Codework

We invite discussion of Alan Sondheim's latest theorization of "codework." Sondheim originally conceptualized codework in a crucial issue of American Book Review. The essays below offer significant elaborations and we welcome you to sign in and respond. Login and click the ? to [add a new wiki page]? or add a comment in the box below.

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Denaturalzing Codework --MattK?, Tue, 22 Mar 2005 19:51:16 -0500 reply
Different electronic writing practices encode different views of electronic textualiy; codework is no exception.

Codework, it should be noted, is performed almost exclusively in high level programming languages or their derivations. High level languages were developed to free the programmer from the limitations of producing code statements that retained a one-to-one correspondence to ordered ranks of machine language instructions. All of the well known advantages of high level languages—their portability and relative ease of use chief amongst them—follow from this initial design objective. High level languages encourage a view of electronic textuality that is referential (variables, arrays, and pointers), fluid (branching conditionals), modular (object oriented), and even autopoietic--for example, the original FORTRAN GOTO statement, which would later come to vex no less a luminary than Edsger Dijkstra because it allows a program to ricochet brazenly, creating the potential for infinite loops. To the extent that codework operates (as nearly all of it does) at a specific, permeable boundary between the visible natural language of interface and screen, and the formalized but still human-legible syntaxes of higher level programming languages, it foregrounds that one particular and partial view of electronic textuality. Indeed, I would argue that codework can serve to naturalize this very same view of electronic textuality, by virtue of the ease with which codework’s aesthetics map to actual coding practices which are nevertheless themselves highly contingent in their ultimate relationship to other layers of symbolic abstractions in a computer. So it is that the one-to-many ethos of high level languages finds immediate concrete expression in Mez, aka Mary Anne Breeze’s penchant for polysemic wordplay (“2 polysemicalli m-ploy a fractured wurdset”). Moreover, the sheer inscriptive density of much codework may, paradoxically, serve to dilute the extreme artifice of its representations since the user, desensitized by thickets of alien punctuation and orthography, is lulled into assuming they must be witnessing electronic writing in something close to its natural state.

Let me give just one example: a composition such as Ted Warnell’s "Berlioz" employs a color palette immediately recognizable as the classic digital aesthetic as it has been lovingly cultivated since Disney’s Tron (1982), and two years later William Gibson’s prose passages describing cyberspace, its Cartesian vortices and “lines of light” like “city lights receding.” While codework is nearly always discussed in terms of making the computer’s internal processes “visible,” of bringing them to the “surface,” the extent to which this visual knowledge production demands fundamentally different cognitive, even physiological modes of address than the relentlessly symbolic logic of computer programming has thus far been understated. Indeed, the unseen element in much codework is that its elaborate visual patternings refer the signs of computation to the forms and traditions of visual knowledge production Johanna Drucker has lately called graphesis. Even such starkly machinic text as we find in much codework quickly yields up a range of political, aesthetic, and epistemological allegiances that are far removed from the stacks and registers of deep computation.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum University of Maryland

Comment on your post --sondheim, Wed, 23 Mar 2005 12:53:46 -0500 reply
First, thank you greatly. A few things in relation to your comments. Most of the codework I'm interested in is hardly object-oriented; instead it uses shell scripts, perl, etc. This is somewhat of a lower-level language, but obviously not on the level of machine coding. But I do think there are several distinctions that have to be made. Mez' work for one isn't really code; it's faux-code, at least most of it has been faux-code, and at that level, is definitely within the aegis of natural English. On the other hand, some work does reference the code that produced it or parts of the code that produced it are entangled within it. For me, this is very different. It doesn't matter what level the code's on - it reminds me of the old hacker's debates about real programming and what level one has to descend to, machine/assembly/hardware etc.

I don't think that codework is "nearly always discussed in terms of making the computer’s internal processes “visible,” of bringing them to the “surface,”" by the way; it's the processes of constructing the semantics-at-hand that are exemplified by the underlying programmatic structure / protocol - which need not reference either the machine or the fundamental and/or/etc. processes of the cpu itself. Instead I'd argue there's an uneasy relationship between the logical structures of formal programming language and natural language content which forms in a sense a "third content" resulting from entanglement.

