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Humans and/as machines:

Beckett and cultural cybernetics
Seb Franklin
Version of record first published: 07 Jan 2013.

To cite this article: Seb Franklin (2013): Humans and/as machines: Beckett and cultural
cybernetics, Textual Practice, 27:2, 249-268

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 Textual Practice, 2013
27(2), 249 –268, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2012.750085

Seb Franklin
Humans and/as machines: Beckett and cultural cybernetics
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This essay engages with the aesthetics and politics of digitality through a
parallel study of Samuel Beckett’s writing and the development of the elec-
tronic digital computer. By placing these distinct threads in parallel, the
essay argues that the digital logic of command and control, in which the
experienced world and the possibilities for future action are parsed, formu-
lated as text and expressed as sets of discrete algorithms, represents an emer-
ging mode of thought that must be traced through textual as well as
technical practices from the mid-twentieth century onwards.

Keywords
Beckett; digitality; cybernetics; Deleuze; Kittler

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Textual Practice

‘If I had to choose a patron saint of cybernetics . . . it would have to be

Leibniz’.1 So wrote the American mathematician Norbert Wiener in his
landmark book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine of 1948. This claim, as much as the subtitle of the
book that contains it, foregrounds the folly of limiting the analysis of
what Gilles Deleuze has defined as the control society to the study of the
digital computer and its associated cultural forms. It is easy enough to
see how this type of society – which Deleuze famously describes in his
1990 essays ‘Having an Idea in Cinema’ and ‘Postscript on Control
Societies’ and the interview of the same year with Antonio Negri published
as ‘Control and Becoming’ – is canonical in the study of digital culture,
accounting as it does for a historical turn in the mid-to-late twentieth
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century towards a society whose organisational language is digital in

contrast to the analogical language of Foucault’s disciplinary societies.2
While Deleuze writes of computers and informatic machines as emble-
matic of control in these texts, however, it is clear from his accounts of
‘equilibrium’ and ‘metastability’ in the workplace, the precise modulation
of wages, the emergence of debt over enclosure as a social corrective
and the replacement of the notion of the individual with that of the
dividual that a broader set of socio-political transformations than the
simple emergence of the computer characterise the socio-political era
he describes.3
What this makes apparent is that the logic underpinning Deleuze’s
societies of control must be traced through dual, if interrelated, historical
threads. On the one hand, one must chart the logical and technical history
of computers that incorporates the stepped reckoner, calculus ratiocinator,
and characteristica universalis described by Leibniz, Joseph Marie
Jacquard’s programmable loom of 1801 and Charles Babbage’s analytical
and difference engines as well as the range of developments throughout the
twentieth century that will be discussed shortly.4 On the other hand, the
emergence of a cybernetic mode of political-economic thinking needs to
be traced through a range of historical approaches to the modelling of
complex social systems in order to render their outcomes predictable.
One might include the battlefield modelling work carried out by Frederick
Lanchester in the 1910s that developed into the field of operations
research, the economic game theory developed by John von Neumann
from the mid-1920s onwards and Jay Wright Forrester’s system dynamics
approaches, which can be applied to armed combat or industrial logistics
interchangeably, as but a few examples of this project. The broad mode
of thinking that coalesced into cybernetics, as the subtitle of Wiener’s
book suggests, is not concerned with machines alone, but with the concep-
tualisation of humans and machines as functionally interchangeable. In
addition to giving us computers, software and networks cybernetics, as

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 Seb Franklin Humans and/as machines

the French collective Tiqqun have argued, ‘proposes to conceive biological,

physical, and social behaviours as . . . integrally programmed and
reprogrammable’.5
If one takes this dual conceptualisation of cybernetics seriously, then
Deleuze’s claim that Franz Kafka’s The Trial stands ‘at the point of tran-
sition’ between Foucault’s disciplinary societies and a new type of society
characterised by ‘free-floating’ forms of control appears not as an anachron-
ism – in the light of his earlier positing of ‘computers’ and ‘information
technologies’ as emblematic of control – but as a recognition that
control societies are above all characterised by a certain historical logic.
This logic, which produces both digital technologies and modes of think-
ing and expression that are related but not tied to such technologies, is
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where one must concentrate one’s efforts if a historically rooted analysis

of the present situation is to be attained.6 That the later form of society
Deleuze describes has proved highly productive in critical writing on
digital cultural politics does not mean that control societies are caused by
digital technologies. By placing Kafka’s writing at the transitional point
of his periodisation, Deleuze would appear to make this obvious. His insis-
tence that each type of society is not determined by its emblematic machine
(thermodynamic machines in disciplinary societies, computers in control
societies), but rather that machines ‘express the social forms capable of
producing them and making use of them’ reinforces this point.7 From
this, one can take an essential methodological cue: the emergence of cyber-
netic logic within culture must be examined through both the development
of computation and the tracing of this logic within non-computational
culture.
Following this, the examination of an artist whose work proceeds and
develops across the period of development and distribution to ubiquity of
the computer might prove extremely useful in positing the logic of control
as both technical and social. This essay approaches such a project through
the historical parallels that exist between the writing of Samuel Beckett and
the emergence of computation as a technical and cultural form from the
1930s to the 1980s. Beckett’s work, from Watt onwards, extends the
late-disciplinary bureaucracy overseen by the analogue media of Kafka’s
writing through the period in which digital machines emerge to replace
their thermodynamic, analogue predecessors in industrial societies.8 At
the same time, this body of work progressively manifests many of the
logical and formal characteristics that are definitive of cybernetic models
of behaviour and thus of the control society. It is the purpose of this
essay to track and define the crucial components of this isomorphism.
This is not an archival or genetic project looking to find material connec-
tions between Beckett’s writing and the computer, since there is simply no
evidence of such a connection existing. Rather, it is one of comparative

