A LY S M O O D Y

A Machine for Feeling:

Ping’s Posthuman Affect

The ‘feeling’ of Beckett’s writing is mechanical. So claims Martha

Nussbaum in an influential essay on emotion in Beckett, in which
she argues that, as ‘heirs of a legacy of feeling that shapes
them inexorably’, Beckett’s people ‘feel like “contrivances”, like
machines programmed entirely from without’ (Nussbaum, 1988,
250). Adam Piette, decades later and from a vastly different
theoretical standpoint, concurs: the ‘endgame’ for both Beckett and
Proust, he argues, is ‘the death of the subject as affective source.
In Proust, intermittence itself becomes a routine and mechanical
thing and the feeling of bereavement fades. In Beckett, we start
with mechanical routine elegy: it is Proust’s endgame which
interests him’ (Piette, 2011, 286). For both Nussbaum and Piette,
the essence of Beckett’s emotion or affect or feeling lies in its
resemblance to a machine, a resemblance that arises from the sense
that these feelings are pre-programmed, determined in advance
by affective histories that have, in their sheer repetitiousness,
emptied experience of spontaneous – here coded as ‘real’ – emotion.
This deterministic affective structure, Nussbaum and Piette concur,

Journal of Beckett Studies 26.1 (2017): 87–102

Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/jobs.2017.0189
© Journal of Beckett Studies
www.euppublishing.com/jobs
88 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

empties the subject of emotional agency, and even negates the

subject as such, transforming it into a machine, as Nussbaum
argues, or prefiguring its death, as Piette does.
This essay takes up the mechanisation of affect in Beckett,
seeking to explore its operations through an examination of the
1967 short prose text Ping. I argue that Ping performs Nussbaum
and Piette’s metaphor of Beckett’s mechanised affect through
its conjuncture of affective resonance and mechanical structure,
becoming an archive of a historically specific feeling. I pursue this
argument in three parts. First, I argue that Ping’s affect operates
not, as humanists like Nussbaum expect, through the depiction of
characters with fully developed emotions, but rather through the
repetition of the text’s rhythmic patterns. This decouples feeling
from narrative and meaning, and produces an inhuman, indifferent
affect, devoid of a subject. Second, I show that the same textual
features that make Ping affective also make it read as mechanical,
and that it therefore confounds familiar ideas that oppose feeling to
machines, producing a form of affect that is explicitly mechanised.
Finally, I argue that this mechanised affect is historically specific,
belonging to a mid-twentieth-century moment in the history of
humanity’s relationship to machines. As a result, Ping serves as an
archive of an historical feeling that is associated with twentieth-
century anxieties about our relationship to machines. Performing
this historical feeling with every new reading, it functions as a
machine for feeling: that is, a structure that makes its readers
feel this historical sentiment as something alive in the present.
A reading of Ping as a machine for producing mechanised affect
therefore demands a post-archival approach to Beckett, one that
recognises not only that texts are a product of their historical
context, but also that they carry the remnants and sentiments
of that past moment forward into the present. It establishes, in
other words, a recursive and bidirectional relationship between
history and the text that sees literature itself as performing archival
functions that are not reducible to the strictly empirical.

1. Ping’s Inhuman Affect

I begin with a simple, relatively uncontroversial claim: the

experience of reading Ping is profoundly, almost distractingly
 Ping’s Posthuman Affect 89

