Does AutoCorrect Correct AutoCorrect?

The answer to the question posed in my title is, Yes, it does. Which is to say, the word "AutoCorrect" is included in Microsoft Word's database of words that are deemed legitimate words in the English language, and therefore not in need of squiggly-red-line correction as you type it in a document. Try it for yourself: compare AutoCorrect with LoobyBooby or HarlemGlobetrotters. AutoCorrect is given the green light, while the other two are stopped in their tracks with the iconic red line. HarperCollins -- the publisher -- is, like AutoCorrect, deemed to be legitimate.

I've written elsewhere on this blog about Jacques Derrida's efforts to figure out AutoCorrect on his word-processing program (whether Derrida was using Word or not is debatable -- but it's highly likely that he was). More recently, Chris Wilson has written an article about Word's sluggish updating of its word database. Because Microsoft employs human-supervised editorship of the database, the process of including new words in it is slow and uneven. Wilson suggests that Word adopt a Google way of analyzing the correct spelling of words algorithmically, based largely on the recognition of frequently used words (and their [mostly] correct spellings) online.

We aren't there yet, of course. Which leaves open the possibility to experiment with words (mostly proper nouns) that you think may or may not appear in the Word word database. If you come across a "legitimate" word (using your own defintion of "legitimate" -- it can come from academese or it may be something more befitting of the Urban Dictionary) that has yet to be registered in the database, accept it into your own Word program for Microsoft to consider whenever it uploads user information.

Here are a few approved (+) and unapproved (-), or yet-to-be approved, word combinations that I came up with:

Jacques Derrida (+) vs. Alain Badiou (-)
Frantz Fanon (+) vs. Gayatri Spivak (-) (most South Asian names were rejected)
Blackburn Rovers (+) vs. Wigan Athletic (-)
Radiohead (+) vs. Wilco (-)
Ryan Vu (+) vs. Gerry Canavan (-)
Motherfucker (+) vs. Mofo (-)

Derrida Tarries with AutoCorrect

In reading the essays and interviews that comprise Jacques Derrida's Paper Machine (2005), I came across a delightful anecdote about the confrontation between philosophical writing and new technologies of writing and inscription. This from "The Word Processor":

In Circumfession I also gave myself the somewhat random constraint of a software program that, when I got to the end of a paragraph of such and such a length, roughly twenty-five lines, told me: "The paragraph is going to be too long; you should press the Return button." Like an order coming from I know not whom, from the depths of what time or what abyss, this slightly threatening warning would appear on the screen, and I decided to come quietly to the end of this long sequence, after the breathing space of a rhythmic sentence, which did have punctuation, as if rippling with commas, but was uninterrupted, punctuated without a period, if you like -- so submitting the fifty-nine long sentences to an arbitrary rule made by a program I hadn't chosen: to a slightly idiotic destiny... As you know, the computer maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or otherwise), of another "subject" (spontaneous and autonomous, automatic) who can occupy more than one place and play plenty of roles: face to face for one, but also withdrawn; in front of us, for another, but also invisible and faceless behind its screen. Like a hidden god who's half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you. (22)

Derrida elaborates on his anecdote by considering how the computer -- this medium of "word processing" -- becomes an Other to our consciousness. In contrast to writing with a stylus or on a typewriter, writing on a computer entails addressing an Other who knows what you are going to say in advance: "you have the feeling that you are dealing with the soul -- will, desire, plan -- of a Demiurge-Other, as if already, good or evil genius, an invisible addressee, an omnipresent witness were listening to us in advance, capturing and sending us back the image of our speech without delay, face to face -- with the image rendered objective and immediately stabilized and translated into the speech of the Other, a speech already appropriated by the other or coming from the other, a speech of the unconscious as well. Truth itself" (23).

Word processing's immediacy, its seamless ability to add or erase data with a stroke of the keypad, its virtuality -- all these give Derrida the impression that there's a "demon" (23) at work in the computer apparatus, some unknown entity which exerts its magic on us, making us think the words we type on the screen are really, truly our "own." In fact, the demon's trickery makes our writing seem less familiar, more fixed in time (immediate) and space (there, on the screen, "in" the machine). Writing on the computer alters the texture of textuality itself:

The text is as if presented to us as a show, with no waiting. You see it coming up on the screen in a form that is more objective and anonymous than on a handwritten page, a page which we ourselves moved down. So from bottom to top is how things go: this show happens almost above us, we see it seeing us, surveying us like the eye of the Other, or rather, simultaneously, it also happens under the eye of the nameless stranger, immediately calling forth vigilance and his specter. It sends us back the objectivity of the text much faster, and so changes our experience of time and of the body, the arms and the hands, our embracing of the written thing at a distance... That doesn't mean that it perverts or degrades the sign, but it renders other our old sorting out, our familiar altercation, our family scene, if I may call it that, when the written thing first appeared. (24-25)

The Demiurge-Other: a demon that, at least to my mind, would mimic what we say as we write on the computer. Yet, in a strange way, his act of mimicry would precede the act of writing; that is, the text which appears on screen would seem as though it should've always been there, with or without our conscious writerly attention. So it's mimicry with a difference: fidelity to language that has already been worked over by the word-processing apparatus.

Between 1997 and 2007, successive versions of Microsoft Office gave a face and a name to the "internal demon" of word processing. Derrida's comments appeared before the arrival of Clippit, or Clippy, but, just as with his sentence's truncation by AutoCorrect, it wouldn't be unfair to speculate that he would've engaged the much-maligned Help icon by simply shrugging off its "slightly idiotic destiny." Clippit, after all, was only the goofy, literal expression of the processes of technological inscription that had already taken root in our writerly beings.