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cultural history that examines the shared formal components of two

systems, one literary and one technical, in order to create an indicative
picture of the cultural-political terms that define the present era of
control and ubiquitous cybernetic systems.
The approach pursued here owes a great deal to the work of the
German media theorist Friedrich Kittler. In his Discourse Networks
1800/1900, Kittler defines two periods that correspond in character, if
not exactly in time, to the disciplinary and control societies outlined by
Foucault and Deleuze. Kittler’s second period can be productively
described as the extended period through which disciplinary societies
develop into control societies. This second period in Kittler, which
begins some 40 years before the development of the first digital computers,
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and perhaps 80 years before the personal digital computer becomes a ubi-
quitous technology, primarily concerns the way in which the discretisation
of text enabled by analogue media such as the typewriter marks a crucial
step towards computation and the discretisation of the real. In Discourse
Networks each of Kittler’s periods, the ‘kingdom of sense’ of 1800 and
the ‘kingdom of pattern’ of 1900, is prefaced by a definitive mathematical
equation: the first, from Leonhard Euler in 1735, produces a sine wave –
an analogue signal; the second, from Bernhard Bolzano in 1830, produces
a binary, digital output.

e ix = cos x + sin x − Leonhard Euler

y = (+a) + (−a) + (+a) + (−a) + · · · − Bolzano.

Friedrich Kittler: epigrams from the 1800 and 1900 sections of

Discourse Networks 9

It is immediately notable that these equations precede the periods they

denote by 65 and 70 years, respectively. In Kittler’s technical approach
to cultural history, the mathematical or theoretical principles underpinning
a technology always mark the start of the era it defines. This is why analysis
of Leibniz, Kafka, and Beckett emerge as productive in the theorisation of
the transition from disciplinary to control societies, regardless of the devel-
opmental state of the digital computer at their respective times of writing.
Extending this periodisation, the identification of a parallel movement
through Beckett’s writing and the development and distribution of compu-
ter technology proves highly instructive in theorising the progression
through Kittler’s second period – towards the control societies of the
late twentieth century and thereafter.

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 Seb Franklin Humans and/as machines

In order to pursue such a project, working across the technical and the
cultural, a degree of formalism is required even if it is (perhaps thankfully)
ultimately destined to fall short of a full systematisation of the subjects in
question. The striking parallels that exist between Lev Manovich’s tripar-
tite formalisation of new media technologies and three progressive
languages that Deleuze identifies in Beckett in his essay ‘The Exhausted’
present a fascinating framework in this regard. In The Language of New
Media Manovich sets out a three-layered model for the analysis of digital
media, stating that the new media object is ‘digital on the level of its
material’, ‘computational (i.e. software driven) in its logic’ and ‘cinemato-
graphic in its appearance’.10 Putting arguments about the stability of such a
rigid, formal model aside for now, a historically tiered deployment of this
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structure serves as a useful framework for the analysis of computation’s

technical and cultural development, since each corresponds to a major
period in the development of the computer. Each of these three movements
can be clearly corresponded to the progression through three languages in
Beckett observed by Deleuze. Deleuze’s ‘language I’, where ‘enumeration
replaces propositions and combinatorial elements replace syntactic
relations’, has its definitive example in Watt.11 ‘Language II’, a language
that ‘no longer operates with combinable atoms but with bendable
flows’, develops from the novels into the theatre and finally ‘blares forth’
from the radio pieces.12 ‘Language III’, ‘no longer a language of names
or voices, but a language of images’, corresponds historically to the emer-
gence of graphical computing and moves from How It Is in 1961 to a point
in the early 1980s where it finds the ‘secret of its assemblage in television’.13
Placing these two tripartite models of periodisation together, the first
period in Beckett according to Deleuze (‘language I’) corresponds histori-
cally and formally to the early theoretical and technical developments of
computation carried out by Alan Turing and Claude Shannon in the
late 1930s and is concerned with the formalisation of the real as data
and algorithmic processes. The second (‘language II’) emerges from the
late 1940s with the novels of the trilogy, and develops alongside the emer-
gence of programming languages and the early developments in analogue-
digital conversion, introducing a user-centred layer that sits above the
nonetheless still-present algorithmic processes – a ‘bendable flow’ in
place of ‘combinable atoms’. The final language (‘language III’) corre-
sponds historically and formally to the development of computer graphics
in the late 1960s, develops throughout the late prose into the television
pieces and adds a layer of visuals above the preceding languages; as
Deleuze notes, ‘language III can bring together words and voices in
images’.14 In each instance the historical-formal parallels with one of the
three layers of digital media set out by Manovich are clear. Each language
presents a cultural correlative to a stage in the progressive technical

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development of user-centred computational systems that parallels the

