Mezangelle poetry is a form of electronic code poetry popularized by the avatarised avant-gardist, Australian multimedia artist Mez Breeze, a.k.a. Mez, a.k.a. Netwurker. The word mezangelle is adjective, noun and verb: mezangelle can refer to or describe the language in which Mez’s codeworks are written, while to mezangelle is to use, and operate within, this language. I would also argue that to mezangelle can also mean to engage more broadly with what N. Katherine Hayles has described as ‘experiments in multiple and interrelated semiotic systems’ [ref]N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: page 22.[/ref] as part of a boundary-disrupting play between natural human language and machine-readable code.

A close reading of mezangelle texts is interesting in itself; however, in this case I would like to deploy a wider reading of Mez’s works in order to draw out some of the feminist (and particularly poststructuralist feminist) implications of such linguistic play. In this spirit, I readily admit that, in this article I am only initially playing with these ideas, although I hope that my experiments may form the basis for further discovery.

In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélène Cixous calls for woman (that troubling universal feminine) to ‘write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon’[ref]Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’: page 250.[/ref], in order to undermine the cultural privilege of phallogocentrism. It is arguable that Western culture, and particularly Western literary culture, remains to a great extent entrapped in the phallogocentric mode — privileging, in equal and interrelated ways, the autonomous male subject and the autonomous signifying word (the word that is tied to a single meaning, the logical logos). For Cixous, writing against this mode would entail the destruction of the binaries of masculine/feminine and logic/illogic and their replacement with a fluid, dynamic interplay of desire:

to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of the one and the other, not fixed in sequences of struggle and expulsion or some form of death but infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another. A process of different subjects knowing one another and beginning one another anew only from the living boundaries of the other: a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and transformations of the same into the other and into the in-between …[ref]Ibid.: page 254. [/ref]

This ‘in-between’ significantly disrupts both the dominance of the authoritative signifier, the word whose meaning is fixed and singular, and that of the autonomous, self-identical subject (by all accounts a Cartesian oversimplification[ref]See pages 6-13 of Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies for a discussion of the Cartesian influence on phallocentric philosophies of self. [/ref]). The in-between stands for the human subject whose identity is ever-changing (for example, in-between the binary determinations of gender), and for the fluid signifiers the meanings of which are indeterminate and which stand in-between comprehensibility and nonsense, logic and illogic.

It is clear that the dual operations of phallogocentrism — assuring the dominance of both phallos and logos — are closely connected, by means of the privileging of certain binary terms over their opposites. In language, logic is privileged over illogic, and these terms are associated, respectively, with their sexual counterparts: the male and female, masculine and feminine, phallus and vagina. The latter term in each pair is subordinated to the former, and the feminine is associated with illogicality along with any number of other subordinate terms: the body that is subordinate to the mind, the domestic that is less valued than the public, the fluid that is coded as unpleasant or unruly in relation to the culturally favourable solid. Indeed, feminine embodiment, domesticity, and fluidity (both physical and psychological) have been given significant attention in feminist literature in the past half-century.

This division between the fluid and the solid is linked by theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz to the binary division between the masculine and the feminine. Grosz makes the claim that ‘there remains a broadly common coding of the female body as a body which leaks, which bleeds, which is at the mercy of hormonal and reproductive functions’[ref]Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: page 204. [/ref] and, as such, is caught up in a play of indeterminacy—the female body is constantly, and in many ways unpredictably, changing. Conversely, the male body, and particularly the phallus, has traditionally been coded as solid, self-identical and unchangeable, the dominating force that gives value to and defines the feminine and the model for psychoanalytic lack. Grosz suggests that the feminine experience of fluidity has been devalued by the phallicisation of the masculine body, which serves to solidify the threateningly pervasive qualities of flow that are experiences by all bodies regardless of sex. By effacing the fluid aspects of the body and by extension of the self, and by treating the male body as solid and self-contained, psychoanalytic and medical discourses shift the characteristics of permeability, openness, and more loaded characteristics of infectiousness and contamination, to be exclusively feminine. The root of this problem is the division of binary terms, and the solution is a reclamation of the positive value of the fluid, not as the opposite of the solid but as something that can fill the spaces between the binary terms and join them into what Cixous has termed ‘a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble’[ref]Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’: page 259. [/ref], or what Deleuze and Guattari describe as an ‘assemblage’.[ref]see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. [/ref]

