#1001week11

Though repetition. Permutation, and seriality figure prominently as devices in aesthetic uses of tedium, practitioners have achieved the same effect through a strategy of agglutination — the mass adhesion or coagulation of data particles or signifying units... Inducing a series of fatigues or minor exhaustions, rather than a single, major blow to the imagination, stuplimity paradoxically forces the reader to go on in spite of the enticement to readers give up (as many readers of The Making of Americans inevitably do), pushing us to reformulate new tactics for reading.

To make Her Recursive Apology (1993), for example, four computers, each hooked to a dot-matrix printer, were programmed to randomly generate apologies "in the smallest possible type" on continuously-fed paper. As Zweig notes, "The printer apologized for two weeks, day and night. Whenever a box of paper ran out, the computer displayed the number of times it had apologized. Because the apologies were randomly chosen by the computer, no two sheets of paper are alike. I arranged the pages in a recursive spiral structure, each stack one sheet larger than the next" (Zweig 248-9). Pushing the boundary between the emotive and the mechanical, and ironically commenting on the feminization of apologetic speech acts, Her Recursive Apology stages the convergence of gendered subject and machine not via fashionable cyborg, but through a surprisingly "flat" or boring display of text, its materiality and iterability foregrounded by the piles of its consolidation.