emergence of the control era.
Beckett’s Watt was first published in 1953, but writing began on it 11
years earlier.15 In an examination of the text’s ‘Cartesian sentences’ in The
Mechanic Muse Hugh Kenner makes the observation that, in the processes
of the novel’s central character, ‘we’re close to the languages of digital com-
puters, which weren’t heard of till a decade after Watt was written’.16
Kenner’s somewhat general statement ignores the significant publication
of the mathematical and technical fundamentals of digital computation,
Alan Turing’s ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem’ in 1936 and Claude Shannon’s Master’s thesis ‘A
Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits’ in 1938, although
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he does acknowledge the algebra of George Boole which forms the basis
of both works. By the time Watt was completed, corresponding to the
period Kittler examines at length in the second half of the ‘Typewriter’
section of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Turing and Shannon’s work
had intersected in the construction of the codebreaking machines that
would win the Second World War, leading directly to the construction
of the first computers in North America in the period immediately follow-
ing this war. Watt, then, was actually written in the middle of the most
crucial development in the movement from disciplinary to control
societies, the foundation of computing through the mathematically
proven possibility of abstracting a series of ‘on’ or ‘off’ states from a
range of logic problems and, by extension, discretised text.
In Watt the coding and patterning processes that Watt engages in
when at the house of Mr Knott are basic, commensurate with the early
stages of computer technology that the novel corresponds to. Watt pro-
cesses events in the world algorithmically by branching through every
possibility, a reduction of experienced events to binary algebra. Kenner
notes this in The Mechanic Muse when he expresses a paragraph of text con-
cerning the visits of Mrs Gorman as first pseudocode then a series of con-
ditional statements. It is notable that Kenner likens the procedure of this
section to the programming language Pascal. Pascal, an imperative, pro-
cedural programming language developed by Niklaus Wirth in 1968
which forms the basis of early Apple Macintosh assembly languages, is
based on the ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language) family, which is especially
suited to pseudocode examples for the written description of algorithms.17
In short, the fundamental basis of Pascal is in a language designed to make
algorithms readable by humans rather than machines. The paragraph in
question proceeds in Beckett’s text as follows:

Mrs. Gorman called every Thursday, except when she was indis-
posed. Then she did not call, but stayed at home, in bed, or in a

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 Seb Franklin Humans and/as machines

comfortable chair, before the fire if the weather was cold, and by the
open window if the weather was warm, and if the weather was neither
cold nor warm, by the closed window or before the empty heath.18

This passage is expressed by Kenner as the following algorithm:

Mrs. Gorman
came, yes/no
didn’t come, yes/no;
if she didn’t come then she stayed home:
in bed, yes/no
in chair, yes/no;
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if in chair, then
by hearth, yes/no
by window, yes/no;
if by hearth, then fire burning, yes/no;
if by window, then window open, yes/no.19

This is only one example of the logical processing of events and pos-
sibilities carried out by Watt in Beckett’s novel, and the suitability of these
processes for direct conversion into code. Watt contains a large number of
these passages, both more and less extensive than the one concerning the
movements of Mrs Gorman.20 Watt’s formalisation of Mr Knott’s meal
arrangements and the days on which leftovers should be given to a dog
is amongst the most extensive of these algorithmic processes, taking up
14 pages of the novel and including two passages (the composition, insti-
gation, and execution of Mr Knott’s arrangements, and the identity, selec-
tion, and ownership of the dog) that are comparable to subroutines in
computer programming, where a process that is relatively independent
of the overall program occurs within it.21
As Turing and Shannon each demonstrate in the five years immedi-
ately preceding the composition of Watt, even highly complex problems
can be formalised and solved through binary algebra provided they can
be broken down into definable, discrete units. This is not to say,
however, that in Beckett we find an uncritical deployment of a similar prin-
ciple. In Watt it is the occasions that exceed complete formalisation that
trouble the ‘hero’, and that serve to draw a distinction between the perfectly
codable signal and the signal-plus-noise that denies computation. Such
occasions are suggested in the early stages of the novel when Watt overhears
a song whose two verses each recount a recurring decimal number,
52.285714 and 51.142857. These numbers, corresponding to the simple
calculation of the number of weeks in a leap and a regular year, respect-
ively, are infinite and, therefore, pose a problem of formalisation to the

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computational power of humans, if not of actual computers.22 For Watt, as

Kenner observes, it is in the aspects of communication that relate to impre-
cisely definable states that provide the experiential equivalent of these
numbers later in the novel; how Mrs Gorman feels, for example, when in
her bed or chair, in front of window or hearth, and so on.23 Here the
central concern in Watt, one that recurs throughout Beckett’s writing
that points towards a form of critique that is optimised for the cultural
logic of control, emerges as the tension between the possibility of formalis-
ing analogue experienced reality into algorithms and the exclusion of non-
computable noise that is essential to this process. Put simply, the relation
between that which can be coded and that which cannot emerge as a crucial
political distinction in theorisations of the control era.
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The third section of Watt literalises a crucial implication of Shannon’s

influential 1948 text ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’: that
communication, in the period of transition from disciplinary to control
societies, becomes conceivable as statistical and meaning-indifferent,
employing coding and patterning in place of interpretation. In this
section, as its narrator Sam observes, Watt begins to reverse the order of
the words in his sentences, then the letters in his words, then the sentences
in the period, then both words in the sentence and the letters in the word,
and so on. From the perspective of Shannon’s theory each of these modes
of communication are identical, since they are patterned in a way that
enables their perfect reconstruction. There is not much in the way of soph-
isticated cryptography here.24 The idea of intelligibility to a human reader
or listener is not a consideration in ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communi-
cation’, only the optimisation of signal strength; as Shannon’s states, ‘[the]
semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering
problem . . . the system must be designed to operate for each possible selec-
tion, not just the one that will actually be chosen since this is unknown at
the time of design’.25 From a technical rather than human-interpretive per-
spective, the patterns of speech in the third section is not a deterioration of
Watt’s mental state but the emergence of an output stage that corresponds
to his method for processing input. If, in the second section of the novel,
Watt strives to formalise all continuous experience as a sequence of discrete
states – an act only theoretically possible for machines, and not at all for
humans – in the third section he extends this process into a mode of com-
munication that is optimised for machines rather than people.
‘Language I’, historically corresponding Watt to the early develop-
ments of computation, develops into ‘language II’ in the movement
from Watt through the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The
Unnamable. In the passage from The Unnamable to the radio plays that
conclude the period of ‘language II’ for Deleuze the significant develop-
ments in computation move from the first electronic computers to the