Following this thread of Grosz’s work, particularly in Volatile Bodies, I would suggest that both feminist and poststructuralist thought—via Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray on the one hand and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the other—are committed to overcoming phallogocentrism and binary logic by means of a philosophy of flow. In particular, it is Irigaray who makes the connection between the feminine and the pleasurable, stating that ‘[f]eminine pleasure has to remain inarticulate in language, in its own language, if it is not to threaten the underpinnings of logical operations’.[ref]Luce Irigaray, ‘The Powers of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine’: page 317. [/ref] Here, the feminine is allied with the inarticulate, that which is invisible under a phallogocentric regime that privileges logos. To dismantle logos, a feminist jouissance needs to be articulated — rather than simply answering masculine logic with its opposite, the feminist text needs to flow between these two poles, in a perpetual play of desire and deferral. Flow is, in this model, that which goes beyond or surpassed the binary, the ‘disruptive excess … that exceeds common sense’[ref]Ibid.: page 318. [/ref].

By adopting a philosophy of flow as part of contemporary literary criticism, it will be possible to follow Elizabeth Grosz in her project of ‘regarding the body [both the physical body of the subject and the textual corpus] as the threshold or borderline concept that hovers perilously and undecidably at the pivotal point of binary pairs’. [ref]Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: page 23. [/ref] In the case of mezangelle poetry, the text stands at a liminal point between sense and nonsense, logic and illogic, playing between these poles without privileging, or even admitting allegiance to, either extreme. As such, the poetic corpus fits into the Deleuzo-Guattarian model of the Body-without-Organs (BwO), which ‘is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free’[ref]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: page 161. [/ref] and which cannot be constrained by one unchanging position or composition. Perhaps unfortunately, the body can never completely destratify, can never fully attain the ideal fluidity divorced from the stratifications and crystallizations of socially-imposed orthodoxy. However, a body in continual movement is in fact favourable to the fully stratified organism on the one hand and the fully fluid, empty, and ‘catastrophic’ body on the other. The continual swinging between multiple positions, the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation that does not reach an end, allows the BwO to function as the in-between, the dynamic assemblage that both encompasses and surpasses the poles of binary pairs.

On a metatextual level, Mez’s use of authorial avatars for her work can be seen as a movement between various positions (the name as position, the website as position), as well as between various models of selfhood that are all divorced from what would generally be considered the ‘real’. As I have already intimated, Mez is known variously as Mary-Ann Breeze, Mez Breeze, Mez, or Netwurker, depending on the context in which she is encountered — for example, she often self-referentially codes her authorial self as Mez in her works, signing on or off by that name, while Netwurker is her handle or username on websites including LiveJournal and Twitter. As well as this referential avatarism — the act of changing names — Mez also undertakes a great deal of her art practice within two-dimensional virtual space, for example her work with the group Third Faction, who operate within the massively multiplayer online game World Of Warcraft. The stated aim of Third Faction is ‘exposing binary systems in Synthetic Environments’[ref]See the Third Faction website [/ref], and it is arguable that one of the binary systems thus exposed is the natural/synthetic divide, the division between real life and game life. Third Faction seeks to bring real-world ethics into a game world that quite significantly constrains character behaviour and endeavours to force specifically confrontational player-vs-player interaction[ref]A poignant example of the problematic morality of competitive online gaming can be seen in the ‘World of Warcraft Funeral Raid’ YouTube clip. Members of the Horde faction were holding an in-game memorial for a deceased player when Alliance player-characters attacked the funeral en-masse. This example, and the discussion which followed it, demonstrates the disjunction between ‘playing by the rules’, i.e. fighting members of the opposing team, and respecting the rights of the inhabitants of the game world. In contrast, one example of Third Faction’s non-combative projects is /hug or SlashHug, in which Third Faction members ‘bring assistance without discrimination to the wounded on the battlefield’ by providing aid to injured player-characters regardless of in-game alliances of race or faction (see the Third Faction website). [/ref]

Screenshot: A World of Warcraft player-character is awarded in-game honor points after an Alliance faction attacks an unarmed group of mourners at a Horde funeral.

