Lab Activity: Poststructuralism, Poems, and Gen AI: Deconstructive Reading
This blog is based on Lab Activity: Poststructuralism, Poems, and Gen AI: Deconstructive Reading and this task was assigned by Dilip Barad sir.
1. "Being, Nothing, and the Wi-Fi Signal"
(On Existentialism, in Heroic Couplets)
I woke this morn to dread and black despair,
Then checked my phone — no signal, life’s unfair.
What is the self, if not a scrolling thumb,
Endless abyss, where memes and meaning come?
Sartre once said existence comes before,
But he had cafés, not the App Store door.
I forge my soul in silence, angst, and tweets,
Where breakfast snaps replace old poets' feats.
I choose, therefore I am — and then regret,
Yet like my rent, the question’s unpaid debt.
So raise a glass to nausea, doubt, and style:
The void looks better filtered through a smile.
Deconstruction of “Being, Nothing, and the Wi-Fi Signal”
Stage 1: The Verbal Level (Contradictions and Paradoxes in Language)
At the verbal level, we focus on ambiguities and self-contradictions within phrases, echoing Empsonian close reading and classical stylistics but taken further in a post-structuralist direction.
Line 1: “I woke this morn to dread and black despair,” presents a typical existential mood. However, line 2 immediately trivializes it with “Then checked my phone no signal, life’s unfair.” The juxtaposition undercuts the weight of existential despair with the comic triviality of Wi-Fi loss, undermining the seriousness of existential themes and showing the instability of tone and meaning.
Line 3: “What is the self, if not a scrolling thumb,” proposes an ironic reduction of identity to a bodily gesture. The metaphor mocks deep philosophical questions by replacing them with banal digital habits, thus both enacting and negating existential inquiry in a single move.
Line 6: “But he had cafés, not the App Store door.” This is ironic and seemingly respectful toward Sartre, but it undercuts him by implying that 21st-century alienation is worse or simply more absurd than that of 1940s existentialism. It implies progress, but in a regressive form: an evolution from authentic alienation to digital absurdity.
Line 10: “Yet like my rent, the question’s unpaid debt.” This line fuses economic anxiety with philosophical questioning, ironically leveling the high seriousness of existentialism with mundane struggles. The phrase “unpaid debt” is itself paradoxical in that the poem is “paying off” the philosophical inquiry with wit, while claiming the question remains unpaid revealing a contradiction in its own rhetorical gesture.
These examples highlight language's self-defeating and unstable quality, suggesting that meaning is not only deferred (as Derrida would argue) but displaced through irony.
Stage 2: The Textual Level (Shifts in Voice, Tone, Focus, and Logic)
At the textual level, we look for inconsistencies in perspective, tone, and structure—larger scale instabilities that reflect the poem’s inability to maintain a unified or stable meaning.
Shift in Tone: The tone oscillates between mock-heroic and sincere. The title and opening lines suggest a pseudo-serious philosophical engagement, but this is quickly undercut by flippant references to memes, breakfast snaps, and social media. This tonal instability calls into question the poem’s sincerity: is it critiquing existential despair or simply parodying it?
Shift in Philosophical Register: The poem opens with a Sartrean reference (“existence comes before”), suggesting engagement with classical existentialism, but quickly degenerates into a parody of modern life. This sudden shift from high philosophy to internet culture causes a rupture in conceptual consistency, making it impossible to ground the poem in a single philosophical framework.
Time and Self: The poem lacks any clear temporal progression or personal narrative the self is reduced to an interface (“scrolling thumb”), and time is compressed into a single instant of absurdity (no Wi-Fi, no being). The absence of narrative continuity reinforces the post-structuralist view that identity and temporality are constructed and easily deconstructed by language and culture.
Omissions: The poem never actually resolves its existential crisis. It ends with a sarcastic toast: “The void looks better filtered through a smile.” There's no philosophical insight, no mourning, no transformation only ironic deflection. This absence of resolution is itself a form of structural silence, a void that resists closure, echoing Derrida’s view that meaning is always incomplete and deferred.