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 Seb Franklin Humans and/as machines

development of programming languages at one or more levels of abstrac-

tion from machine language.26 The development of programming
languages instrumentalises the indifferent binary logic of the computer,
since it allows for a mediation of human intent with machine-optimised
formalisation. It is essentially a process of abstraction that is ordered
from the perspective of the machine; in the same way that a home
video, viewed as a stream of binary 1s and 0s, appears at a high level of
abstraction to a human user, a programming language consisting of any-
thing but electrical variations is at one or more levels of abstraction from
the perspective of the computer. All programming languages are, in
effect, an abstraction of the computer’s technical function in order to
make it universal, useful, and accessible – as Kittler and Chun have
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noted – and ultimately allow the abstractions of the social, cultural, politi-
cal, and economic world which define Deleuze’s control society.27 In
examining the texts definitive of ‘language II’ in Beckett, it is possible to
set up a correspondence between this translation process, where the
attempts at machinic formalisation seen in Watt give way to an instrumen-
tal mediation of this formalisation, and the parallel developments in com-
puting history.
An example supplied after that of Watt and its Pascal program that
‘doesn’t give the computer anything to do’ in Kenner’s The Mechanic
Muse is instructive in moving from ‘language I’, data and coding
(‘atoms’) to ‘language II’, high-level programming and software (‘bendable
flows’). This example is taken from Endgame, written in the period
between ‘as early as 1952’ and 1956, the same time that FORTRAN, argu-
ably the first high-level programming language, was being developed by
IBM in the USA, and concerns the exact positioning of Hamm’s chair
by Clov.28

HAMM: Put me right in the center!

CLOV: I’ll go and get the tape.
HAMM: Roughly! Roughly! [Clov moves the chair slightly] Bang
in the centre!
CLOV: There!
[Pause.]
HAMM: I feel a little too far to the left. [Clov moves the chair
slightly.] Now I feel a little too far to the right. [Clov moves the
chair slightly.] I feel a little too far forward. [Clov moves chair
slightly.] Now I feel a little too far back. [Clov moves the chair
slightly.] Don’t stay there [i.e. behind the chair.]29

Here, at roughly the same time that high-level programming

languages emerge in the labs of IBM, the machine-readable formalisations

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that produce no output in Watt are replaced with an imperative language

that enacts a similar process, but that produces action in the world
through communication that appears centred on humans. This growing
human-centrism is critiqued by Kittler in his essay ‘There is no Software’;
for Kittler it is not the case that software fundamentally relates to any
less of an algorithmic, nonhuman process than hardware, but rather
that it abstracts the algorithmic away from machines and towards
instrumentality for human users. The same holds true for the levels of
programming language; a program written in a high-level language
such as C, the same program written in a low-level language such as
x86 assembly and the same program again written in binary code funda-
mentally resolve to identical hardware operations. There is no technical
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difference between these levels of language for the machine, only for
the user.30
As Kenner writes, in issuing orders in the manner of Hamm one
comes ‘even closer [than Watt] to the spirit of programming languages,
FORTRAN and Pascal and their many siblings, since they are unique in
having but one mood, the imperative’.31 In the passage of Endgame repro-
duced above instructions are given for the procedural movement of an
object, in a way that precludes any of the direct communication with
data and algorithms that might be thought of as madness. Beyond
Watt’s institutionalisation for prefiguring Shannon’s mathematical
theory of communication, a prospective ideological connection between
an interest in hardware-level programming on the part of the user and
insanity is critiqued by Kittler in ‘Protected Mode’, where he cites a
trade publication’s claim that ‘even under the best circumstances, one
would quickly go crazy from programming in machine language’.32 As
Kittler continues, ‘at the risk of having gone crazy long ago, the only
thing one can deduce from all this is that software has obviously gained
in user-friendliness as it more closely approaches the cryptological ideal
of the one-way [i.e. irreversible] function’.33 In other words, the further
we go towards high-level programming and software applications, the
further we move away from the technical function of the machine and
the possibility of going mad, from the perspective of the billion dollar soft-
ware industry that is definitive of control-era economics. In the same way,
the further into ‘language II’ in Beckett we look, the further we move
towards the instrumentalisation of Watt’s algorithmic processes and the
closer we come to the underlying conditions of the control-era cultural
form. At the same time, as the problems of positioning Hamm’s chair in
the above-quoted sequence from Endgame indicates, the noise that
emerges from the relation between algorithmic, computational processes,
and the emergent aspects of their use by humans is that which can be
neither coded nor eradicated.

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 Seb Franklin Humans and/as machines

Alongside the emergence of programming languages, there is a second

major development in the information technologies of the control society
that accompany the period of ‘language II’ in Beckett; the emergence of
methods for digitising analogue signals such as recorded sound and, ulti-
mately, images. Deleuze does, after all, note that ‘language II’ culminates
not in writing but the ‘blaring’ sound of the radio pieces. The first of
these pieces, Embers, was completed in early 1959, a year after Beckett’s
application of tape-recorded voice for the first time in Krapp’s Last Tape.
This places the ‘recorded voice’ pieces at a point where techniques for
pulse code modulation (PCM), under development since the late 1930s,
were well established, and work on the fast Fourier transform that would
enable the digitisation and micro-level analysis of analogue signals for
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theoretically perfect noise reduction was close to applicability.34 Work

