The Flickering Signifier

In print, the signifier stays put. The ink fixes to the page, and the durability of the printed word underwrites an entire epistemology: citation is possible because the passage cited can be located and verified, attribution is possible because the text traces back to a hand and a moment of commitment, and the implicit truth-claim of print culture rests on the material stability of the mark. N. Katherine Hayles introduced the flickering signifier to name what happens when text moves from page to screen: the digital text is not the text but a representation of it, continuously refreshed from underlying data structures, rendered by software, subject to change at every level of the stack without leaving a trace. The screen simulates the stability of print while concealing a fundamental instability. AI-generated text extends this condition to its logical extreme—the text does not merely flicker between states of a pre-existing text but flickers into existence, token by token, through large language model prediction, selecting