However, all of the actions of Third Faction take place in-game and are conducted by player avatars, visual representations of the player that allow and, in fact, govern, the ‘real’ person’s interventions in the game world. Indeed, talking about these avatars, whether they are referential or representational, as though they are all masks for the ‘real’ Mez is highly misleading. In the feminist sense, Mez’s use of avatars can be seen as a means of encountering the other within the self—she shifts through a number of different subjectivities which are nevertheless a part of her, in much the same way that Irigaray theorises feminine self-touching as ‘a nearness so close that an identification of one or the other, and therefore any form of property, is impossible … a closeness with the other that is so near she cannot possess it, any more than she can possess herself’.[ref]Luce Irigaray, ‘The Sex Which Is Not One’: page 104-5 (italics in original). [/ref]. And, as part of the phenomenology of digital engagement, in which all interactions across the digital network are mediated by what John Reep calls ‘purely symbolic bodies consisting solely of language and programming code’[ref]John Reep, ‘Re: The Fact That I Am Fiction’. [/ref], avatarism breaks down the divide between the real and the virtual. The avatar is an extension of the real self, ‘transgressing … pre-assigned boundaries and perhaps venturing into new, previously forbidden or inaccessible territories’[ref]Ibid. [/ref], but it also stands apart from the self, achieving actions (for example in-game behaviours) that would not be possible for the ‘real’ physical human self alone. The dominance of the ‘real’, here allied with the physical and opposed to the virtual, representational realm of avatarised selves, is broken down; the boundaries between material and virtual selves are permeated; and subjectivity is constantly shifting between the actions of the ‘real’ self and those of one or more avatars.

This division between the material and the virtual also has significant effects on more specifically textual forms. The positive revaluing of fluid forms is an unusual move in the late age of print, given that linguistic value in particular has been determined by the solidity, fixity, and permanence of the printed page. However, given the hyperbolic increase in digital artforms, the philosophy of flow that emerged prior to the 1980s can be seen as an antecedent to the new operations of language and selfhood in the digital realm. Theorising on hypertext, Jay David Bolter makes this particular distinction, and the philosophical foundations, explicit:

In the age of the manuscript and especially in the age of print, the book was valued for its capacity to preserve and display fixed structures. It was a technological reflection of the great chain of being, in which all of nature had its place in a subtle, but unalterable hierarchy… [T]he electronic book reflects a different natural world, in which relationships are multiple and evolving: there is no great chain of being in an electronic world-book. [ref]Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: page 105. [/ref]

While print texts were traditionally valued for their permanence, digital texts can explore, experiment with, and give value to the qualities of ephemerality and emergence.

Digitality has also reopened the text to a consideration of materiality: both the ‘material basis of literary production’[ref]N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines: page 19. [/ref] that forms the basis of Hayles’ critical corpus, but also the material conditions by which the products of literature are disseminated and used — in other words, how texts are read as well as how they are written. Although print media have very specific material conditions, these have generally been treated as part of a tabula rasa on which the text itself (in opposition to the materials which embody the text and make it possible) can be inscribed. Materials such as ink and paper have been seen as ‘neutral, inconsequential carriers of “content”’[ref]Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: page 19. [/ref] and the impact of these material objects upon the phenomenology of reading has generally been effaced. It is most often that case that avant garde practice, rather than popular or orthodox literature, has engaged with the materiality of paper media. To give just one example, the technique of randomised cut-ups outlined in Tristan Tzara’s ‘dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love’ introduces unorthodox physical interactions into the act of composition, as well as breaking down the notion of the print page as a fixed totality:

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. [ref]Tristan Tzara, ‘dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love’: page 39. [/ref]

By foregrounding the artifice involved in any linguistic construction, experiments such as these also serve to roughen the text and reveal the non-neutrality of the textual medium. This is particularly significant for dead-tree media, the fixity of which has been considered almost sacred, but it is also relevant, as Hayles suggests, for digital texts, which require specific physical interactions with interfaces and programs in order to be constructed, transmitted, received and read.

