Chris Hong

11 December 2013
AMST 426
Prof. Hazel Carby

Language as Intuitive UX in Babel-17

If I took away anything from our class, its that SF whether it deals with alien
cultures, alternative histories or futuristic societies is a literature of otherness and
change. Through reading works by Mieville, Mitchell, and Delany, I became acutely
aware that the most self-conscious, alternate reality SF must take into account the
inevitability of linguistic change and the possibility of linguistic otherness. In this sense,
Perdido, Cloud Atlas, and Triton are linguistically self-conscious fictions invented
language becomes the narrative format, informing plot and discourse. Feeling like our
class necessitates an investigation of the nature of language, the relation of language to
reality, and the possibilities of linguistic otherness, I discuss some personal run-ins with
language interpreted through the lens of Delanys masterwork Babel-17 (another very,
very linguistically aware text). I hope to illustrate a few possible ways language can
influence the shape of future fictions.
Im nine years old watching Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for the
first time at a movie theater in Montreal (French Canada). Anakin was in the middle of
pod racing against his alien rivals when the edge of the scene suddenly bursts into white
lava. I lean forward in my seat, excited to discover a new detail. The effect metastasizes;
Anakin, aliens, and giant pod racers erode into abstract bleeding blobs. It looked unlike
any cinematic special effect I had ever seen. Ushers begin to yell at the audience, but not
knowing French, I mistake their shouts for reactions at dysmorphic Anakins face. House
lights come on and we are guided to emergency exits. Outside in the parking lot, my
parents and I stand searching, squinting. We do not know what to do or how to behave.
There were no plans to be anywhere else.
Structurally, Babel-17 plays out in five parts. Part one begins with an introduction
to its heroine, Rydra Wong, a preternaturally gifted linguist and the most famous poet in
the five explored galaxies, and to her mission: her government, deep in intergalactic
war, enlists her help to decode the mysterious Babel-17, a language they believe to have
played a role in a recent series of sabotages perpetrated by the Invaders. An account of
her preparations follows Rydra acquires a spaceship and recruits a crew. Part two takes
place on Rydras ship, where a fatal mechanical error jeopardizes everyones lives. Rydra
resorts to her rapidly improving grasp on Babel-17 to get them out of their predicament.
It becomes clear that Babel-17 is no ordinary language. Rydra suspects there is a saboteur
amongst her crew. They arrive at their destination, the Alliance War Yards, where Rydra
predicts the next Invader sabotage will take place. The Baron who commands the war
yard arranges a banquet that is disrupted by his assassination at the hands of his own
militaristic weapon, the TW-55, an artificially grown human weapon. In part three, the
crew is saved from the war yard fiasco by a passing pirate ship, where Rydra furthers her
mastery of Babel-17 enough so that by thinking in Babel-17, she successfully foils a
second assassination attempt. More importantly, she meets the Butcher, a criminal with a
history of amnesia and another speaker of Babel-17 (although at the time neither of them
realizes). Part four elaborates on Rydras relationship with the Butcher, whose use of
language notably lacks the concept of self (he never uses the pronoun I). This becomes
a curious case study for Rydra, who eventually uses Babel-17 to access Butchers
consciousness, where she discovers that he too possesses the ability to think in Babel.
Part four climaxes with their mind meld. In part 5, it is revealed that as a result of their
psychic enjoining, their physical bodies are rendered catatonic. The Alliance calls upon
Rydras doctor, Markus Tmwarba, who introduces a linguistic paradox that brings the
pair out of their paralytic state. Rydra and the Butcher emerge with full control over
Babel-17. The Butcher, his amnesia cured, turns out to be the son of the Baron. He was
the prototype for the first human bioweapon. Babel-17 is revealed to be a mystically
precise language developed by the Invaders that, when forcibly inculcated in the Butcher,
turned him into a murdering sociopath. The saboteur is revealed to be none other than
Rydra herself, who under the influence of Babel-17, sabotages her own ship and
hypnotizes herself to forget her own treachery. By introducing the personal I into
Babel-17, Rydra and the Butcher invent Babel-18, which they claim will single-handedly
end the war and, presumably, create a new peaceful future.