Stage 3: The Linguistic Level (Language’s Slipperiness and Binary Reversals)
Finally, at the linguistic level, we reflect on the slipperiness of signifiers and the inversion of traditional binaries, characteristic of deconstructive reading.
Binary Reversals:
Being/Nothing: Traditionally, “being” is privileged, but here “nothing” (or Wi-Fi absence) is more psychologically significant. The loss of a signal becomes the loss of self nothingness becomes dominant.
High/Low Culture: The poem collapses the binary between existential philosophy and social media triviality. By equating Sartre with the App Store, it reverses the cultural hierarchy, mocking both.
Authenticity/Performance: The line “I choose, therefore I am and then regret” deconstructs Descartes and Sartre simultaneously. The supposed assertion of self becomes the basis for immediate disillusionment. Thus, choice doesn’t guarantee identity, but rather exposes its fragility.
Signifier vs. Signified:
The phrase “scrolling thumb” displaces the abstract “self,” reducing it to a physical act. The signified (identity, being) is thus never stable only gestures, apps, and reactions float in a world of signifiers.
The final line “The void looks better filtered through a smile” highlights language’s tendency to mask, not reveal. A smile possibly an emoji or a literal mask becomes the filter through which nothingness is consumed, suggesting that language and media obscure the Real, rather than express it.
Conclusion (In Deconstructive Spirit)
Far from being a straightforward satirical poem, “Being, Nothing, and the Wi-Fi Signal” is internally conflicted, constantly undercutting its own assertions, oscillating between critique and parody, and ultimately exposing the unstable, ironic ground on which modern identity is built. Like Thomas’s refusal to mourn, this poem performs a refusal to mean definitively, generating a virtual self that is always caught between signal and silence, meaning and meme, existence and update pending.
2. "The Digital Bard's Complaint"
Behold the age where code and Keats entwine,
Where Shakespeare’s plays are graphed on PowerPoint line.
The scholar scans a PDF and sighs,
Then feeds the text through AI’s hungry eyes.
“What is the soul?” we ask — then hit ‘Export’;
The spreadsheet weeps, but Google gives report.
“Metadata is meaning now,” they boast,
While footnotes die on servers coast to coast.
We digitize the canon, pixel-bound,
Then wonder why the magic can't be found.
Oh brave new world, where Borges meets Excel
And every thought must fit an HTML.
Deconstructive Reading of “The Digital Bard’s Complaint”
in the style of Catherine Belsey
The Primacy of the Signifier
At first glance, “The Digital Bard’s Complaint” seems to make a lament for the digital turn in literary studies a humorous but earnest protest against the translation of poetic soul into data and code. But like the Imagist and modernist examples Belsey analyzes, this poem does not merely describe a transformation. Instead, its language performs it.
The poem begins with a visual juxtaposition:
“Behold the age where code and Keats entwine,”
“Where Shakespeare’s plays are graphed on PowerPoint line.”
This is a moment akin to Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”. Just as Pound's “apparition” creates a spectral fusion of faces and petals, here we are invited to see a strange merger of canonical literature and digital tools: Keats (Romanticism, lyricism, soul) and code (system, structure, machine logic). The visual image of Keats entwined with code is impossible, absurd, and therefore entirely poetic not because it refers to a real-world situation, but because it forges an unexpected connection between signifiers, based not on logic but on connotation and contrast.
Like in “The Red Wheelbarrow”, where Belsey shows that the object is not grounded in empirical reality but in the bright, clean play of language and image, the references in this poem Shakespeare, Borges, Excel are evocative, not descriptive. The poet seems to mourn, but what is being mourned is not the soul of poetry it is the loss of stable referents. “Keats” becomes a signifier of lost lyric purity, just as “PowerPoint” becomes a signifier of instrumental modernity.