The linguistic play within mezangelle poetry in some ways resembles the products of these Dadaist cut-ups, although the disjunction is conducted on a more minute level by means of a technique of lexical splicing. Mezangelle is characterised by the splicing of individual words into one another through the use of symbols outside of the traditional alphanumeric elements of written English. As such, mezangelle becomes what N. Katherine Hayles refers to as ‘a creole evocative for human readers, especially those familiar with the denotations of programming languages’, which ‘uses programming punctuation and expressions to evoke connotations appropriate to the linguistic signifiers’. [ref]N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: page 20-21. [/ref] Or, in Mez’s own words: ‘i constantly mine programming conventions/structures + actively repurpose them as part of my works’. [ref]Mez Breeze, personal interview: no page. [/ref] This repurposing of digital codes shifts them into an intermediary space between full computer operability and human comprehension, and also serves to trouble the supposedly ‘natural’ features of human language by penetrating the boundaries of words and splicing lexemes to one another.

This lexical splicing can be seen throughout Mez’s works, but a fairly simple example comes from her work ‘rabBit_frOSt[ing]’. [ref]Mez Breeze, ‘rabBit_frOSt[ing]’: no page. [/ref] Even within the title, the use of extralinguistic symbols, such as the underscore and square brackets, serves to break up the component words and splice them into one another. The traditional linear reading of lines or sentences is overtaken by the layering of multiple semantic possibilities — Mez forms new splicewords in which no one of the original terms is privileged as the primary site of semantic meaning. In the case of ‘rabBit_frOSt[ing]’, an initial interpretation might be ‘rabbit frosting’. [ref]Ibid. [/ref] However, simply by taking the capitalisation into account, we encounter a new set of lexemes which draw from both sides of the artificial/natural binary: on the one hand ‘Bit’ and ‘OS’ act as self-referential markers drawn from the digital realm in which these texts exist; while ‘Sting’ resonates with another meaning of ‘bit’, the past tense of ‘to bite’, which gives connotations of viciousness and animalism and perhaps implies a predator to which the eponymous rabbit-bit is prey. Significantly, in this context ‘bit’ plays between two meanings and between two binary realms — the nature/artifice division, the terms of which are often regarded as ontologically incommensurable but which may instead be thought of, to adopt Grosz’s metaphor, as two sides of a Möbius strip on which, ‘through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another’. [ref]Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: page xii. [/ref]

SCreenshot: from ‘rabBit_frOSt[ing]’, as it appears on Mez’s livejournal site.

This proliferation of multiple meanings, which operates beyond the boundaries of the univocal meaning which is traditionally the subject of textual criticism, is expanded by the inclusion of extralinguistic symbols, or what Jay David Bolter refers to as ‘diagrammatic signs that cannot be spoken’. [ref]Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: page 201. [/ref] In this way, Bolter distinguishes between common punctuation such as commas and full stops, which partly govern the rhythm of reading, and symbols such as square brackets and underscores, which, in mezangelle, serve to rupture the linearity of the sentence into a multi-layered matrix of lexemic fragments. The interpolation of alphanumeric symbols and diagrammatic signs serves as a mechanism by which words are fused into new polysemantic splicewords.

The use of square brackets around parts of words allows for two or more lexemes to operate in conjunction by positioning them more or less in the same physical space within the text. Here, ‘frOSt[ing]’ [ref]Mez Breeze, ‘rabBit_frOSt[ing]’: no page. [/ref] implies both ‘frost’ and ‘frosting’ without the need to repeat the shared elements of the two words. Mez uses this technique throughout her codeworks: extralinguistic symbols, including square brackets, round brackets, slashes, and the angle brackets formed by the less than (<) and greater than (>) symbols, serve to break down the linear syntagm of the sentence and add levels of meaning to the text.