Babel-17 as all the trappings of an epic space opera: intergalactic war, treacherous
spies, exotic locales, and astronomic space battles. Delanys heroine is an archetypal
femme fatale sexy, smart, can captain a spaceship, a prodigy in the field of linguistics,
and, at twenty-six, the most read poet in the worlds of five galaxies. There are other
commonplaces that invoke the traditional pulp lineage of SF. Yet, where Delanys
conceptual project begins and where the work begins to relate to my movie-going debacle
(I hope) lies in Delanys treatment of language and communication. His protagonist,
Rydra, is a female poet. The weapon of destruction is not some invented technology but
an invented language. The villain is the inability of humans to communicate with each
other. The struggle of the novel is Rydras struggle against miscommunication. Babel-17
becomes in a very real sense not a rousing space opera but rather Delanys just as
rousing treatise on language and communication.
Language is not the only the motivation that drives Rydras mission, but
communication (and the lack thereof) is constantly thematized by events and by the
conversations between Rydra and her crew. The general who recruits Rydra to the
Alliances cause falls in love with her immediately upon their meeting at a bar, but lacks
the language to express it:
My god, he thought, as coolness struck his face, all that inside me and she doesnt
know! I didnt communicate a thing! Somewhere in the depth of words, not a
thing, youre still safe. But stronger on the surface was the outrage at his own
silence. Didnt communicate a thing at all. (13)
Rydra sees the generals love for her, but cannot help him in his isolated frustration.
Another invocation of communication arises in Rydras search for her crew. Describing
to a friend on her selection criterion, Rydra emphasizes they had to be people I could
talk to (49). Spaceships in the novel, as conceived by Delany, can only be navigated by
a team of three individuals involved in a mnage-a-trois. Rydra finds two talented but
disconsolate navigators Ron and Calli who have lost their third to a fatal accident on a
past mission. Rydra purposefully forces them to take a new third, Mallya, who speaks no
English. There is initial tension because of the language barrier. As the novel progresses,
however, the navigators overcome the communication issues and learn to love each other.
Ron explains:
Christ, yes. I talk to Mollya and shes trying to explain something to me and she
still dont talk so good yet, but suddenly I figure out what she means, and He
straightened his body and looked up as though the word he was searching for was
someplace high. Its wonderful, [Rydra] supplied. Yeah, its He looked at
her. Its wonderful. (109)
On the level of the macroplot, Delany portrays the fall of man in purely linguistic terms.
His characters inhabit a world in which conflict arises from the lack of communication.
Their universe is characterized by isolated communities, each hardly touching its
neighbor, each speaking, as it were, a different language (64). A state in which strangers
desperately try and fail to communicate leads, in this world, to an intergalactic war that
pits human against other humans from another galaxy. Rydras search is for a language
that will go the depth of words. Talking about her own poetry, Rydra clarifies: You
know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and
half sentences and their clumsy feelings they cant express, and it hurts me. So I go home
and burnish it and polish itI know what they want to say, and I say it for them (19). It
comes as no surprise that Rydras poems are popular with Alliance and Invader members
alike.
Babel-17 itself is very peculiar. Rydra comments to the general that the language
is Small, she said. Tight, close together that doesnt mean anything to you,
does it? In a language, I mean? I have to find out who speaks this language,
where it comes from, and what its trying to say. Most textbooks say that
language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is a thought.
Thought is information given form. The form is language. The form of this
language isamazing And as I begin to see into this language, I begin to see
too much. (21)
As Rydras understanding of Babel-17 grows, she realizes that the language is so
analytically descriptive of reality that, when thinking within its linguistic framework, she
gains the ability to act and respond according to a heightened reality. At a point in the
novel, Rydra is captured by space pirates. She awakes trapped in some kind of web. Her
certain reality is one in which she is completely restrained. When she switches from
English to Babel-17 (at this point she has partially mastered the language), she is able to
see not webbing but rather a three particle vowel differential, each part of which
defined one stress of the three-way tie, so that the weakest points in the mesh were
identified when the total sound of the differential reached its lowest point (110).