affective. It is affective in the sense that, as Beckett himself

famously claimed of Not I, it seeks ‘to work on the nerves of
the audience, not the intellect’ (qtd. in Brater, 1974, 200). Indeed,
the subversion of intellect in favour of affect foregrounds what
is most distinctive – and most disruptive – in the experience of
reading a text like Ping. As Elisabeth Bregman Segrè describes this
experience: ‘On a first reading, one comprehends next to nothing;
yet on a first listening (Beckett’s texts must primarily be heard),
one feels something intensely, something ineffable and far more
musical than verbal in quality’ (1977, 127). Like Beckett, Segrè
suggests that this text upends our conventional critical hierarchy,
disrupting our capacity to privilege the meaning of the text over its
form, and forcing us out of the intellectual realm of comprehension
into the ineffability of a poorly defined feeling – that which, in
Beckett’s terms, ‘works on the nerves’. As what is (at least to me)
most exciting but also most indescribable in his writing, it situates
the limits of our critical practice at the centre of our scholarly
investment. As such, it raises difficult questions about the role
of both conventional modes of close reading, as well as more
historicist approaches that have dominated recent work in Beckett
studies, in a context in which this text’s affective structure precedes
and perhaps even precludes interpretation.
This problem – the challenge that a work like Ping poses
to hermeneutics – can be usefully conceptualised through Brian
Massumi’s account of affect. For Massumi, affect describes
an autonomous system of intensity, ‘associated with nonlinear
processes: resonation and feedback which momentarily suspend
the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future’
(2002, 26). Affect, in this account, is outside of narrative and
meaning, and capable of acting at times in opposition to both. In
this sense, the affect of Ping poses a problem for critics because it
falls in a space beyond the hermeneutically qualifiable.
To conceptualise the separation of affect from meaning in this
text requires a vocabulary capable of describing the development
of a parallel system of sensation and resonance that is not fully
co-optable to either the development of narrative or the meaningful
production of form – a vocabulary that, while lacking in prose, is
well-developed in criticism of poetry. As Marjorie Perloff remarks,
‘the rhythms of recurrence are marked’ in Beckett’s late prose, to
the extent that, she argues, these texts might profitably be read as
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poetry (1981, 867). One way to account for Ping’s extraordinarily

affective surface, therefore, lies in the extent to which it, so
unusually for a prose text (even for prose poetry), insists forcefully
on the primacy of its rhythm, making itself available for scansion.
Ping, in this sense, follows a kind of accentual metre, with an
unusual number of stresses to a sentence. This dominant rhythm
is repeatedly interrupted by unstressed syllables that appear as a
kind of flutter, a disruption in the regularity of the spondaic march
that drives the text forward. Sentences typically begin with regular
pairings of stressed syllables, before breaking down as the sentence
winds to its end, as in the lines: ‘White walls one yard by two
white ceiling one square yard never seen. Bare white body fixed
only the eyes only just’ (Beckett, 1995, 193). The spondaic opening
of each sentence (‘White walls / one yard / by two’; ‘Bare white’) is
troubled but never fully undone by the introduction of additional
unstressed syllables (‘white ceiling’; ‘body fixed / only the eyes /
only just’) or additional stressed syllables that draw the foot out
(‘one square yard’).
The effect here is not directly on meaning, but instead on
the rhythm of the piece as a whole, developing a tension
between the regularity of the heavy rhythm of stressed syllables
and the faltering, the wavering introduced by the unstressed.
The result is what Laura Salisbury has described as Beckett’s
‘modality of tremor’ (2012, 151), the ‘rhythmic interruption’ that
‘forces incommensurability and measure into a deforming compact
with one another’ (161). These tremors, flutters or syncopations
constitute the site of Ping’s affective intensity, the moment at
which, as Massumi argues of Ronald Reagan’s characteristic ‘jerks’,
movement ‘decomposes’, ‘compress[ing] into the movement under
way potential movements that are in some way made present
without being actualized’ (2002, 40–1). These tremors in the
spondaic progression of Ping introduce a flutter of potential that,
folding potentiality into actuality, constitute the text’s affective
surface.
This metrical pattern is integral to what makes the text so
‘speakable’, as Enoch Brater describes the late prose more generally
(1994, 4). Whether we read this ‘speakability’ as indicative of a
move towards drama, with Brater, or towards poetry, with Perloff,
the extent to which Ping strains against the limits of prose is a
 Ping’s Posthuman Affect 91