Because the ‘-ing’ of ‘frosting’ is bounded by a set of square brackets, the pun of ‘rabbit frost’ and ‘Robert Frost’ is made visually explicit, and this play-on-words is further elaborated and expanded in the poem itself. The play of punning relies upon the polysemantic nature of words, relying on the multiple, contextually-determined meanings of a single word or the homophonic similarities between words (as with ‘rabbit’ and ‘Robert’) to create connotative connections. In both cases, a play-on-words requires that both meanings of the word are explicit, relying on the indeterminacy and in-betweenness of the word. The near-homophone of rabbit/Robert is only significant, or rather, only playful, because of the proximity of ‘frost’: the denotation of the written word is ‘rabbit’ but, given the context, this implies the play-on-words that evokes the name of the poet Robert Frost.
In the third line of ‘rabBit_frOSt[ing]’, Breeze once again splices into the name ‘Robert Frost’, merging the shared letters of the two words and creating ‘fRo(bert)ST’, which she then elaborates into ‘Robert_frOSt_ST: do.u.live:there:?’ [ref]Ibid. [/ref], a playful question that emerges from the act of splicing the words and separating the ‘st’ at the end of Frost’s name.

This question is contained within a border made of hash symbols — similarly, in many programming languages, comments that are intended to aid the human programmer, but not be ‘read’ by the computer and included in the program, are often marked by a null symbol. The hash is used as a null symbol to mark programmer comments in languages such as Perl and PHP, and while the bordering used by Breeze may not be an orthodox technique within coding, it does have the appreciable benefit of standing out. As with functional programming codes, it would be easy for a human programmer reading this poem to distinguish between what is intended for his/her benefit and what is intended for the machine compiler. In short, Breeze has marked off the more ‘human’ sections of her work, the parts that ‘translate’ the more heavily coded lines — taking ‘fRo(bert)ST’ and translating it into ‘Robert_frOSt_ST’. It is worth noting that both of the ‘hashed’ lines in this poem still contain the non-alphanumeric underscore, and, indeed, the line ‘#kill_zOne_bits: Ra(re)bb(s)its.+.sIlk(en)#’ is particularly complex [ref]Ibid. [/ref]; however, this complexity seems to suggest that all levels of the text, even those which seem the most human, can be permeated by the quirks of digitality. The boundaries between the natural and artificial languages are shown to be indistinct and easily transgressed by splicewords that continually flow and return, deterritorialise and reterritorialise, and ‘seep or surge into one another, like tides flowing in and out of an estuarial river’. [ref]N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: page 63. [/ref]

The peculiar linguistic characteristics of mezangelle serve to controvert the presumption of a material, or, indeed, a cultural tabula rasa upon which a text can be unproblematically built. In a similar way, the experiences of the male body have been normalised and universalised, becoming the blank slate upon which feminine experience is an aberrant mark. The body, like the print page, has been treated as a neutral medium, both for cultural inscription and for inscription from within by the controlling mind or reason, and, like the print page, the material realities of the body have in many cases been effaced or treated as taboo. As Elizabeth Grosz argues, ‘the specificity and concreteness of the body must be neutralized, tamed, made to serve other purposes… Its corporeality must be reduced to a predictable, knowable transparency’. [ref]Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: page 9-10.[/ref] Reason and masculinity, logos and phallos, have been privileged over illogicality and femininity, and mind has been considered as the controller of the body, with little acknowledgement of effects of materiality on subjectivity. It is only the phenomenology allied with Maurice Merleau-Ponty that begins to examine the body as a non-neutral, effective entity that operates synergistically with the mind, rather than simply as a conduit for sensory experience and physical interaction.
To overcome these dualisms, it is worth attempting to draw together poststructuralist and feminist analyses of fluidity, not as part of a fluid/solid binary but as an ever-changing assemblage that can contain and go beyond the characteristics of either binary term. In her discussion of Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizomatics, Grosz states:

A ‘desiring machine’ opposes the notion of unity or oneness: the elements or discontinuities that compose it do not belong to either an original totality that has been lost or one which finalizes or completes it, a telos … Desire does not create permanent multiplicities; it experiments, producing ever-new alignments, linkages, and connections, making things. [ref]Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: page 168.[/ref]

If we treat a mezangelle text as a desiring machine, an assemblage in constant interaction with other assemblages and with the elements that constitute it, then it is clear that the mezangelle work does not emerge from a single originary meaning, nor does it progress towards one. Rather, it maintains a continual sense of becoming, of desire forever deferred, of functioning as a dynamic play of multiple meanings of equal status.

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