on PCM was in progress at Bell Laboratories since the discovery in 1943
of a patent held by Alec H. Reeves since 1938;35 its technical development
is simultaneous with the movement from ‘language I’ to ‘language II’ in
Beckett. As collected in a 1948 paper by Shannon, B.M. Oliver and
J.R. Pierce, a basic technical account of the PCM process is as follows;
in order to move beyond the necessary transcription of messages into
text before they can be discretised, a two-stage technique is applicable.
The first stage is concerned with the sampling of an analogue signal,
giving a discrete value for the time variable (x axis) of the signal. The
second stage allows the discretisation of the signal’s amplitude (the y
axis) through its reduction to 32 incremental values, each expressed as
five on/off states.36 It must be noted that after the techniques of PCM
attained widespread use through the distribution of transistor technology
in the 1950s, allowing for the prospective application of Turing and Shan-
non’s theoretical work to all analogue signals, Beckett begins to work pri-
marily with voices instead of text. This marks a major stage in the
movement towards the crucial language in Beckett in terms of contempor-
ary cultural production, ‘language III’. This final language, where all
elements of text and voice, data, and algorithm are placed in step with
images, is of particular historical interest because of the way it coincides
with the emergence of ubiquitous computing. After the techniques for
PCM make analogue to digital conversion possible (albeit through pro-
cesses of discretisation that necessarily eliminates any aspect of the object
to be digitised that cannot be adequately coded), the prospect of the com-
puter as a multimedia machine emerges. After Beckett’s writing moves
from the formalisation of data and algorithms to their execution of
literal action and the subsumption of the analogue under the digital, and
finally to images, the historical movement of his work alongside the emer-
gence of the computation that technically defines the cultural conditions of
the control era is complete.

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There have been some attempts made in the last 25 years to connect
the works characteristic of Beckett’s languages I and II to the function of
computation; these include Kenner’s above-mentioned translations of
Watt into Pascal, Richard N. Coe’s attempt to find the act of linguistic
translation and the function of code analogous in ‘Beckett’s English’,
Damian Gordon’s attempts to teach fundamental computing through
Krapp’s Last Tape and Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haar’s creation of a com-
puter program that generates new arrangements of Lessness.37 The shortfall
of this language-based approach, in terms of grasping the political signifi-
cance of the abstract relationship between non-digital cultural production
and computation, lies in a failure to comprehend a fundamental aspect of
machine code, namely that such code is meant to be ‘read’ by computers,
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not people. From Watt onwards it is possible to see a progression in Beck-

ett’s writing that reflects the technical developments within the ‘kingdom
of pattern’, the discourse network of 1900. The major trend in this move-
ment is towards retaining algorithmic processes whilst masking data and
algorithms under the modes of human-centric analogue media. It is not
that the novels, drama or the radio plays that define ‘language II’ eliminate
the algorithms that are on the surface in Watt, but rather that they hide
them behind layers of narrative and sound. The final language in Beckett’s
writing as read by Deleuze marks the culmination of this process, where
images are added to the assemblage of data, algorithm, and interface.
Beckett’s ‘language III’, for Deleuze, begins with How It Is and culmi-
nates with the television plays. The period of work that constitutes
‘language III’ thus also spans the technical development of graphical com-
puting, from the earliest experiments to the array of software interfaces that
are synonymous with computation today. Beckett completed How It Is in
1961, the same year that Ivan Edward Sutherland begun work at MIT’s
Lincoln Labs on his Sketchpad system, the first graphical user interface.38
In 1963, the year Sutherland submitted work on his system, Beckett wrote
Film, followed by Eh Joe, the first of his television pieces. By the time of
Ghost Trio (1975) and . . . But the Clouds . . . (1976) the Xerox Alto Per-
sonal Computer had been built, employing the modern GUI and the
desktop metaphor for the first time. From this period to the early 1980s
marks the emergence of the commercially available computer and the
associated graphical software packages. Quad (1982) coincides exactly
with the release year of the Intel 80286 microprocessor which motivates
Kittler’s critique of graphical, software-based computing in ‘Protected
Mode’.39 In line with this historical correspondence, it is Quad that pro-
vides the most telling manifestation of the specific form of visuality that
emerges after cybernetic logic, and that most keenly interests Deleuze in
‘The Exhausted’.

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 Seb Franklin Humans and/as machines

At the very start of the GUI era, Sutherland’s Sketchpad removes not
only the need for the user to programme in low-level or machine language,
but the apparent need to programme in the sense of inputting discrete
symbols (be they the presence or absence of holes in a punch card or
sequences of letters) at all. Presenting an interface based on pointing, click-
ing, and dragging to draw lines the system combines the analogue physical
input of the user with analogue visual output (quite literally, since it uses a
vector rather than a raster screen). Following this, if Beckett’s ‘language I’
coincides with the theoretical and technical possibility of computation, and
‘language II’ with the instrumentalisation of computing through the first
high-level programming languages, the emergence of software and the
possibility of analogue-to-digital conversion, then ‘language III’ coincides
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with the emergence of interfaces that both motivate user action and allow it
to be captured and algorithmically expressed without requiring the user to
enter code of any type. If the passage of Watt and its corresponding stage of
computer history is concerned with the discretisation of the real, and the
passage from Endgame and its corresponding stage of computer history is
concerned with the abstraction of pure algorithmic logic through impera-
tive commands that resemble natural languages, then the period and the
Beckett work after How It Is removes the trace of algorithmic conversion
and presents input and output as simultaneous and inseparable. As
noted above, this final language finds its clearest connection between for-
malisation and visuality in Quad.
In Quad, an exhaustive series of combinations are expressed thorough
four bodies, each with a specific lighting scheme, percussion instrument,
passage of movement and footstep sound. It is a defined set of possibilities
that is executed procedurally and expressed visually, and because of this it
marks both the clearest expression of ‘language III’ in Beckett and the
strongest point of connection between Beckett and the technical conditions
of the control era. The piece is filmed with a single static camera located
slightly above the depicted space, and consists of four hooded figures
executing a series of movements within a square ‘six paces’ in length.40
Each player must complete a predetermined course based on movement
between the four corners and evasion of an invisible square set at the
centre. The stage directions for this movement consist solely of the
letters given to each corner – A, B, C and D, and appear as follows:

