Automatic poetics. A study of the history and semiotic conditions of artificial linguistic creativity

My research focuses on the automation of writing in contemporary literature, looking at its scientific and technical conditions as well as its aesthetic and semiotic effects. The subject is studied first by analysing the discourses of XIX century biology and psychopathology in Europe, especially concerning the idea of “automatism” and its correlated scientific ideology, as it is expressed in the organism-machine analogy. Automatism is then seen in parallel with the rise of automation, as stemming both from logic- and labour-related issues. The hypothesis is that during this period—between the automatism of the body as well as thought, and the automation of mental labour and reasoning—we have the first speculations or designs of machines capable of reproducing a linguistic faculty. This automation of language is then researched, moving on to the XX century, at the intersection of linguistics and cybernetics. Specifically, a central portion of the study is dedicated, first, to the notion of linguistic creativity from Saussure to Chomsky, by also looking at how that same notion was being dealt with in logic-based theories of language (that is, from Carnap to Bar-Hillel). This is paralleled with how cyberneticians, in some of their works or in such occurrences as the Macy Conferences, were tackling a very similar debate, centred on how language could be effectively formalized in order that a machine could produce novel and original linguistic utterances. I then move from linguistic to literary issues: I focus on what allowed an “automatic ethos” in contemporary literature (and prose writing in particular) to develop and be maintained thanks to the idea that not just humans but machines too, after all, can be considered creative agents in their own right. A discussion of the cybernetic origins of this idea are reconnected to the preceding part and lead me to deal with computational creativity, thus with the conditions that made a technical process (computation of linguistic data) into an aesthetic one (creation of computer-made works of literature). The goal is to study the aesthetic and semiotic grounds on which an “automatic linguistic creativity” might be possible. The final section of the research will analyse the current situation, by appealing to a number of examples of computer-generated literature the aim of which is to propose the necessity to delineate different forms of judgement when reading and interpreting those computational texts. Here, the aim is also to define the emergence of a specific moment in the history of poetics, seeing how the idea of “automated” writing favoured the development of a similar interest in the literary field, Futurists and Surrealists being among the first ones having experimented with such forms of “automatic” writing. From the latter two groups, the final steps of the research will be towards the fulfilment of this push towards more automated forms of linguistic creativity, until the recent emergence of prompting in the digital arts.