted passage, but she or he cannot pronounce many of them while perusing the text in real time. Speakers of French and other European languages will have a better chance, but the equivocality of which of the languages are brought into play has been the calculated effect of Joyce’s multilingual work. Furthermore, the ideographic symbols, such as the capitalizing of letters and their lowercase, are not supposed to be read out loud regardless of one’s language preference. In live speech, how could one make a distinction between lowercase “s” and capitalized “S” in the word/nonword “iSpace”? And why should one?

3In most cases, Joyce’s ideographic symbols are used to make a visual or spatial point. Consider the spacing in the odd looking phrase “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina.” Perhaps with patience and luck, you will discover that there is sense after all in the seemingly random grouping of letters and you may want to crack the string of letters to reveal the whereabouts of its “sense.” Try transposing the spaces among these letter groups and you will get something like “bits of broken glass and split china.” A perfectly legible phrase after all. Moments like this are rewarding and can always enhance the pleasure of reading, although not all riddles in Finnegans Wake are susceptible to this type of decoding. Naturally, the reader will pose a question: What is Joyce up to by designing this elaborate literary game?

What Derrida Saw

4There is strong evidence Jacques Derrida was one of those readers who loved Joyce’s verbal puzzles. Poring over the immense translingual network in Finnegans Wake, the French philosopher spent several decades trying to make sense of the literary ambitions of Joyce’s masterpiece. In one of the novel’s ungrammatical puns “He war,” for instance, Derrida discovers a multiplicity of linguistic echoes which suggest to him a Babelian confusion between the English war and the German war, for in its written form, war represents the coincidence of the identical spelling of several heterolinguistic terms; which is to say, two or more unrelated words share the same spelling across the linguistic divide of English and German. This interesting confusion or multiplicity, however, cannot be sustained the moment the word war is determined in either English or German. Derrida argues that it is only in the act of reading, not speech, that the semantic equivocation between the two languages can both be maintained and made sensible. He makes a further observation on the peculiarity of writing:

“This Anglo-Saxon commerce, these exchanges of a piece of merchandise (ware) in two languages, must pass through acts of writing. The event is linked to the spacing of its archive and would not take place without it, without being put into letters and pages. Erase the typeface, mute the graphic percussion, subordinate the spacing, that is, the divisibility of the letter, and you would again reappropriate Finnegans Wake into a monolingualism, or at least subjugate it to the hegemony of a single language.” (Derrida 1984, 147)

5This brings us back to the question we have raised earlier: What is Joyce up to by designing his elaborate literary game? Derrida would reply that Joyce constructed a hypermnesiac machine and next to this machine, “the current technology of our computers and our micro-computerified archives and our translating machines remains a bricolage of a prehistoric child’s toys” (156). There is a startling reversal in the state of technological progress between the computer and the literary machine. By manipulating typefaces, graphic forms, spacing, and an exhaustive variety of written signs, Joyce constructs a vast network of writing that interlinks up to allegedly 40 languages and stores numerous historical archives. This literary machine has been designed to anticipate everything that could possibly be said in any language and to exhaust every conceivable combination of letters and words. For good reason, Derrida calls it the hypermnesiac machine.

6The hypermnesiac machine, capable of storing all kinds of human memory and anticipating all future possibilities, is a terrifying thought. This ambition is no doubt shared by today’s network technology and big data projects. But if we know how to read Joyce’s uncanny wordplay in Finnegans Wake, we might be prompted to pose a further question: What is the place of sense in the hypermnesiac machine? Will such a memory machine make sense without relying on what we already know of where sense is to be found? It seems that Derrida’s insight about “spacing” or “the divisibility of the letter” would have led him to a fundamental critique of sense in the latest technologies of inscription.1 But that has not happened. Instead of interrogating “the divisibility of the letter” further, he takes pleasure in the polysemy and equivocality of multilingual words along with their rich biblical and theological overtones. In so doing, Derrida privileges sense and semantics once again. Indeed, how could polysemy possibly exist if the philosopher had not presupposed what sense was—fully accessible through his application of etymological procedure—or where sense happened to be located in the hypermnesiac machine?

7In my book The Freudian Robot, I have attempted to address some of these issues, and here I would like to reiterate my argument and develop it further to reflect on the place of sense in the hypermnesiac machine. To begin, let me point out that Joyce’s main contribution lies in the discovery of some fundamental sense-making mechanisms in alphabetical writing, the most important of which is the role of spacing. Or else, he would not have bothered to write “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina” in Finnegans Wake when he could have written “bits of broken glass and split china.” This is not a trivial point, one that pertains merely to something like visual word recognition whereby every literate person knows that letters must be spaced in order for words to emerge on the page at all. Rather, I am referring to the place of sense and nonsense—probabilistically speaking—in any symbol-processing machine.