Course 1: AC, CB, BA, AD, DB, BC, CD, DA

Course 2: BA, AD, DB, BC, CD, DA, AC, CB
Course 3: CD, DA, AC, CB, BA, AD, DB, BC
Course 4: DB, BC, CD, DA, AC, CB, BA, AD41

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 Textual Practice

Each course corresponds to one of four hooded figures (one wearing

white, two in yellow, three in blue, four in red). Through the execution of
these series four times, with a player added at each repetition, every possi-
bility of each course with each combination of players is worked through
algorithmically. The piece is of interest for two main reasons in light of
the control era that stands at the end of Kittler’s discourse network of
1900; firstly, because the piece as a whole presents a procedural configur-
ation of space overlaid with a visual layer whose effect is to mask the pres-
ence of an underlying algorithm; and secondly, because the movements of
the players corresponds to the control mode, exemplified by cybernetic
systems such as proprietary software use or videogame play, where restric-
tions on action are enforced not by a human agent but by the technical
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impossibility of deviating from a coded path.

To draw parallels with an example taken from digital cultural pro-
duction, the experience of watching Quad is comparable to watching a
videogame such as Bomberman in ‘demo’ mode, where output is reliant
not on potentially emergent user input but on coded instructions executed
by the machine.42 ON the one hand, then, the formal system manifested
by Quad – comprising the binary coding of all possibility, the rendering
executable of this possibility and the ultimate visualisation of the overall
process – is emblematic of the cultural logic of control. On the other
hand, however, a glance at the minimal script for Quad foregrounds an
impossibility of perfect execution that parallels Watt’s inability to engage
with non-codable phenomena such as infinite decimals and feelings. The
script notes that allowances must be made, in the timing of the piece,
for ‘time lost at corners and centre’ as well as the problem of a ‘rupture
of rhythm’ caused by ‘three of four players’ crossing paths at the centre.
This piece, it is made clear, might function with perfect execution of an
algorithmic structure as a mathematical model or simulation, but not
when performed by human actors (Figure 1).
Towards the end of his 2007 book Gamer Theory McKenzie Wark
modifies a statement from Mark Fisher, aka K-Punk, in order to align
its evaluation of Beckett with the terminology of gamespace, the title he
gives to the socio-economic dimension of the contemporary, cybernetic
(or control) era:

[w]hat do we look like from [game]space? What do we look like to

[game]space? Surely we resemble a Beckettian assemblage of
abstracted functions more than we do a holistic organism connected
to a great chain of being. As games players, we are merely a set of
directional impulses (up, down, left, right); as mobile phone users,
we take instructions from recorded, far distant voices; as users of
SMS or IM, we exchange a minimalized language often

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 Seb Franklin Humans and/as machines
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Figure 1. Samuel Beckett, Quad.47

communicating little beyond the fact of communication itself (txts

for nothing).43

Here the cultural politics of the control era are set out in a way that
demonstrates the underlying algorithmic logic that applies not only to
videogame play and digital communication technologies use but to an
entire system of social organisation, production, and management. This
essay demonstrates that the selection of Beckett as the cultural exemplar
of this situation’s emergence is one that is deeply intertwined, both for-
mally and historically, with the logic that underpins control. That the pri-
vileging of ‘abstracted functions’ over ‘being’ – or an interest in that which
can be parsed and cast into a more-or-less elegant algorithm over that
which cannot – is clearly explicated in Beckett’s late work is suggestive
of a broad series of socio-cultural transformations that are not the same
as the development and rise to ubiquity of the computer, but that are none-
theless linked to this universal, emblematic technology through a shared

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 Textual Practice

historical logic. In the relationship between representation and action pre-

sented in Quad the cultural terms of the control society, the ‘kingdom of
pattern’, are clearly manifested. Quad, exemplary of ‘language III’ in
Beckett, draws together the three crucial characteristics that develop
through languages I and II and that parallel the three elements of compu-
tation. The formalisation of all possibility as data set or algorithm; the ren-
dering manipulable of this data through, for example, software; the
implementation of these algorithmic process across the widest possible
reach through the overlaying of visuals. These three elements constitute
the predominant technical-cultural concerns of the present, and the exam-
ination of their emergence represents an essential heuristic procedure for
the theoretical analysis of this current situation.
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In conclusion, it must be restated that formalisation is only part of the

engagement with a form of control-era cultural logic in Beckett. The intru-
sion of noise, the only way to understand those emergent elements of being
or experience which cannot be logically captured, modelled, represented or
made executable under the conditions of cybernetic systems, is a constant
presence throughout the texts described above. The components of experi-
ence that trouble Watt – such as the recurring decimals produced by
attempts to calculate the exact number of weeks in a year number of and
the impossibility of addressing the way Mrs Gorman might be feeling –
are clear examples of such noise. While the broader implications of this
must be left for another day, it is not possible to say so simply that Beckett’s
texts represent an objective historical process, whereby abstracted functions
replace being as the subject of human experience. Kafka’s writing, for
Deleuze, describes the emergence of perpetual modulations of power.
Beckett describes on one hand the extension of this historical process,
whereby the object of governance becomes to capture being as abstracted
functions, to represent human activities as discrete and thus modellable
units, whilst on the other hand foregrounding those aspects of being that
cannot be effectively processed in this way.44 Here Deleuze’s suggestion,
made in the ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, that ‘noise’ presents an
active threat to the efficacy of societies of control just as the impact of ‘sabo-
tage’ and ‘entropy’ on thermodynamic industrial machinery represented a
threat to the preceding disciplinary societies takes on a special resonance –
as the principle definition of that which cannot be informatically captured,
coded, and modelled.45 As Tiqqun put so simply, for all of the ‘universal
enrolment’ and ‘proliferating schematisation’ that characterises control, the
fact remains that ‘entropy, considered as natural law’ – that is, as a
general reminder of the impossibility of capturing, coding, and modelling
noise sequences rather than the specific thermodynamic principle that
impairs the machinery of the disciplinary era – ‘is a cybernetician’s
hell’.46 For all of the abstractions, logical formalisations, and algorithms