mark of its insistent movement towards what Brater calls ‘a voice’s

embodiment in words’ (ix). In other words, this ‘speakability’ is a
mark of the unusual, highly embodied mode of reading that this
text demands, one which strains against and at times threatens to
occlude a reading for meaning. It points to the ‘disconnection of
signifying order from intensity’ that Massumi identifies as one of
the hallmarks of affect (2002, 24).
If these rhythms foreground the disconnection of affect from
meaning in Ping, they are also integral to overcoming the
interpretive difficulties posed by its emaciated syntax. Lacking
verbs and prepositions, stripped of paragraphs and punctuation,
and employing a radically impoverished vocabulary, Ping reads as
though whole parts of speech and whole linguistic conventions
have been excised. This enables the affective rhythms described
above, but it also places the text at constant risk of breaking down,
disintegrating into its constitutive parts as words fail to connect
meaningfully with each other. Without conventional syntactical
markers, sentences like ‘Given rose only just nails fallen white
over’ (195) are difficult, if not impossible, to parse or decode
in any definitive way. Like the permutations that proliferate in
Beckett’s writing, we are forced to shift words through a series of
arrangements in search of a meaning that makes sense syntactically
and contextually. The text’s insistent rhythmicality, however, is a
powerful aid in this process, dividing the text into feet – rhythmic
units – that come to function as syntactic units (‘Given rose’ /
‘only just’ / ‘nails fallen’ / ‘white over’). As such, they become
central to the successful parsing of the prose. The disconnection
of affective surface from sense-making therefore opens the way for
an inversion of the conventional critical hierarchy that privileges
meaning over rhythm, re-positioning the text’s affective rhythms
as its primary engine, and meaning as a secondary effect.
This inversion produces a disjuncture between emotion and
affect in the text. As Massumi argues, ‘emotion and affect [. . .]
follow different logics and pertain to different orders’: while
affect is unqualified intensity, ‘emotion is a subjective content,
the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which
is from that point onward defined as personal’ (2002, 27–8).
Because the affect of Ping arises from its textual rhythms and
resists meaning and narrative, it is therefore not readily describable
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as emotion. Indeed, the peculiarity of a text like Ping is that

although it presents, as Segrè suggests, first of all as feeling, as a
shimmering affect, its content is almost eerily devoid of emotion.
The inanimate – or externally animated – ‘bare white body’ at the
centre of Ping’s narrative might be capable of movement and
speech, but our view of this ‘character’ is so radically external that
it is impossible to imagine what it might feel about its suspended
state. The narrative voice is similarly impersonal – not only devoid
of personal pronouns, but fixed scrupulously at the level of bare
description, offering no hint of emotion and no suggestion of its
attitude towards the situation it describes or the quasi-subject at its
centre. The scene described in the text’s closing line for instance,
which seems to describe the death of the protagonist, ought to be
profoundly emotional: ‘Head haught eyes which fixed front old
ping last murmur one second perhaps not alone eye unlustrous
black and white half closed long lashes imploring ping silence ping
over’ (Beckett, 1995, 196). But the consistency of the mechanical
rhythm and the narrator’s exteriorised, indifferent focus on the
body as an inanimate object make it difficult to understand the
scene described as the death of a person, and therefore difficult to
feel or recognise those emotions of loss, fear, grief and mourning
that we might expect to encounter in a protagonist’s death. Ping’s
affect, in other words, is rigorously indifferent, a performance of
the disjuncture between affect and emotion.
The hollowing out of emotional content offers an almost
hyperbolic dramatisation of what Martha Nussbaum finds so
troubling in Beckett’s writing in general: its radical scepticism
towards the ‘narrative emotions’ that, for her, constitute the
indispensable value of literature as such. Ping, in contrast, makes
an implicit claim for literature’s capacity to offer something quite
different: an indifferent affect that is separable from any emotional
content and that derives from distinctly non-narrative literary
features. Ping therefore suggests that Beckett’s scepticism towards
narrative emotion need not entail an end of feeling. But it also
indicates precisely why a humanist like Nussbaum might find
Beckett’s writing so horrifying, given that its affective quality
does not sharpen our sense of shared humanity, as Nussbaum
suggests literature ought to do, but rather points beyond it. In
Ping’s unemotional affect, Beckett offers an uncanny vision of an
 Ping’s Posthuman Affect 93

affect that neither emanates from nor belongs to a subject – an

inhuman affect, one that arises from and inheres in the ‘inhuman
code’ of language (Blasing, 2007, 9), even as it displaces language’s
signifying function in favour of its affective force.

