The idea of Joyce's text as a kind of machine has also been treated by Jean-Michel Rabate. In his essay titled 'Lapsus ex machina,' Rabate examines Finnegans Wake as a "system which can be described as a word machine, or a complex machination of meanings," a "perverse semic machine" which "has the ability to distort the classical semiological relation between "production" and "information," by disarticulating the sequence of encoding and decoding" (79). Joyce's paronomasian and polyphonic writing, we might say, demonstrates that "[w]hat can't be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for" (FW 482.34). By dis-articulating the received phonic-graphic binary, Joyce's writing also destabilises classical notions of meaning and comprehension, forcing the reader to (re-)assemble the semantic horizons of a text with whatever is near at hand.
Among other things, this dis-articulation reveals that what remains necessary for meaning to arise is not a predetermined system of codes, but rather a sequence of internal textual (graphic and phonic) difference which participate in an-other kind of code breaking. This mechanical process of "breaking" codes gives rise, in turn, to an-other text, a text comprised of ruined sign structures and quasi-fragmentations. If Rabate relates the mechanical labour of the text to the "Levi-Straussian concept of bricolage" (81), he is able to do so because this labour would no longer distinguish writing from interpretatio
Such a machine would suspend reading in an open system, neither finite nor infinite, labyrinth-abyss ... and would thus also retain the memory of the traversals tried out ... by all its readers, these being so many texts to plug back into the general network ... But this machine is already in place, it is the "already" itself. We are inscribed in it in advance, promise of the hazardous memory in the monstrous to-come. ['Derridabase' 315-6]
This sense of the traversal and the labyrinth, taken together, would describe a kind of double apparatus which, in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari begin to identify in terms of a "transverse". They write:
... the whole itself is a product, produced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies nor totalizes, though it has an effect on these other parts simply because it establishes aberrant paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels, transverse unities between elements within their own particular boundaries. [43]
The notion of "transverse unities" is further elaborated in a reference to Proust's In Search of Lost Time which deals, in a way similar to Einsteinean relativity, with the point-of-view of a passenger inside a train compartment as it moves through the countryside. According to Deleuze and Gauttari, "there is never a totality of what is seen nor a unity of the points of view, except along the traversal that the frantic passenger traces from one window to the other, 'in order to draw together, in order to reweave intermittent and opposite fragments'" (43). This traversal involves the passenger-reader in a process of encoding and decoding which is no longer an abstract process. The resultant transversal, by installing the passenger-reader within the encoding and decoding process, brings about a rupture in the classical analytic scene and the objectivist methodology that belongs to it, thus opening analysis to the necessary possibility of the contingent in the orientation and structure of its gaze.
A similar sense of transversal can be detected in Joyce's Ulysses as what is generally termed "stream of consciousness" or "associative logic," characterised by Derek Attridge as "the multiple coincidences of language, both within language and across languages" ('Postmodern Joyce'). These coincidences, remarked upon by Leopold Bloom early in the "Lestrygonians" episode, signal a breakdown in the distinctions that we might otherwise wish to draw between intention and chance. Reflecting upon this breakdown, Attridge suggests: "if Joyce intentionally builds a machine of such complexity that unforseen connections are bound to arise when it comes into contact with a reader possessing equally complex systems of memory and information, we can't call them "unintentional" in any straightforward sense of the word. And this means we can't say that the openness to chance and to the reader ... is only an accidental effect". Moreover, as Derrida points out, such distinctions as "unintentional," "chance," or "accidental effect," would themselves depend, "as they say, on the context; but a context is never determined enough to prohibit all random deviation" ('Mes Chances' 4). As with the notion of "transverse unities," the inter of reading -- the fluid "intertext" which establishes itself as the "context" of all acts of reading -- would describe a place of "communication" within which apparently determined significations (at the limits of the encoding--decoding process) would have the chance of going astray, and metaphysical categories would risk breaking down. "Communication," as Bennington urges, "takes place, if at all, in a fundamental and irreducible uncertainty as to the very fact and possibility of communication" (Legislations, 2).
RE-EMBODYING
If we take Attridge's remarks about the Joycean machine and the way it appears to be driven by a breakdown in the distinction between intentionality and chance, and set them beside Deleuze and Gauttari's notion of "desiring machines," we may gain certain insights into Joyce's use of the term, "re-embodying" (cited in Anti-Oedipus 43).
According to the model of Deleuze and Gauttari, we could say that "desiring machines" function through a process of Joycean "interregnation" (FW 224.14) -- "flows and interruptions" or "breakthroughs and breakdowns" -- somewhat akin to the apparent discontinuities Attridge identifies between the concepts of non-straightforward (un)intentionality and chance. For Deleuze and Gauttari the desiring-production of "desiring machines" coalesces about what Artaud had called "the body without organs," a body which "is produced as a whole, but in its own particular place within the process of production, alongside the parts that it neither unifies nor totalizes" (Anti-Oedipus 43). Further, when the body without organs "turns back upon" these other parts, "it brings about transverse communications, transfinite summarizations, polyvocal and transcursive inscriptions on its own surface, on which the functional breaks of partial objects are continually intersected by breaks in the signifying chains, and by breaks effected by a subject that uses them as reference points in order to locate itself" (43) -- which recalls the process in Finnegans Wake by which Shem the Penman writes over the entire surface of his body with his own excrement (185.29-186.02).
This sense of "transverse communications" between the body without organs and its signifiers, suggests a kind of Wakean "grand continuum, overlorded by fate and interlarded with accidence" (FW 472.30-31); what we might also regard as a form of telepathy wherein the concepts of re-embodyment, metempsychosis, chance and intentionality intersect, so that it seems as if "Coming events cast their shadows before" (U 165.31): "Signifying ... that, primeval conditions hav[e] gradually receded but nevertheless ... [have] persisted through intermittences of ... providential divining, making possible and even inevitable, after his a time ... morphological circumformation" (FW 599.09-17).
