PENTAMETERS

Toward the Dissolution of Certain Vectoralist Relations

John Cayley

Language is a commons, and yet by contrast
With first nature’s free resources, it is constitutive
Of culture while all at once incorporate within
Those cultures it enables. As language is a commons,
To use it, we need not agree to terms.
Now, counter to our expectations and our rights,
Agreements as to terms of language use
Are daily ratified by the vast majority
Of so-called users – you-and-I – by all of us
Who make and share our language on the Internet.

Services, like those of Google and many others such
Still expressly offer their results in swift symbolical
Response to phrases of a language we call natural:
Words composed by human writers, desirous
To discover something that they wish to read,
If only with the aim of transacting through commerce,
And so satisfying a moiety of our more venal cravings.

Although the objects of our culture have each
Their specific materials, now these may be mediated
By the insubstantial substance of machines
That symbolize – or seem to, in potential –
Every thing. The digital appears
To us historically unprecedented, thus:
It presents itself as servant and as Golem,
Non-vital but commensurate, un-alive
And yet all-capable: of service, of facility:
A limitless archive of affordances,
And so it ceases to be some thing or substance
Amongst others; it becomes the currency
Of all we are: essential infrastructure,
Determinative of practice and of thought.
Despite this, it still seems made by us, and lesser,
A servant still, and so we treat the digital
As if it remained in service, though it sustains –
Or seems to – all that we desire to be.
We will not live without it, yet we believe
That we still choose to purchase and to use
A relation that is optional, elective, and we
Manage it as such.

Even for those writers
Who may be in denial of any digital mediation
Of their practice, networked services are likely
To provide for them: crucial points of reference,
Essential to the composition of their texts,
And intimate with whatever artistry they own.
If this is the case, then, given how the structures
Of the network and its services are deployed:
Terms of use have, literally, been agreed.
The commons of language is, in part, enclosed
By its very makers. The writer has conceded
That he or she is happy to supply a phrase –
How many? And to whom? And on what terms? –
And then to receive, to read, and to transact
With results that have been fashioned from the store
Of every other user’s phrases, and from the indexed
Language of all that you-and-I have published
On the Internet since it began.

“Results that have been fashioned,” which is to say
That they, words orthothetically abject
To those within our selves, have been shaped
By algorithm: and to this circumstance the writer
Has agreed. Perhaps we may, you-or-I, pretend
To have some general understanding of these algorithms’
Behaviors, yet the detailed workings of such processes
Are jealously protected. Indeed, they are proprietary,
Closely guarded and esteemed as highly valuable
For reasons that may be entirely divorced from
Or at odds with the tenor of our queries.
The underlying transactions and the relationships
Devolved are very different from any that arise
When you or I take down our dictionary to look up
A word.

However the power of the cultural vector
Represented by the mouth or maw of Google’s
Search box and its ilk is all unprecedented.
For any artist-scientist of language, it is like
The revolutionary and revelatory power
Of a newly discovered optic, allowing you-and-I
To see, suddenly and spectacularly, farther
Into the universe of language by several
Orders of magnitude. The writer may observe
And get some sense of the frequency or range
Of usages for words and phrases in our living,
Contemporary tongues, up to the millisecond—
All in a few keystrokes and clicks. This extraordinary
Facility – inconceivable until just now – is presented
As a freely open service, in the guise of what
Has already been cited as “cultural vector.”

Oriented
Where? And how? By whom? For whom? To what
End? That this momentous shift in no less
Than the spacetime of linguistic culture
Should be radically skewed by terms of use
Should remind us that it is, fundamentally,
Motivated and driven by quite distinct concerns
To those of art. Here are vectors of utility and greed.
If language is a commons then what appears
To be a gateway or a portal to our language
Is, in truth, an enclosure, the outward sign
Of a non-reciprocal, hierarchical relation.
The vectoralist providers of what we call services
Harvest freely from our searches in themselves,
And from whatever language we have published,
Using fantastically powerful and sophisticated
Algorithmic process, lately known by many names,
As bots, robots, spiders and the like, but we users –
You-and-I, who make and publish all we write –
Are explicitly denied, according to their terms of use,
Any such reciprocal opportunity. We may not freely
Use our own algorithmic processes to probe
The universe of capta – our captured and abducted data –
Even though our aim may be to imitate,
Assist or to prosthetically – aesthetically – enhance:
To beautify the human user.

And so, why not?
The foremost reason is: the harvested capta
Might be muddied and so rendered less effectively
Correlate with its primary purpose: to represent
In a normalized form, the most frequently expressed
And potentially most profitable human desires,
Such that advertisement may be intimately associated
With our harvested phrases, ideally, all at the moment
Of harvesting itself, with human eyes to read
Not only a desired result but an intimately associated
And immediately transactable new desire. Moreover,
The vectoralist ads are made with sign chains that are
Orthothetically disposed towards the language
We have written. This also is previously unknown:
That advertisement intended to induce a profitable
And non-reciprocal exchange be made from some thing
That is proper to its addressee. This is material
Appropriation of cultural interiority to venal desire,
Wrongly subjecting and reforming you-and-I
Within a false enclosure of precisely that which
Should never be enclosed: the openness of all
That we inscribe. As yet, the so-called interaction
Of so-called users is falsely founded on unwitting, habitual,
And ignorant terms of abuse.

Seize these vectors now!

To make art on terms? Impossible.
For the sake of art and for the sake
Of every cultural institution and their futures
We must find a way to refuse such
Terms of use. If you-and-I do not,
Then services like Google’s will, quite literally,
Show us how to write and give us what
They know we want to read, bettering our selves.

Author's note: This is the complete text of an expository poem, early- and perhaps, therefore, "A-modern" in style. The author’s commentary on the poem is provided by the text of a polemical-scholarly essay in this issue, "Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions: Situating Certain Literary Transactions over Networked Services," accessed here.

It is suggested that readers may wish to turn to the poem before the essay. It is hoped that once they have read its commentary, they may return to the poem. The use of pentametric rhythmical lineation and pseudo-archaic diction is neither pastiche or humor; it is part of a lament for public discourse, poetically rendered.

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Image: "10,000 B.C. paragraph 9”
From: "Drawings from A Thousand Plateaus"
Original Artist: Marc Ngui
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