My Grandmother Glitches the Machine

Everything that is spoken and can be spoken is merely a figurative term we use to nominate the unnamable, an inventory of “metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” that we have mistaken for the real and fixed. All we have is language and we cannot get beyond it.

“The glitch is a wonderful experience of an interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse… But once I named it, the momentum—the glitch—is no more…” For Menkman, the glitch cannot be described or it ceases to be what it claims; it is a lack, a break in the pattern of meaning that forces its own opening.

The problem with the machine as a metaphor is that it is claustrophobic; all that passes through and out of it is accounted for by a precise and unrelenting algebra

A glitch is similar in that it is a failure in a minor key, a moment of slippage when the code or the machine blunders and produces an unintended, random output.

I’ve developed a certain tenderness for the glitch: the riddled, dysfunctional thing that evades the conditions of what might be expected and what might be known, rupturing unfamiliar territories, or maybe a glimpse into a second reality that has been there all along

It’s a bit like dreaming, which is always a bit like remembering.