This (telepathic) communication between "events" and "shadows," is aligned in Derrida's writing with the phenomenon of the "trace" and what he calls in 'Two Words for Joyce' "a hypermnesiac machine" (147). Following Joyce's writing practice in Finnegans Wake, Derrida is interested in how the idea (eidos) put to work hypermnemically, as an alternative to the intuition or direct experience of phenomenology, is not the signified concept (according to the destiny of the sign) but the elision of meaning brought about by the re-alignment of letters or phonemes. In Dissemination, Derrida suggests that this elision would give rise to a type of hypertext which would operate "in two absolutely different places at once, even if these were only separated by a veil" (221); a polyphony or paronomasia evident, for example, in such terms as Derrida's "dishemination" or indeed the entire textual surface of Finnegans Wake.
Referring to Derrida's text Glas -- what, in itself, has been referred to as "a sort of wake" ('Two Words for Joyce' 150) -- Gregory Ulmer coins the neologism "phonex" to indicate a kind of "generative grid" motivated by the recurrence of chance in the alignment and re-alignment of sublexical graphic and phonic units ('Op Writing: Derrida's Solicitation of Theoria,' 56). This "generative grid," which opens up a virtual text, or hypertext exceeding linear teleological forms, would deploy "the image of the Phoenix and the idea of metempsychosis" (Derrida, Glas 117ai) as metaphors of a "pyromaniac dissemination". For Derrida, the re-embodyments of the Phoenix is related, not to a dialectical unveiling of historical narrative, but rather to something more like a transverse; something which cuts across dialectics in the form, perhaps, of a (Nietzschean) eternal return. In other words, "phonex" could indicate (beginning with its own internal resonances of "Phoenix" and "phoneme," and its deployment as a kind of linguistic-semantic "matrix") an elision or lapsus in the narrative of intentionality which would open language to the recurrence of the chance event -- "the debility or failure that organizes the telos or the eschaton (Derrida, Dissemination 7) -- what Hegel in Reason in History calls "[t]he relief of inadequation" and which Derrida then links to the phenomenon, symbolised by the image of the Phoenix, of destiny's "suicide" (Glas 117a). As Joyce writes: "That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso counterpoint words" (FW 482.33-34).
For Derrida, the recurrence of the chance event is characterised as ostensibly mechanical repetition and "marks the necessity of a contamination of any essence by a generalized 'technology'" (Bennington, 'Derridabase' 312-3). This contamination derives from a kind of technology which occupies the position of "prehistory," thus inscribing itself ahead of a teleological system or historical narrative. Derrida writes: "the current technology of our computers and our micro-computerified archives and our translating machines remains a bricolage of a prehistoric child's toys" ('Two Words for Joyce' 147). Elsewhere he is more specific:
The game of which the repetition of repetition consists, is a selbstgeschaffene game, that the child has produced or has permitted to be produced by itself, spontaneously, and it is the first of its type. But none of all this (spontaneity, autoproduction, the originality of the first time) contributes any descriptive content that does not amount to the self-engendering of the repetition of itself. Hetero- tautology (definition of the Hegelian speculative) of repeated repetition, of self-repetition. [The Post Card 301]
We might care to identify this selbstgeschaffene game as the fort/da game of Freud's grandson. Watching his grandson playing in his pram one day, Freud observed him throwing a toy out of the pram and exclaiming fort! (gone away), then hauling it back in by means of a leash to the cry of da! (here). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this fort/da game is interpreted as the child's symbolic mastery of its mother's absence, and accordingly provides the basis of all future narratives of loss and recovery. The mechanical repetition of the game, however, opens up another space which is not contained within the narrative sequence -- the space of repetition itself. This space, however over-determined it may appear, allows for possible contingencies to arise (such as the object not being returned). Without this possibility the game itself could have no force. Moreover, we could say that this repetition (of the space of repetition) gives rise to a kind of telepathy whereby the child is put into communication with the Other. Like the symbol of the telephone in Ulysses, which Derrida engages in his essay 'Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,' the fort/da game reveals the importance of the leash (the handset, telephone cord, Stephen Dedalus' ashplant, the tapping cane of the blind man or the staff of Oedipus, Ariadne's thread) as what binds Da(-)sein to the destining "call" (of the Other).
This "call," for Derrida, is also connected to Heidegger's concepts of Verfallen and "thrown-ness". The chance "throw" (of dice, of the child's toy) doubles "the endless plunge" which "throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum" ('Two Words for Joyce' 148). Thus Finnegans Wake is also, in a sense, a repetition of this child's game of repetition -- the "endless plunge" into the "riverrun" of the Wake corresponding to a primordial call which calls repetition over to the place of the Other and of other texts.
This calling-over can also be considered as a process of metamorphosis, it marks in the Other what allows it to be called-back by the child as something belonging to it, what allows it to give itself as different signifiers and as differences within signifiers (including the different aspects of the child's toy which are revealed at every moment in the fort/da ritual). This (re-)embodyment of the Other as repetition of repetition provides the ritual basis of the Phoenix myth and the symbolic force of the Wakean "phonex". Beginning with the elision of desire upon which this proto-technological game is founded, the ritual of the machine marks an accumulation or gathering of chance which is then "disguised" in the form(s) of intentionality -- so that the child imagines that he has attained the desired mastery of its absent (m)other, or so that Spirit, as an aspect of the Phoenix, is misrecognised as attaining to self through a process of (Hegelian) dialectics. We could begin to view this disguise -- the quasi-transcendental -- as a kind of anamorphosis whereby the apparent inferability of (mnemic) traces runs up against the always-prior of originary repetition.