2. Mechanising Affect

This account of the primacy of affect applies widely across Beckett’s

late work, which tends to privilege affective rhythms over the
production of meaning. From How It Is to the Nohow On trilogy,
Beckett’s late writing shares Ping’s stripped-back vocabulary and
insistent, often spondaic rhythms, which steal textual focus from
the unfolding of narrative. In the short prose texts from the
1960s and 1970s, like Lessness, Imagination Dead Imagine and The
Lost Ones and even in the Nohow On texts of the 1980s, these
affective rhythms are coupled, as in Ping, with a focus on radically
depersonalised and often inanimate ‘characters’ that do not make
themselves available to emotional interpretation. Ping is unusual,
however, in imagining the inhuman affect that arises from these
rhythms as specifically mechanical, and therefore in literalising
the mechanisation of affect towards which both Nussbaum and
Piette gesture (although Lessness, the product of apparently random
arrangements of fixed texts, moves in this direction by different
means).
Central to this sense of Ping’s mechanisation is the eponymous
‘ping’, which, as Dan O’Hara observes, ‘is a specifically
onomatopoeic word that is and has always been echoic of the
metallic noise of machines’ (2010, 438). Indeed, although O’Hara
conceptualises this relationship in a novel way, scholars have long
suggested that ‘ping’ points to a certain mechanisation at the heart
of the text: David Lodge, in an influential early study, suggests that
the word ‘ping’ might ‘denote a noise emitted by some piece of
apparatus’ – possibly a bell, a rifle or a typewriter (Lodge, 1979,
297); Enoch Brater reiterates this latter proposition that ‘ping’ is
a typewriter’s return (Brater, 1994, 91); and O’Hara himself has
linked the word to the noise emitted by an ECG machine, allowing
him to argue that the text is set in a hospital (O’Hara, 2007, 185–6).
94 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

In each case, ‘ping’ signals the presence of the mechanical as

an agent within the text. In the deathly stillness of Ping’s world,
the word ‘ping’ itself is the only identifiable source of agency
and its sporadic eruptions toggle both figure and room between
various fixed states. The word first appears in three separate
variations on the formulation ‘bare white body fixed ping fixed
elsewhere’, each time as the fulcrum whose mere utterance seems
to produce the body’s movement, shifting it between ‘fixed’ and
‘fixed elsewhere’ (Beckett, 1995, 193–4). A second sequence follows,
marked by alternation between the phrases ‘ping murmur’ and
‘ping silence’ (194). Flicking between speech and silence, ‘ping’s
dominion extends to encompass both body and language, and
finally also meaning (‘ping a meaning only just’; 195), producing
the traces of what we might consider the human (speech; meaning;
the animated body) as a function of its mechanised control.
With its onomatopoeic evocation of mechanical operations and
metal-on-metal, the word ‘ping’ points to a mechanisation of the
text that is reinforced by its rhythmic pacing – the same rhythm
that I link above to the text’s affect. This rhythm relies heavily
on the text’s spondaic patterning, which breaks the text into a
sequence of mostly paired, equally weighted syllables, suggestive
of the sort of binary system on which computer technology is
based. The fact that ‘ping’ most often toggles between a series
of on/off positions – murmur/silent, fixed/fixed elsewhere – only
reinforces this binary movement. This structure implies a profound
indifference, a failure to differentiate qualitatively between
various ‘inputs’, switching restlessly between equal items in a
binary sequence or equally weighted, undifferentiated syllables,
evoking the inhuman lack of desire that we tend to associate
with machines. Similarly, the unusually repetitious use of this
unusually monotonous foot – conventionally employed selectively,
for emphasis – evokes the mindlessness and the lack of preference
associated with mechanical reiterations. This repetition is echoed
at the level of sentence structure, as phrases repeat in various
combinations throughout the text. Literalising the reader’s mental
configuration and reconfiguration of words, these permutations
evoke a computer running through all possible combinations. But
this repetitious textual surface is also, as we saw above, what
produces the text’s affect. Ping’s mechanisation, then, produces
 Ping’s Posthuman Affect 95