Thinking in Babel-17, Rydra sees the weakness of the webbing: By breaking the threads
at these points, she realized, the whole web would unravel (110). So, by switching from
English to Babel-17, Rydra shifts from a reality that is constrictive and uncertain to a new
reality in which obstacles can be overcome. Eventually, it is revealed that Babel-17 is a
double-edged sword, in that while it grants Rydra power over a new reality, its also a
linguistic weapon designed by the Invaders so that anyone who learns it becomes an
unknowing Invader agent. The moment she begins to understand Babel-17, Rydra starts
unconsciously sabotaging her own ship, and then selectively forgetting these acts. Rydra
only discovers, through her union with the Butcher who had been brainwashed and
given Babel-17 as his sole linguistic form that Babel-17 is an impersonal language. It
lacks the concepts of I and you. Rydra notes that I and you (the self and the
other) are essential to an individuals moral framework: for an I to kill a you without a
lot of thought is a mistake (139). Without this fundamental distinction between self and
other, as we see with the Butcher, one becomes sociopathic murderous, even. Rydra
elaborates:
As a language, Babel-17 contains a pre-set programme for the Butcher to become
a criminal and saboteur. If you turn somebody with no memory loose in a foreign
country with only the word for tools and machine parts, dont be surprised if he
ends up a mechanic The word for Alliance in Babel-17 translates literally into
English as: one who has invaded. You take it from there. (130)
Delanys Babel-17, with respect to linguistic theory, subscribes by the strong version of
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that language determines thought (not vice
versa) and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. While it
should be noted that Whorfianism remains highly debated (the Behaviorist school rejects
its notions outright), it nevertheless supplies a valuable corrective to a purely
instrumentalist view of language. In Babel-17, language is distinctly constitutive of
reality and not reflective of it. Rydra, at one point, describes Babel-17 in highly Whorfian
terms: Most textbooks say that language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But
language is a thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language. The
form of this language isamazing (113).
This brings me back to my experience at the movie theater. We eventually found
other, through another English speaking moviegoer, that the film reel in the projector had
caught on fire. In fact, the entire projection room, unobtrusively tucked away on the
second floor of the theater, was up in flames. But up to that moment of that clarification,
as a non-French speaker, I had no sense of danger or panic. The ushers shouts (which
were evidently of panic, fire, and evacuate immediately) meant nothing to me. My
reality was one such that what I saw happening on screen I thought was some kind of
exceptionally done visual effect, not the immolation of projector film.
Riffing off of Whorfianism, to what extent, then, does language control reality? I
can say with a fair amount of certainty that my reality during the movie would have been
considerably different had I understood French. Furthermore, extending Rydras usage of
Babel-17 in the novel, can language itself be seen as an intuitive technology for cohering
the experience of reality? After all, the language of Babel-17 functions uncannily similar
to a technology. In the episode where Rydra is caught in the web, we can easily imagine
her to be using some type of scope gadget technology to free herself. Delanys
substitution of language for technologized solution, to me, is one of the most interesting
devices in the novel.
As a computer science major, I saw the relationship between language and
technology in the novel through a slightly geekier prism: language functions as a kind of
user experience (UX, to borrow from dev jargon) design for organizing the look and feel
of reality. But sometimes random, unscripted unforgiving things happen (a mechanical
failure on a spaceship, or an isolated movie theater fire in 2001). Contingency is change
happening faster than a human being can linguistically narrate. Specialists turn to non-
intuitive technologies like quantitative analysis, simulations, modeling, and probability in
order to trace narratives that account for the present and make predictive narrations of the
near future. But for the rest of this, this kind of non-human storytelling is counterintuitive
to our intuitive UX. We receive it, but we dont feel it, so we cant embody it.
Delany seems to suggest that the ameliorative morphing of language our
intuitive UX can account for contingency, just as Rydra shifts from English to Babel-
17. In the movie theater, to a much lesser degree, I made a shift from thinking in English
to reading body language. I understood that the ushers were gesturing at us to get up and
exit the theater. I can imagine a morbidly hypothetical, impossible scenario in which
someone who could not read body language might have just sat in the theater watching
the screen through the fire.
As future realities unfold, could the evolution of narrative form necessitate
mutating our intuitive language UX? Rydra likens Babel-17 to FORTRAN (how 1966 of
Delany), a long-defunct programming language. To rouse Rydra out of her coma, Dr.
Tmwarba feeds her logical paradoxes, which in a computing sense, would error out
and stop any code from compiling. This is vaguely metaphorized by their awakening
unable to switch levels of abstraction to address the paradoxes, Rydra and the Butcher
were forced to reactivate the amnesiac portions of their brains that dealt with the English
language. I was taken by how technical and computer science-y Delanys presentation of
Babel-17 was. In computing today, we have come a long way since FORTRAN and more
and more, programming languages have taken on the more sophisticated syntactical
characteristics of spoken languages. But could, Delany asks, the reverse be true?