8What is a computer but, first and foremost, a symbol-processing machine? It seems that all other capabilities of the computing technology, including that of storage, distribution, and networking, depend on this simple and fundamental capability. If so, is there a place for sense in symbol-processing machines and in the kind of hypermnesiac machine that interested Derrida? This is by no means a fortuitous question. One of the little known facts about the emergence of information theory is that Finnegans Wake is among the prewar modernist experiments, literary or otherwise, that had inspired Claude Shannon to conceptualize Printed English after World War II, pushing information beyond semantic concerns.

Claude Shannon: Inventing Printed English

9In its nonthreatening form, nonsense has been a great source of play and pleasure across cultures and civilizations, especially for children. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” verse in the novel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). is one of the best-known nonsense poems written in the English language, relying predominantly on the play of sounds. When it comes to the exuberant assertions of nonsense in Finnegans Wake, we move to the next stage of nonsense words associated with print and movable type. On the opening page of this novel, Joyce introduces an unusual word/nonword that consists of one hundred letters. This appears in

“The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronn-tonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoorde nenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy” (James Joyce 1939/1999, 3)

10The nonsense letter sequence within the parentheses after the “fall” precipitates a horizontal ideographic tumbling of the letters to simulate the fiction of an action. This string of 100 letters has more radical implications than the mere assertion of the author’s Dadaist impulse or his deconstruction of alphabetical writing, because the negativity of space, which has been indispensible to the written and printed word in alphabetical writing, becomes visible all of a sudden. The glaring absence of space within Joyce’s 100-letter sequence proves the point. When Shannon invented Printed English for information theory, all he needed to do after Finnegans Wake was transform the negative principle of space into a positive letter. To the 26 letters of the English alphabet, he added the 27th letter to code “space” as an equivalent but non-phonetically produced positive sign. In Shannon’s mathematical eye, Finnegans Wake represents an extreme case of the lower threshold of redundancy within the range of stochastic possibilities allowed by English prose (Liu 2011, 99-101).

11I have argued elsewhere—and would like to reiterate here— that Printed English was one of the most significant semiotic inventions of the twentieth century, for it helped lay the first stone in the mathematical foundation of information theory and spurred the development of computing technology in the postwar years (Shannon and Weaver 1949, 43). Shannon approached Printed English as a post-phonetic alphabet which has very little to do with syllables, meters, or phonetics, with which Roman Jakobson was chiefly preoccupied in his work on the phoneme and speech in that same period.2 Today’s literary scholars and philosophers of language must be prepared to register this happening if they want to remain relevant or make meaningful statements about language and writing in the digital age.

12Two years after Shannon published his path-breaking essay “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in The Bell System Technical Journal (1948), he brought out “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English” in which he elaborated the code work in association with information theory. These studies suggest numerous connections with Shannon’s military research in World War II where the inventor of information theory had investigated the statistical aspects of alphabetic writing for the purpose of cryptoanalysis.3 The idea of Printed English allows him to treat English writing as a statistical system.

13In everyday usage, information is regarded as having some sort of bearing on the semantics of a message. But the linguistic definition of “meaning” or even “message” is irrelevant to communication theory. For Shannon, information exists insofar as there is a choice of alternative messages or alternative sequences of letters. If there existed only one possible message (a letter sequence or character string), there would be no information and no need for a transmission system because that message would be on record at the receiving point. From the viewpoint of mathematics, information is related primarily to the factor of uncertainty or probability. The letter E in English, for instance, occurs more frequently than Q, and the sequence TH more frequently than XP, etc. (Shannon & Weaver, 39). If a given message is overwhelmingly probable, the amount of information or the a priori uncertainty will be small. Joyce’s intuition about certain letter sequences as nonsense words or nonwords in the aforementioned phrase “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina” is borne out by the assumption behind information theory that anyone who speaks a language possesses an implicit knowledge of the statistical structure of that language that determines the probability of sense and nonsense.

14From a mathematical viewpoint, our implicit knowledge of the statistical structure of language can be converted to a set of numerical data with the help of experiments. These experiments are designed to determine a stochastic process known in mathematics as the Markov chain. The Markov chain describes a finite number of possible “states” of a system: S1, S2,…, Sn, like the finite 27 letter English alphabet. In addition, there is a set of transition probabilities, pi (j), the probability that if the system is in state Si it will next go to state Sj. In the case of the finite alphabet of 27 letter symbols in Printed English, state Sj might be represented by one of the 26 letters or the “space” symbol. On the basis of the present state, one can predict, for example, that the probability of the letter Q being followed by the letter U is very high in English.