Associative Logic, Not Reference
Take the phrase:
“Then feeds the text through AI’s hungry eyes.”
Here, AI is personified, but its “eyes” are not literal. They are metaphoric, just as the “petals on a wet black bough” are metaphoric, not actual. We aren’t shown a description of an event, but a network of signifiers “feeds,” “text,” “hungry,” “eyes” each pulling associations of consumption, scrutiny, and cold intelligence. The meaning of this line, like that of Pound’s poem, is produced through juxtaposition, not reference. It is not AI that consumes, but the idea of poetry itself being processed algorithmically, rendered soulless.
Similarly, the line:
“Metadata is meaning now,” they boast,
might seem like a statement, but the verb “boast” tells us more. It reveals irony, a distancing tone. The speaker isn’t merely reporting they are critiquing, even mocking. Yet this mockery relies not on argument but on tone, which is inherently unstable. Belsey would point out that the authority of voice here is disrupted: who is speaking? The “bard”? The academic? The poem itself?
Like “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, which Belsey shows ultimately questions the permanence of beauty even as it claims to preserve it, this poem undercuts its own gestures. It mourns the loss of poetic magic while composing that very mourning in polished verse in rhymed iambic pentameter that recalls the very literary tradition it critiques.
Rhythm and the Semiotic
In Belsey’s reading of Kristeva, poetic rhythm becomes semiotic a pre-linguistic, musical, bodily force. Here too, rhythm and rhyme play a crucial role.
“The spreadsheet weeps, but Google gives report.”
“While footnotes die on servers coast to coast.”
These lines don’t just state facts; they perform sound-play. Weeps/report and coast/toast resonate through internal tension, suggesting mourning and cold efficiency. The rhythm has a lulling symmetry, but the content disrupts it as if the poem’s body (its meter) is at odds with its message (its mourning).
This is where Belsey’s insights into Kristeva’s semiotic are most visible. The music of the lines the patterned stresses, the witty rhymes creates a sensuous pleasure that contradicts the idea that “so much has been lost.” Like Williams’s “glazed with rain water,” the poem glows with aesthetic surface, even as it claims to depict cultural decline.
Referential Collapse and Binary Tension
The closing couplet:
“Oh brave new world, where Borges meets Excel
And every thought must fit an HTML.”
Again, what appears to be a mournful satire of Digital Humanities is actually far more complex. Borges the master of infinite libraries and metafiction is hardly a symbol of stability or pre-digital purity. He already wrote stories that anticipated AI and hypertext. Excel, in this context, becomes a mirror of Borges’s infinite catalogues, only flatter, more banal. The joke lands because the two terms are so different, and yet we are made to see their parallel.
Like Belsey’s reading of “In a Station of the Metro”, we must recognize that these images are estranged from real-world referents. “Borges meets Excel” does not name a historical event; it generates a collision of signifiers that belong to different orders of meaning. We read not a loss of magic, but an ironic hyper-awareness of the conditions of meaning-making in the digital age.
Conclusion (The Poem as Play of Signifiers)
Just as Catherine Belsey argues that “The Red Wheelbarrow” and Pound’s Metro poem are not simple images of reality, but acts of signification, so too “The Digital Bard’s Complaint” is not merely a satire of academia. It stages a conflict between past and present signifiers, between lyric and logic, soul and spreadsheet. Its meaning lies not in what it says about the world, but in how language behaves within it.
Far from delivering a simple lament, the poem participates in the very digital poetics it critiques, offering an ironic, self-aware meditation on poetry’s survival not as truth, but as a network of signifiers, always shifting, never fixed.
References :
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory, 3/E. Viva Books Private Limited, 2010.
Barad, Dilip, Deconstructive Analysis of Ezra Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' and William Carlos Williams's 'The Red Wheelbarrow', Researchgate.net, Accessed 3 July 2025.
Thank you !
Comments
Post a Comment