its affect and is indistinguishable from it. The spondaic rhythm

through which the text evokes mechanical processes is also the
rhythm out of which it produces a sonorous, resonant structure
that, in foregrounding the sensuous qualities of language at the
expense of meaning, produces the autonomous affective structure
described above. Ping, in short, offers a vision of a specifically
mechanised affect
At first glance, this doubling of the mechanical and the affective
seems almost oxymoronic: the popular understanding of the line
between human and machine is often built around a divide
between unemotional machines and emotive humanity that the
notion of mechanised affect necessarily undermines. Indeed, the
problem posed by Beckett’s mechanisation of affect for writers like
Nussbaum is, as we have seen, a problem both of the relation
of these texts to humanity, and of the persistence or authenticity
of their affect itself. Because it reimagines affect as a product of
what is most mechanical in Ping, and because its mechanisation
and its affect arise simultaneously from the same rhythms, this
text stages affect neither as an irreducibly personal response, nor
a quintessentially human one, but instead as the point at which
human and machine, feeling and meaning, logical and aesthetic
form blur into indistinction.
In this sense, Ping’s affect is a specifically posthuman one. The
oxymoronic notion of mechanised affect brings about ‘the union
of the human with the intelligent machine’ that N. Katherine
Hayles offers as her starting definition of the posthuman (1999, 2).
Elements of such posthumanism can be found throughout Beckett’s
writing, from the union of man with bicycle that Hugh Kenner calls
the ‘Cartesian centaur’ (1961, 117) to Beckett’s extensive interest in
prostheses (see Tajiri, 2007). But in keeping with Ping’s preference
for asignifying rhythm over representation and narrative, this
text differs from earlier, more representational examples in its
refusal to depict the posthuman directly through its characters. The
‘bare white body’ – the closest Ping comes to a character – displays
signs of neither humanity nor intelligence, and is therefore better
understood as inhuman than posthuman, the passive recipient of
mechanical forces that act upon it. Conversely, while the ‘ping’
might be an intelligent machine, it bears no trace of humanity.
Neither body nor ‘ping’ therefore qualifies as fully posthuman.
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Instead, Ping’s posthumanism is located in the experience

of reading the text. Here, the (human) reader experiences the
simultaneity of affect with mechanical rhythm. In this simultaneity,
the reader experiences Hayles’ ‘union of the human with
the intelligent machine’, and the text therefore produces the
posthuman, not in its characters, but in its readers. Because the
mechanical qualities of this text are so firmly rooted in Ping’s
very language, and because, as Brater has noted, texts like Ping
are so eminently ‘speakable’, the text’s mechanisation ultimately
implicates the readers themselves. By asking readers to speak
this mechanical language – even if the vocalisation is only sub-
vocalisation – the mechanised text makes its readers into its proxies.
This mechanisation of the reader stages the process that David
Porush takes as definitive of what he calls ‘cybernetic fictions’ – the
process of ‘forcing the reader into a cybernetic fix’ (1988, 383).
Porush ultimately claims that the staging of this process is
necessarily critical, but we need not follow him to this conclusion
to see the validity of his emphasis on the implication of the
reader in the mechanised text. Indeed, in Ping, where the processes
that produce the text’s mechanisation – its rhythms, its tremors,
its toggling between fixed states – are central to both the text’s
affect and to its availability for interpretation, the implication
of the reader might best be understood as generative – even as
necessary for the text to function. The site of Ping’s posthumanism
lies, therefore, in the reader, who, in being forced to speak this
mechanised text, comes to embody the posthuman union of human
and machine.
The operation of this performative affect requires not just the
reader’s implication, but his or her education – the shaping of the
reader’s expectations out of the text’s own repetitive, and thus
increasingly predictable, unfolding. This dynamic of repetition
returns us to the quotations with which I began, both of which
suggest that Beckett’s mechanisation of affect is the result of specific
histories – that it arises from the repetition of feeling across time (in
this case, the time of reading), until this feeling becomes routinized
and thus mechanised. With its emphasis on rhythmic repetition
and semantic permutation, Ping generates histories of feeling out
of its routinized textual dynamics. Such micro-histories educate
the reader in the text’s exhausted and exhaustive affective routines
 Ping’s Posthuman Affect 97

and produce its distinctive affect as a function of its routinisation

of sound and sense. Ping’s affect, therefore, is mechanical in the
sense meant by Piette and Nussbaum, constituting an after-effect
of a repetitious history of feeling. The mechanical affect that they
observe and worry over emerges in Ping as the process of the
reader’s habituation to certain textual structures.