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 Seb Franklin Humans and/as machines

that Beckett’s work presents, the spectre of that which cannot be measured,
counted, parsed or cast into an algorithm remains ever-present, an assertion
of those aspects of being that can evade control.

University of Surrey

Notes

1 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and

the Machine (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1965), p. 12.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia
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University Press, 1995), p. 178. Also see Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings
in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, Eleanor Kaufmann and Kevin Jon Heller
(eds) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 14 –19.
3 Deleuze, Negotiations, pp. 179 –182.
4 See Martin Davis, ‘Mathematical Logic and the Origin of Modern Computers’
in Rolf Herken (ed.), The Universal Turing machine: A Half-Century Survey
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 150 – 151. While there is a
great deal of writing on the influence of Leibniz on Beckett’s thought, none
directly address the wheel, the calculus of reason that prefigures Boolean
algebra or the idea of a universal lingua characteristica indifferently suitable
for mathematics and communication. For work on the relationship between
Beckett and Leibniz see, for example, Garin Dowd, Abstract Machines:
Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari (Amsterdam and
New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 129 –162.
5 Tiqqun, ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis’, Tiqqun 2 (Paris: Belles-Lettres, 2001), p. 42.
6 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 179.
7 Ibid.
8 For Kafka on the prospect of combining various technical media – such as par-
lograph, gramophone, and telephone – and then connecting these combi-
nations with each other across space, see Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), pp. 167 – 168. In addition, see Frie-
drich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001), pp. 359– 363 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 222 – 228, and Bernhard Siegert,
Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal Service, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 256. The connection between Kafka’s
writing and the typewriter is also made briefly by Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Brian Massumi (Minnea-
polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 30, 94 n5.
9 Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, pp. 1, 175. As Kittler reveals in an
interview with Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann, ‘both equations
appeared some seventy years prior to the discourse networks which they
describe. Euler’s formula is from 1735, and Bolzano’s nonconvergent sum is
from 1830. I wanted to place both systems in the shadow of their mathematical

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do-ability’. Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann. ‘Technologies of

Writing: An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler’, New Literary History, 27.4
(1996), p. 735.
10 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge and London: The
MIT Press, 2001), p. 180.
11 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and
Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), p. 156.
12 Ibid., pp. 156 –159.
13 Ibid., p. 159.
14 Ibid. Alain Badiou also defines a specific movement in Beckett following How
It Is and concentrated on the image. He finds the preceding forms ‘progress-
ively replaced’ with what he deems ‘the figural poem of the subjects postures’.
Badiou notes this is a definite progression from the previous works, which
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are continuous with Kafka’s writing, supporting the periodisation that places
Kafka at the transition between disciplinary and control society and Beckett
alongside the ongoing development of control. Alain Badiou, ‘The Writing
of the Generic’ in Alberto Toscano and Nina Power (eds), On Beckett (Man-
chester: Clinamen, 2003), p. 16.
15 As Beckett himself remembers, ‘I think Watt was begun in Paris 1942, then
continued evenings mostly in Roussillon and finished in 1945 in Dublin
and Paris’. Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2001), p. 108.
16 Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987), pp. 91– 92. Despite these relative shortfalls in his periodisation,
Kenner remains the only Beckett critic to address his mathematical interests in
terms of computation. The main body of work to address Beckett and math-
ematics can be broadly divided into two types; texts that address specific math-
ematical concepts that Beckett is known to be aware of through his own
reading and trace these concepts through his work, and texts that apply a
general notion of, for example, chaos theory to his writing. Chris Ackerley’s
‘Samuel Beckett and Mathematics’ (http://www.uca.edu.ar/esp/sec-ffilosofia/
esp/docs-institutos/lit-inglesa/mathem.pdf, last accessed 6 January 2010) is
an example of the former, and John Leeland Kundert-Gibbs’s, No-thing is
Left to Tell: Zen/Chaos Theory in the Dramatic Art of Samuel Beckett
(London: Associated University Press, 1999) is an example of the latter.
17 See Scott Moore, ‘The ISO 7185 Standard Pascal Page’, http://www.
standardpascal.org, last accessed 7 May 2009.
18 Samuel Beckett, Watt (London, Montreal, and New York: Calder, 1998),
p. 138. Quoted in Kenner, Mechanic Muse, p. 93.
19 Kenner, Mechanic Muse, p. 95. Kenner is an able computer programmer as
well as literary critic, contributing a column to the computing magazine
Byte in the early 1980s. See Harvey Blume, ‘Hugh Kenner: The Grand
Tour’. http://www.bookwire.com/bookwire/bbr/reviews/March2001/hugh_
kenner_thegrandtour.htm, last accessed 23 April 2009.
20 See Ackerley, ‘Samuel Beckett and Mathematics’, pp. 9–12 for a complete list of
these ‘exhaustive logical paradigms’, albeit a list that does not acknowledge the