15Shannon’s analysis of Printed English is concerned with the stochastic implications of alphabetical writing rather than with the “semantics” we usually demand of information. This exclusion of sense from information theory has led N. Katherine Hayles to surmise that the bracketing of semantics in information theory was Shannon’s strategic choice because “he did not want to get involved in having to consider the receiver’s mindset as part of the communication problem” (Hayles 1999, 54). Hayles draws our attention to an alternative and competing theory of information proposed by British information theorist Donald MacKay.4 Unlike Shannon, MacKay has insisted on the machine’s ability to measure psychological states in order to bring sense back into information theory. This has ignited some enduring debates about the missed opportunity to choose between the Shannon model of information which has since prevailed and the MacKay model which is never adopted. The debates appear to boil down to one fundamental issue: should semantics be incorporated into the theoretical construct of the communication machine?

16The trouble with the critics who endorse the MacKay model is that many of them are rationalists and fail to take the human paranoia about the dissolution of sense into account. If MacKay and others had given some attention to Finnegans Wake as did Shannon and Derrida, they might be less inclined to insist on the sovereignty of linguistic meaning in the communication machine, since Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a modernist experiment calculated to provoke our deepest anxieties about the wandering or whereabouts of “meaning.” Likewise, by calling linguistic meaning into question in Printed English, Shannon has done more service to the philosophy of language than have MacKay and contemporary philosophers.

17Let us take the 27th letter in Printed English. This letter for “space” must not be taken at face value or be confused with the empty spaces between written (or printed) words. Insofar as information theory is concerned, the 27th letter is a mathematical symbol like any of the other letters in the 27-letter alphabet. By virtue of being a non-phonetically marked symbol, this letter activates the statistical structure of the 26-letter alphabet, although it can hardly function in this capacity until the remaining 26 letters in the system are made to function simultaneously as equivalent, ideographical signs. Consider the phrase I brought up earlier from Finnegans Wake, “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina,” from this perspective and we begin to see that Joyce’s idiosyncratic usage is the result of random assignment of the 27th letter “space” among the 10 letter groups which—except for the first letter “a”—happen to be nonwords and make no sense whatsoever. As we reshuffle the spaces among all the letters, we get either another set of unreadable letter combinations or a perfectly readable English phrase “bits of broken glass and split china.” This example goes to show that what we call “sense” in alphabetical writing has something to do with the statistical structure of information in general and with the placing of the 27th letter in particular.

18There are several other factors that may alter the probability of sense and nonsense in letter combination. Still, one of the earliest experiments in information theory and cybernetics has suggested that, within given parameters, the “space” letter in English derives a probability of 0.182 which is higher than the most frequently employed letter E which stands at 0.107 (Guilbaud 1959, 72-73). What it means is that random processes that produce letter sequences are more dependent on the stochastic frequency of the letter “space” than they are on any of the other letters in Printed English. Shannon’s work on the entropy and redundancy rates of Printed English at Bell Labs confirms that sense and nonsense are probabilistically related and cannot be measured as psychological states. This does not mean that the probability of sense and nonsense does not have psychic implications. It certainly does. As we will see below, Jacques Lacan was one of the few thinkers of his time to have grasped the psychic dimensions of information theory and cybernetics and, on the basis of that understanding, he radically transformed the Freudian idea of the unconscious.

The Cybernetic Moment

19Joyce’s nonsense word “iSpace”—coined long before the invention of the iPhone and the iPad—anticipated Shannon’s development of Printed English by assuming a radical rupture between writing and speech. It matters little if one can spell or pronounce this nonsense word, for our speech cannot reproduce the ideographic image of iSpace in sound nor can it assign a linguistic meaning to it. In Shannon’s Printed English, the 27 letters are conceptualized as ideographs—petites lettres as Lacan would put it—like mathematical symbols. One may object that these ideographs and mathematical symbols have meanings. Yes, they do, but there is a crucial difference: these meanings need not be mapped onto any particular language or speech. In fact, Printed English ceases to relate to the English language except in terms of probability. The interplay of sense and nonsense across the gap of ideographic Printed English and the English language becomes central as we delve further into the whereabouts of sense in the hypermnesiac machine.