Although we havent reached the point quite yet, could there be a future in which a
programming language is as communicative as, say, English? Even more so?
In the 1980s and 90s, hypertext software was developed as a format that was
linguistically experimented with to build narrative. Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce
wrote Storyspace, a software program for creating, editing, and reading hypertext fiction.
Joyce wrote Afternoon, a story (1987), the grandfather of all hyperfiction. William
Gibson released a 300-line semi-autobiographical poem Agrippa (a book of the dead) in
1992 that was stored on a floppy disk that eroded along with its reading by encrypting
itself. Online, Mark Amerikas GRAMMATRON (1997) told the story of a digital creature
encoded in a magic sorcerer-code called nanoscript. In 1999, The Electronic Liberature
Organization was founded to promote the future of writing in the digital environment. To
be sure, some of these examples are technical novelties, but experiments with hypertext
fiction still thrive and have their fanbase.
I think its fair to say that computers and their implicit language have changed, to
varying degrees, how we communicate. The articulations of futurity cannot be ignored.
Delanys Babel-17 presents the notion of language morphing itself to accommodate the
reality around it a reality of increasing technologization and connectivity.
To concretize this, Ill attempt a more recent example. I took Arabic classes for
two years in high school. Conveniently, my best friend is a native speaker and by senior
year, we would converse in Arabic (mostly to help me pass the exams). One day, we
were over at his house working on a project and I caught a glimpse of my friend
messaging someone on AIM (the AOL instant messaging client). He was typing
something that looked vaguely like Arabic, but was so aesthetically different than the
Modern Standard Arabic I studied in class. When I asked him, he just shrugged and
explained that it was just chat slang he picked up. He told me that all his Arabic friends
texted and chatted with similar slang.
Ive been fascinated by this particular mutation of Arabic ever since. Arabic is a
triglossic language meaning it exists simultaneously as the Classical Arabic of religious
texts, as the journalistic and literary Modern Standard Arabic, and as the various regional
spoken Arabic dialects. This orthographic tradition of Arabic has remained fairly stagnant
throughout history until a large-scale mutation appeared in the 1990s with the advent of
text messaging and IM. Tech savvy Arabic youth started using the Latin alphabet in
conjunction with a set of numbers to represent consonants that exist in traditional Arabic.
This Arabic chat language (popularly known as Arabish, Arabizi, or Araby) was born as a
technological necessity at a time when mobile phones and computer keyboards did not
accommodate the Arabic alphabet. The chat language transliterates Arabic text into
something like English using Latin script, and to handle those Arabic letters that do not
have an approximate phonetic Latin equivalent, numerals and other characters were
situationally appropriated. For example, the numeral 3 is used to represent the Arabic
letter (ayn). Note that this instance of numeral substitution is pictorial a mirroring
technique is used to create a visual similarity between the Arabic letter and its number
substitute. This mutation effectively allowed any dialect of Arabic to be written and
pronounced provided the user was able to comprehend the Latin alphabet which
previously had not been possible on such a widespread and functional scale. Overcoming
this technical hurdle, to my mind, represents a linguistic revolution on its own. Moreover
the Arabic chat language is universal in the sense that any regional Arabic dialect can be
accomodated. In the past, Moroccan, Lebanese, and other Arab writers had attempted to
write publications in their unique dialects. Now that Arabs can write in any dialect using
chat language, how far will this revolution go? Will Arabic chat morphology lead to new
forms of Arabic narratives? Will it create a new audience? Will the publishers of books
and magazines recognize the legitimacy of Arabish, or will it be see as a transgression?