A Dirty Shame: Partial Law & Strict Interpretation

My friend Tyrone Kapricorne brought to my attention a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., that exposes the corruption of the American legal system by frivolous, "bad faith" torts. Most amazing (aside from the amount of money being requested in damages) about this suit is that it was filed by a D.C. judge himself.

You can read about the suit yourself in this article by AP writer Lubna Takruri. The suit was filed by one Roy Pearson, an administrative hearings judge for the D.C. circuit. Two years ago, Judge Pearson brought several suits that needed to be altered to a dry-cleaning business owned by a Korean immigrant family, the Chungs. When one of the judge's pants went "missing" a few days later, Pearson set in motion a series of events that culminated in his $65 million suit against the Chungs.

Now at first Pearson demanded that the Chungs reimburse him for the price of the suit (of which the pants was a part), more than $1,000. But one week later, the Chungs recovered the pants, without any damage, and simply wanted to return it to the judge. Pearson refused to accept this and, after several months of rejecting settlement offers by the Chungs (as much as $12,000!), instead filed his lawsuit.

How Judge Pearson arrived at the extraordinary figure of $65 million is too complicated (and too loathsome) for me to summarize here. So I'll defer to Lubna Takruri's excellent account:

Because Pearson no longer wanted to use his neighborhood dry cleaner, part of his lawsuit calls for $15,000 — the price to rent a car every weekend for 10 years to go to another business.

...

But the bulk of the $65 million comes from Pearson's strict interpretation of D.C.'s consumer protection law, which fines violators $1,500 per violation, per day. According to court papers, Pearson added up 12 violations over 1,200 days, and then multiplied that by three defendants.
Much of Pearson's case rests on two signs that Custom Cleaners once had on its walls: 'Satisfaction Guaranteed' and 'Same Day Service.'

Based on Pearson's dissatisfaction and the delay in getting back the pants, he claims the signs amount to fraud.

Remember, of course, that the pants were found, without any damage, by the Chungs only a week or two after they had presumed it had gone missing. And remember that despite Judge Pearson's clear unreasonableness, the Chungs were willing to pay as much as $12,000 to avoid going to court. The pants in question have been hanging in the Chungs' lawyer's office, untouched, for over a year. Amazingly, Pearson now claims this pair is not his, even though the inseam measurements match his own and the ticket matches his receipt.

How, then, are we supposed to judge the actions of Judge Pearson? In what ways can we understand law, and how it works, when one of its own administrators (or "interpreters") is so clearly intent on bending words and provisions and clauses to suit his personal needs? To what extent do Judge Pearson's actions reveal a larger culture of toxic litigation in the American legal system? And how uncommon is his strategy of reading, or interpreting, the law among supposedly impartial, freestanding judges and justices in a country that prides itself on having a legal system in which "justice is blind"?

Note Takruri's gloss on the reasoning behind Pearson's lawsuit: his is a "strict interpretation" of D.C. consumer law. For those unfamiliar with contemporary ideologies of legal interpretation, the "strict reading" of law is championed mainly by conservative judges who base their decisions on "literal" or "originalist" readings of legal documents. Pearson is a classic literalist when he argues that the Chungs' signs did not accord with the service he received -- he was literally "not satisfied" by his service (i.e., the Chungs couldn't guarantee his satisfaction), and though his pants were eventually recovered, this happened too late for "same day service" to apply here. And then of course we have Pearson's calculations, which inflate his assumed damages to extraordinary proportions and continue to assume that he is "damaged" every day that goes by without his pants being returned to him.

This case is a travesty, to be sure, but Pearson's legal ideology is in fact not at all uncommon. In addition to numerous judges at the state and federal levels, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court espouse extreme forms of literalism and originalism in their readings of the U.S. Constitution. For Scalia and Thomas, if the "framers" of the Constitution didn't intend something -- protection of certain rights, let's say -- in their writing up of that document, then it cannot be defended as constitutional. Scalia and Thomas have lambasted abortion rights and affirmative action policies, for example, for having no foundation whatsoever in the framers' understanding of what could be protected by law in American society. In their view, abortion is legalized by a radical reading of the Constitution's protection of "privacy" and affirmative action, which gives minorities an "unfair" advantage over whites, amounts to reverse racism and discounts the Constitution's understanding of "equal protection." Scalia defends his strategy of reading in an eloquent yet troubling book, A Matter of Interpretation. (Chief Justice Roberts is also by and large a literalist. Though I haven't the time to research his decision online, Roberts's tenure on the D.C. Circuit Court saw him uphold some form of harsh punishment for a girl who ate french fries in the subway when the subway's policy was that no food was allowed there.)

Given this thumbnail sketch of strict interpretation, what's revealing about the Pearson-Chung case, at least for me, is the way Judge Pearson's recourse to literalism is so clearly linked to a perverse pleasure in exercising power and making the law do what you say it does. I would go so far as to argue that Pearson's bad faith is in fact symptomatic of the literalist legal position: if your reading can be said to accord precisely with "what the law means" (or "what the framers intended"), and if there's an absolute coherence of your position and what you say the law says, then you confer upon yourself the authority of what Derrida calls "the force of law." You are the Law. This is the literalist ideology, and if you ask me it's not terribly different from the fundamentalist's claim that, knowing exactly what God means or intends, he acts in the name of God, with the force of God behind him. This is the literalist ideology, and it breeds hatred, disillusionment, and bad faith.

Pearson's case will be heard by D.C. Superior Court Judge Neal Kravitz on June 11 of this year. If you wish to help support the Chungs in their defense, please visit the Custom Cleaners Defense Fund.