3. An Archive of Feeling

Ping’s historical affect, however, arises not just from the history of
feeling within the text, but from the way in which this mechanised
feeling is itself an historical artefact. In making this claim, I
follow a recent strand within Beckett scholarship that has sought
to understand his writing’s historicity as ‘streaked by historical
turmoils and the emotions provoked by them’, rather than ‘simply
[. . .] “matched up” with historical contexts on the ham sandwich
model’ (Gibson, 2010, 22). Such a claim opens up a novel way
of understanding Beckett’s relationship to history, which places
feeling at the forefront. It has received one of its fullest theoretical
elaborations in Beckett studies in Iain Bailey’s account of tone as a
kind of historical feeling, ‘a felt response to a zeitgeist’ (2013, 200).
For Gibson and especially for Bailey, feeling in Beckett offers a way
of locating him in relation to his historical moment that exceeds
the straightforwardly archival. At the level of Beckett’s distinctive
tone – which, in Bailey’s usage, shares with my account of Ping’s
affect an interest in Beckett’s textual repetitions and rhythms – his
texts record an historical mood, one that may not be empirically
demonstrable, but which is nonetheless central to their historical
position and relevance.
For Bailey and Gibson, this historical feeling is connected
primarily to post-war France and more generally to a mid- to
late twentieth-century sense of distress. Ping, however, taps into
a different well of historical feeling, one which reads Beckett’s
writing through its contemporaneity with the rise of cybernetics
and a rapid transformation in the relationship between humans
and machines. This context includes both the emergence of new
medical technologies, such as the ECG machine, that brought
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humans and machines into increasingly intimate relationships,

as well as the theoretical developments of cybernetics, a field of
research that sought a language that could describe both biological
and mechanical systems in the same terms and thus pave the way
for hybrid systems that combined the two. Indeed, in the 1960s,
as Beckett was writing Ping, cybernetics was undergoing a shift
to ‘second-order cybernetics’, which emphasised the role of the
observer and therefore, for the first time, made room for affect in
these integrated systems.
Several critics have already sought to historicise this relationship
between humans and machines in Beckett’s writing. Dan O’Hara’s
archival reading of Ping takes the text as a response to Beckett’s
time in hospital in the years immediately preceding its writing,
in which he would have come into contact with the relatively
new technology of the ECG machine. Such contact, O’Hara
argues, prompted Beckett to write a text that imagines ‘a closed
circuit between man and machine’ (2010, 442) – a characteristically
cybernetic image. Seb Franklin, moving away from archival
historicism, instead offers a ‘comparative cultural history’ (2013,
251–2) that traces the parallels between Beckett’s writing and
the emergence of cybernetics, without laying claim to any
particular empirical link between the two. Although Franklin
does not specifically discuss Ping, this text follows the evolution
that he describes. In the sense that Ping is a system whose
mechanical and affective components are fully articulated with
each other, it operates as a cybernetic system, while in implicating
the reader – the ‘observer’ of the text – and his or her affective
responses, it operates as a specifically second-order cybernetic
system. Both O’Hara’s biographical and Franklin’s more broadly
cultural historicisations are helpful for understanding why Ping
invests mechanical rhythms with affective potential. Both analyses
point to the text’s location at a specific moment in the history of
technology, and of humanity’s theorisation of its relationship to
technology, which can be traced both through archival documents
and through a broader sense of the cultural zeitgeist.
Read against this backdrop, Ping’s mechanised affect can
be understood as encapsulating a specifically twentieth-century
feeling that is rooted in the rapidly changing relationship between
humanity and machines over the course of that century. The
 Ping’s Posthuman Affect 99