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 Seb Franklin Humans and/as machines

algorithmic procedures that they entail. For some additional, general accounts
of mathematics in Beckett see Hugh Kulik, ‘Mathematics as Metaphor: Samuel
Beckett and the Esthetics of Incompleteness’, in Papers on Language and Litera-
ture 29, and Howard J. Alane, ‘The Roots of Beckett’s Aesthetic: Mathematical
Allusions in Watt’, in Papers on Language and Literature 30.
21 Beckett, Watt, pp. 84– 98.
22 These numbers in Watt have been erroneously classified by Rubin Rabinovitz
and Barbara Reich Gluck as surds – irrational and hence noncomputable
numbers – when both are in fact rational numbers, since they are finitely
expressible as fractions. See Rabinovitz, The Development of Samuel Beckett’s
Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 153 and Gluck,
Beckett and Joyce (London: Bucknell University Press, 1979), pp. 91 – 92.
Turing’s ‘On Computable Numbers . . .’ sets out the definitions of countable
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and hence computable numbers for a theoretical computing machine,

although Kittler queries the consistency of Turing’s definitions in ‘There Is
No Software’; see Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems
(Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997), p. 189 n13.
23

Having ascertained these pivotal yesses and noes, the program, like the sen-
tence, dies away a little feebly, since it tells us nothing about what happened
when Mrs Gorman came, or about her sensations when she did not come. Is
she snug, in her chair, by the fire? Elated, in her chair, by the open window?
(Kenner, Mechanic Muse, pp. 95 –96)
24 See Friedrich Kittler, ‘Code’, in Matthew Fuller (ed.), Software Studies: A
Lexicon (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), pp. 40 –47, for a discussion of
computer code in relation to the history of cryptography.
25 Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communi-
cation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 3.
26 See Cornelis Robat, ‘Introduction to Software History’ for a history of program-
ming languages. http://www.thocp.net/software/software_reference/
introduction_to_software_history.htm#FirstSteps, last accessed 27 April 2009.
27 See Kittler, ‘There Is No Software’ and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘On Software, or
the Persistence of Visual Knowledge’, Grey Room, 18 (Winter 2004), pp. 26–51.
28 S.E. Gontarski (ed.), The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Volume II:
Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. xvi.
29 Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990),
p. 105. Quoted in Kenner, Mechanic Muse, pp. 100 – 101.
30
Galloway has made the same point in responding to Chun and Kittler,
stating that ‘it is foolish to think that writing an “if/then” control structure
in eight lines of assembly code is any more or less machinic than doing it in
one line of C, just as the same quadratic equation may swell with any
number of multipliers and still remain balanced. The relationship
between the two is technical’. Alexander R. Galloway. ‘Language wants to
be Overlooked’, The Journal of Visual Culture, 5 (2006), p. 319.

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31 Kenner, Mechanic Muse, p. 100.

32 B. Edlinger, H.G. Eichholtz, H. Feichtinger, J.P. Jordan, U. Kern, ‘Chip-
Tool-Praxis: Assembler-Programming Auf Dem PC, 1, cited in Kittler, Litera-
ture, Media, Information Systems, p. 157.
33 Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, p. 158.
34 The crucial paper in terms of practical applications of the FFT is J.W. Cooley and
J.W. Tukey’s ‘An algorithm for machine calculation of complex Fourier series’,
Mathematical Computation, 19.90 (1965), pp. 297–301. Also see Daniel
W. Rockmore, ‘The FFT – An Algorithm the Whole Family Can Use’, http://
www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~rockmore/cse-fft.pdf, last accessed 29 April 2009.
35 See M.D. Fagen (ed.), A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System,
Vol. 2 (New York: Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1975), p. 316.
36 B.M. Oliver, J.R Pierce, and C.E. Shannon, ‘The Philosophy of PCM’, in the
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Proceedings of the Institute of Royal Engineers, 36.11 (November 1948).

37 See Richard Coe, ‘Beckett’s English’ in Morris Beja, S.E. Gontarski, and Pierre
Aster (eds), Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1983), pp. 36 –58; Damian Gordon, ‘Using the Work of
Samuel Beckett to Teach Fundamental Computing Concepts’, http://www.
comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Publications/Author/2007INTED/eBeckett.ppt, last
accessed 29 April 2009; and Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haar, ‘Lessness: Ran-
domness, Consciousness and Meaning’, http://www.random.org/lessness/
paper/, last accessed 29 April 2009.
38 See Ivan Edward Sutherland, ‘Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Com-
munication System’, electronic version available from http://www.cl.cam.ac.
uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf, last accessed 30 April 2009.
39 See Kittler, ‘Protected Mode’ in Literature, Media, Information Systems.
40 Beckett. Complete Dramatic Works, p. 451.
41 Ibid.
42 Elizabeth Klaver has made a similar remark on Quad, stating somewhat
vaguely that it presents a ‘cycle of repetition which is similar to a computer
program in loop mode’. See Elizabeth Klaver, ‘Samuel Beckett’s Ohio
Impromptu, Quad and What Where: How It Is in the Matrix of Text and Tele-
vision’, Contemporary Literature, 32.3 (1991), pp. 366– 382.
43 Mark Fisher, ‘Cartesianism, Continuum, Catatonia: Beckett’, http://k-punk.
abstractdynamics.org/archives/007587.html, last accessed March 2006.
Quoted in McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 2007), paragraph 223. ‘Cyberspace’ altered to
‘gamespace’ by Wark throughout.
44 For more on the informatic capture of human actions see Philip Agre, ‘Surveil-
lance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy’, Information Society, 10.2 (1994),
pp. 101– 127.
45 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 180.
46 Tiqqun, ‘Cybernetic Hypothesis’, pp. 47– 48.
47 From http://www.trax.it/olivieropdp/mostranotizie2.asp?num=99&ord=20,
last accessed 7 May 2009.

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