20This point is nowhere better demonstrated than by the Chinese linguist Y. R. Chao in his paper at the 10th meeting of the Macy Conference in April 22-24, 1953. Claude Shannon himself was invited to the same conference. On that occasion, Chao was asked by the Cybernetics Group specifically to speak on the question of meaning in language. In his paper, he brought up the issue of “meaning” at the intersection of visual word recognition and the production of phoneme to reflect on what I call the probability of sense and nonsense between writing and language. Chao argued that what makes “sense” in writing may turn out to be gibberish in speech, and vice versa. He demonstrated this point by pushing the Joycean literary experiment on alphabetical writing to yet another extreme; only this time he adopted a Chinese example.

21Chao’s experiment involved 106 written characters (with frequent repetition) in classical Chinese with which he fabricated a simple story titled “The Story of Mr. Shi Who Eats Lions.” This improbable story about a man trying to eat ten lions was made up by him in a tongue-in-cheek manner. What he is trying to demonstrate is that when the story is read out loud in Mandarin, it turns into a string of nonsense syllables and gibberish. Try pronouncing Chao’s 106 written characters in a hundred and five repetitions of shi, shi, shi, shi... since the written characters all happen to share the same sound /shi/ in Mandarin with varying tones:

“石室詩士施氏嗜獅誓食十獅氏時時適市視獅十時氏適市適十碩
獅適市是時氏視是十獅恃十石矢勢使是十獅逝世氏拾是十獅屍
適石室石室濕氏使侍試拭石室石室拭氏始試食是十獅屍食時始
識是十碩獅屍實十碩石獅屍是時氏始識是實事實試釋是事

22(Stone house poet Mr. Shih was fond of lions and resolved to eat ten lions. The gentleman from time to time went to the market to look for lions. When, at ten o’clock, he went to the market, it happened that ten big lions went to the market. Thereupon, the gentleman looked at the ten lions and, relying on the momenta of ten stone arrows, he caused the ten lions to depart from this world. The gentleman picks up the lions’ bodies and went to the stone house. The stone house was wet and he made the servant try and wipe the stone house. The stone house having been wiped, the gentleman began to try to eat the ten lions’ bodies. When he ate them, he began to realize that those ten big lions’ bodies were actually ten big stone lions’ bodies. Now he began to understand that this was really the fact of the case. Try and explain this matter.)”5

23Unlike Joyce’s 100 nonsense letter sequence, Chao’s 106 written characters can be read and pronounced yet make no sense to the Chinese ear. Even with the phonemic markers such as the four tones (phonemes in Mandarin), each character repeats the same syllable /shi/ in pinyin Romanization and cannot be distinguished from one another. The point Chao was trying to make at the Macy conference had nothing to do with the alleged monosyllabic nature of the Chinese language, which has been a popular but mistaken view that projects the sound transcription of the written character, such as /shi/ in the pinyin, onto the spoken language.6 Instead, Chao shows that the written character plays a vital role toward constraining the stochastic occurrences of spoken syllables in Mandarin or any other languages in China. The probability of sense and nonsense is thus played out across the gap between the silent visual writing and the spoken language where the 106 written characters carry enough visual information to make sense but their shared singular pronunciation /shi/ carries too little information among them to make sense in speech. Nodding in the direction of Shannon’s stochastic analysis of Printed English, this experiment suggests that the written-character sequence exhibits a high level of entropy—a great deal of information—in classical Chinese writing which is contrasted with an extremely high level of redundancy—very little information—in spoken Mandarin, all within the same text. This striking anomaly—the opposite tendencies of redundancy and entropy rates between writing and speech embodied by the same set of characters—has fascinating ramifications for our understanding of writing as technology in general and the place of sense in the hypermnesiac machine in particular.

Lacan’s petites lettres

24Jacques Lacan, who took pains to study the Chinese language in World War II, would have had no difficulty grasping the distinction that Chao was trying to make to his cybernetician colleagues. I suspect that, being an avid reader of cybernetic literature in the 1950s, Lacan may even have encountered Chao’s paper through his cybernetician friend Georges-Théodule Guilbaud, although I have no reliable sources to back this up. Regardless, the distinction Lacan repeatedly insisted upon between the word and the letter begins to make perfect sense when we consider that Lacan was making his theory at a time when the symbol-processing machine prevailed in the postwar development of information theory, cybernetics, and game theory.