cybernetic imbrication of humanity and the machine appears in

this reading not just as a theoretical position, but as a way of
feeling about, with, and through technology. Ping’s mechanised
affect captures this way of feeling, preserving it as something
that can – indeed, must – be experienced and re-experienced at
every reading of the text. In this sense, it locates Ping as part of
a longer twentieth-century tradition of cultural phenomena that
stage the strangely affective hybridisation of technology with the
human, running from the imprinting of mechanical movement
on Charlie Chaplin’s body in Modern Times (1936), to its playful
re-enactment in the late twentieth-century ‘robot’ style of dance.
This tradition encapsulates one of the dominant ways of ‘feeling’
about technology in the twentieth century. What it shares with Ping
is an experience of the human/machine relationship as embodied
and affective, as human observer-participants come to embody
mechanised, repetitive rhythms.
As we saw in the above discussion of Ping, the cyborg affect
that results from this hybridisation registers as inhuman because
of its detachment from emotion, its inassimilabilty to narrative,
and its resultant air of indifference. But it also has a very specific
temporality, staging an imagined future in the infinitely prolonged
present of performance. This imagined future operates at the
level of both thematic meaning – the science fiction vision of the
man-machine hybrid – and at the level of affect, where, following
Massumi, these performances operate through the compression of
potential into the actual. Ping reflects this futurism by offering a
nightmare vision of a human body whose agency has been entirely
sacrificed to the animating voice of the mechanical ‘ping’, but
describing it in terms that make it always present in the moment of
reading. In this context, the text’s lack of verbs makes its futuristic
vision register as an uncanny timelessness, holding it in the fixed
state of the past participle (‘legs joined’) and the suspended action
of the present participle (‘hands hanging’, ‘ceiling shining white’).
Like Chaplin and the robot dance, it is the embodiment in the
present of the historical ‘feeling’ of a cyborg future.
We may be witnessing the end of this historical, future-
directed affect, as the relationship between feeling and technology
increasingly becomes dominated by anxieties about emotion rather
than affect. While Massumi took Ronald Reagan’s ‘jerky’ television
100 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

appearances as his key example of the centrality of mediated

affect to 1980s politics, in the twenty-first century, Reagan’s
‘jerks’ have been replaced by Donald Trump’s rageful, emotive
Twitter feed, with its insistence on qualifying comments with
explicit emotional responses (‘Sad!’). In this change of conservative
presidents, we might detect a broader shift. Our anxieties about
technology increasingly now turn less on the fear that we will
be so colonised by technology that even our affective responses
will be formed around it, and more on the threat of empty or
excessive emotion that is too readily co-optable in a social media
landscape. In this new dispensation, we fear not the prospect of
becoming cyborgs, but rather the simulation of emotional content
and reactions without genuine connection, the harnessing of our
‘natural’ emotions as simply inputs in a technological system.
In this context, Ping’s inhuman affect begins to feel properly
historical, evoking a feeling that belongs to a cultural imagination
now perhaps past, or passing. To read Ping as the bearer of this
specific, historical affect, then, is to read it as an archive of feeling,
a text that continues to animate its readers with an affect now
growing increasingly unfamiliar. As this feeling passes into history,
it brings the text’s archival machinery to the fore, foregrounding its
anachronistic capacity to restage a lost futurism.
Ultimately, then, I want to suggest that a post-archival Beckett
need not entail a resignation from history or indeed from
historicism. On the contrary, a reading that returns to history via
an attention to form and affect opens up other histories buried
in these texts – histories not available to straightforwardly archival
criticism, but which nonetheless do not force the text beyond its
(or our) historical moment into an abstract realm of universal form
or universalised theory. Instead, reading Ping as itself an archive
of a mechanical feeling, now passing into history, foregrounds the
recursiveness of literature’s relationship to history, its capacity both
to carry an historical experience forward into the present and to
transport a reader, located in the present, into a fading past with its
anticipation of a future that will never be. The advances in Beckett
studies that have been permitted by archival scholarship tell one
half of this story, grounding the text in a historical moment – but
they cannot take full account of the dynamism of this relationship,
the recursive back-and-forth that the historical text stages with the
 Ping’s Posthuman Affect 101

contemporary moment in which it is ceaselessly performed and

re-performed (at least as long as it is read). To properly account
for this dynamic requires an attention to formal and theoretical
questions that respond to but are not bound by the historical,
yielding an insight into the way in which Beckett’s readers, as much
as his characters, are ‘heirs of a legacy of feeling that shapes [us]
inexorably’ (Nussbaum, 1988, 250).

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102 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

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