According to my friend, Arabish has the potential. He had been admittedly shy of
reading Arabic narratives before Arabish they had seemed needlessly stuffy and
outdated vernacular in the same way Latin seems for modern English speakers. Before he
discovered Arabish, he embraced English novels, magazines and newspapers with vigor
with the belief that English, as a language, could express the present moment, i.e.,
teenage angst, in ways that Arabic never could. This is, of course without a doubt, is also
a symptom of his American education and upbringing. After being exposed to Arabish,
however, he changed his mind. Borne of chat and text, Arabish allowed my friend (as
Arabic youth like him around the world) to rediscover Arabic as a form of expression,
albeit in the digital realm. Arabish is exciting because its a fairly recent orthography that
internalizes futurity (online text and chat mediums) and that will feasibly grow with the
number of biligual, web-savvy Arab speakers speakers like my friend who abandoned
the language in their youth to learn a Western lingua franca, but now yearn for Arabic
narratives. Arabish could be the ticket out of a linguistic limbo. Already, Arabish is used
on many public advertisements by large multinationals large players in the online
industry like Google and Microsoft have built conversation tools from Arabish to Arabic
and vice versa. Just now, I downloaded a Chrome extension that transliterates Arabic
webpages into Arabish.
Im only half-joking when I say Arabish is a sort of real life Babel-18. Babel-17
is, true to its namesake, a fallen language. Although analytically robust, this seventeenth
variation of Babel, far from reuniting men, only divides them further. Ive already
mentioned its characteristic absence of the concept of self and other precludes any
form of moral framework. There is symbolic importance in Rydras invention of Babel-
18 through injecting I into its previous iteration: she bridges the gap between self and
other. Babel-18, she predicts, will end the war between the Alliance and Invaders in few
months, presumably by allowing both sides to communicate with each other transparently
without duplicity. As such, Rydras mission is one of connectivity, or rather solving a
communication problem. Her solution is to morph the language itself by introducing the
missing element. I see Arabish as a real life analogue because it too emerged as a
linguistic solution in the face of a communication problem. Mobile phones and
computers simply did not accommodate the Arabic language. Arabish represents a
linguistic morph, not by addition of new or missing elements, but by discrete
substitutions. Like Babel-18, Arabish becomes a language of connectivity, a solution to a
communication block. In a very palpable, humanistic way, Arabish connected my friend
to other Arab-speaking, Western educated peers. It enabled them to rediscover the
richness of a language that was, to them, previously inaccessible.
Thinking about language and futurity, it makes a lot of sense that so much of the
SF we have read in class has been linguistically aware. Maybe these authors see futurity
natively built into language. In other words, language itself is a dynamic technology (I
call it an intuitive UX) that morphs according to realitys contingencies. Language is
analytic, but also generative in that it describes reality, but also forms it. We use language
as an intuitive technology to normalize change, to cohere our experiences of unique
realities into a sequence of measured consequential developments. Delanys admonition
in Babel-17 is one that concerns the misuse of language. In both the novel and, well,
contemporary life, theres a sense that language can no longer normalize the complex,
unpredictable forces of reality that intrude with greater and greater frequency. What is the
intuitive story of climate change? Shifts in the market? Mutations in your brain? Your
browsing history? Anxiety takes hold when embodied language fails.
The solution, as Delany suggests and Arabish attests to, may come in the
orthographic morphing of language itself. That is, new linguistic solutions deconstruct
the existing rules of previous narration and pave the way for alternative, as-yet-
unimagined models of narrative. With both Babel-18 and Arabish, rules are rewritten and
possibility is repatterned.
Finally, with respect to futurity and what the shape of future fictions will look
like, I feel like the brunt of discussion has been focused around mediumhood (novel, e-
book or kindle??) when the formal qualities of language itself will inevitably become a
determinant. Whether or not hypertext or Arabish go on to become dominant modes of
future discourse, I am confident that wherever new, anxiety-inducing communication
problems arise, linguistic change will provide an answer.
Imagine a language that has probabilistic outcomes. Imagine a language that can
simulate unscripted contingencies against scripted choreography. Imagine a language that
requires its authors to embrace contingency and irreversibly change during its making.
Imagine a language that doesnt promise a scheduled time to end. Imagine a language
that erodes as you erode. Delany conceives of mankinds next great technological leap to
be a linguistic one. To instructively contemplate futurity is not to imagine outlandish
cure-all technological panaceas, but to do the work of developing and integrating existing
formats of intuitive and non-intuitive technologies towards a humanistic end.




Works Cited
"Arabic Chat Alphabet." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Nov. 2013. Web. 11 Dec.
2013.
Delany, Samuel R. Babel-17. Boston: Gregg, 1976. Print.
"Salon." Saloncom RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2013.