25Like Derrida, Lacan took a keen interest in Finnegans Wake but he remained highly skeptical of any demand for sens from the hypermnesiac machine. Unlike Derrida, he was less impressed with the polysemy of multilingual punning in Joyce’s work than with the curious disappearance of sens. In “Joyce le Symthôme,” Lacan discusses how the “sense” which we habitually attach to words can get lost in the process of symbolization in Joyce’s verbal puns (Lacan, “Joyce le Symthôme,” 165). The loss of sens interests him greatly because it brings us a bit closer to the real. The real, Lacan wrote elsewhere,

“is completely denuded of sens [meaning]. We can be satisfied, we can be sure that we are dealing with something of the réel [the real] only when it no longer has any sens whatsoever. It has no sens because it is not with mots [words] that we write the réel. It is with petites lettres [little letters].” (my emphasis)
(Lacan, Yale University”)

26The distinction between senseless letters and meaningful words is absolutely central to Lacan and to his reinterpretation of the Freudian unconscious through the lens of information theory and cybernetics. Around 1955, he developed what one might call a materialist view of language which was rooted in the communication technologies of his time. Friedrich Kittler says no less of Freud, arguing that the latter’s materialism went as far as did the inscription machines of his own time. Freud conceived of psychoanalytic data storage in terms of the grooves that phonographs etch on to wax or tinfoil rolls (Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems 1997, 134)

27For Lacan, the communication machine offers other and more interesting possibilities. The circulation of information does not mean that communication takes place between human beings. Rather, the law of entropy stipulates that all machines have a tendency to run down. Lacan says that there is a name for this breakdown called

“in psychology, the jam, an American word. It is the first time that confusion as such—this tendency there is in communication to cease being a communication, that is to say, of no longer communicating anything at all—appears as a fundamental concept. That makes for one more symbol.” (Lacan, “The Circuit,” in Jacques-Alain Miller 1988, 83)

28Lacan goes on to develop the idea of the symbolic order that reframes the meaning of communication with respect to the distinction between petites lettres and the word. He would reiterate that distinction in his Kanzar lecture at Yale University in 1975 in which he argues—with reference to Finnegans Wake—that there is a world of difference between the letter and the word; due to this difference, the return of sens can never be guaranteed through communication, much less the communication machine.

29In a public lecture sponsored by the Société Française de Psychanalyse on June 22, 1955 titled “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics, or on the Nature of Language,” Lacan tries to clarify the symbolic order through the binary signs 0 and 1 as the universal system of language. It is important to note that he does so by distinguishing the symbolic order from thought, signification, speech, and meaning. He states:

“The little symbolic game in which Newton’s system and that of Einstein is summed up has in the end very little to do with the real. The science which reduces the real to several little letters, to a little bundle of formulae, will probably seem, with the hindsight of later epochs, like an amazing epic, and will also dwindle down, like an epic, to a rather short circuit.” (Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics, or On the Nature of Language,” in Jacques-Alain Miller 1988, 299)

30According to him, the invention of probability calculus and cybernetics makes it abundantly clear that the symbol is embodied in an apparatus that ties the real to a syntax, and this syntax—having nothing to do with ordinary grammar—is the combinatory logic of 0 and 1. “The human being isn’t master of this primordial, primitive language,” and he adds, “he has been thrown into it, committed, caught up in its gears” (307). Speaking at the height of the Cold War, Lacan alludes to the symbol-processing machines of cybernetics and game theory and to the dangers of their collusion with the American domination of the world. He states:

“In keeping on this frontier the originality of what appears in our world in the form of cybernetics, I am tying it to man’s waiting. If the science of the combinations of scanned encounter has come to the attention of man, it is because it deeply concerns him. And it is not for nothing that it comes out of games of chance. And it is not for nothing that game theory is concerned with all the functions of our economic life, the theory of coalitions, of monopolies, the theory of war. Yes, war itself, considered in its aspect as game, detached from anything which might be real. It is not for nothing that the same word designates such diverse fields as well as the game of chance… Here we come very close to the central question with which I began, namely—what is the chance of the unconscious, which in some way lies behind man.” (300)

31The chance of the unconscious is his novel formulation of the dangerous symbolic order entailed by the inventions of game theory, cybernetics, and information theory. Lacan saw it coming, knowing that the game of chance was played with the combinatory logic of 0 and 1.

32Does the same logic drive the communication machine that is written with the petites lettres of Printed English? The answer is yes. If the meaning of words has the tendency of getting lost in the process of symbolization in Joyce’s hypermnesiac machine, what are the chances of our discovering “sense” in the communication machine in general? I venture to speculate that where Derrida found polysemy and equivocality of multilingual meanings, Lacan would only allow for the game of chance or probability because he knows how such a machine works; in short, the machine is less about retrievable memory than it is about the perils of the symbolic order. At a fundamental level, the communication machine can process nothing—certainly not words, in spite of its word-processing reputation—but the petites lettres of Printed English. That which gets processed guarantees no more—and no less—sense than does the “iSpace” of Finnegans Wake.