I certainly disagree as well "the unseen element in much codework is that its elaborate visual patternings refer the signs of computation to the forms and traditions of visual knowledge production" - this is true in some cases, particularly Mez' again, but it's not true say in Meskens, my work, much of solipsis, noemata, etc.

And yes, I do agree that "much codework quickly yields up a range of political, aesthetic, and epistemological allegiances" - that's the point of it. And of course it's removed from deep computation - that's not the point of it. It doesn't assign epistemological priority. But deep computation isn't the issue at all; as Jerry Cullum wrote in an issue of Art Papers, there's information all the way down.

Finally, I think that codework problematizes the visual; I don't find Drucker's category relevant. What I've seen of Drucker's work/aesthetic is close to both design and concrete poetry, as well as conoisseurship, and (again what I've seen) these are uncritically accepted. I don't find that the case at all; codework if anything is more often than not ugly, and the visual structures that appear are the results of laying out hashes, etc. I'd relate the visual of codework more to the Wolfram's cellular automata (of A New Kind of Science) - not in terms of the ontological claims made, but in terms of chaos, confusion, debris, and the comprehension that order is somehow at the basis of it all, no matter how entangled it appears in the lifeworld.

• Alan

Collocation on A/D --sondheim, Wed, 23 Mar 2005 13:33:51 -0500 reply
[maybe of interest]?

some sum across text

1. the world has any and none 1 axioms and axiologies are dispersed among worlds and domains 1 distinctions may be fissuring of same and same 1 every age is every un-age 1 links and couplings constitute the world 1 meaning is constituted by virtue of desire and domains 1 mouths and ears are identical 1 primary structures include annihilation and creation 1 representation structures are in the form of mappings 1 the armature of belief is the encoding of desire 1 the phenomenology of the imaginary is that of the plasma 1 the world has a certain style 1 theory is defuge and enumeration coupled with abjection and foreclosure 1 this abacus is always already that abacus 2 channeling and gating may also be included 2 desire is towards signifer and totalization 2 distinctions may be inscriptions of self and not-self 2 domains are nearly decomposable into worlds 2 hierarchies decompose into holarchies at the limit 2 in a link contiguity transforms into structure 2 investment is characteristic of phenomena 2 it is terminology which forecloses and annihilates 2 our worlds are constituted 2 science is that ideological which is non-ideological 2 the mirror stage is always a coagulation 2 the world is constituted by equivalences and not identities 2 these include P)Q, P)P, P)Q, P)Q, P)*Q)P, P)P)P etc. 3 an identity is an equivalence of one 3 desire is towards the potential of infinite manipulation 3 disinvestment is the state of defuge or refusal/deluge 3 existence is relative to domains 3 fissuring characterizes the postmodern and inscription the modern 3 in a coupling contiguity remains disassemblage 3 limits are always asymptotic 3 meaning is always in relation 3 negations include chain, sheffer, and the sheffer-dual 3 terminology is destroyed within the creativity of the border-regions 3 there is no ontological distinction between information and materiality 3 truth and slanders are bound in abjection 3 within the secondary are also found hieroglyphic binding and leakage 4 an equivalence of one is a misrecognition emptied of the symbolic 4 bases collapse into superstructures, and superstructures into bases 4 consider leakage of the signifier, excess, clutter, debris, and noise 4 digital is eternal and analog operates between death and desire 4 everything applies no farther than to ourselves in the act of reading 4 infinite manipulation is the binding of body and bodies into hieroglyph 4 intentionality is always mediated and itself intended 4 mouths hold and carry the cultural skein as linking communality 4 our worlds are loosely tethered 4 secondary structures include inscription, demarcation, distinction 4 substance is never and always emergent 4 there is no meaning outside of relation 4 what is disinvested participates in the abject 5 analog and digital interpenetrate 5 analog and digital interpenetrate 5 analog and digital interpenetrate 5 5 analog burns the noise within us 5 at the limits ontologies fractally coalesce 5 chains of consequences are couplings at best 5 culture adheres and coheres 5 inscriptions are overcoded or undercoded and always destabilized 5 self-reflexivity and contradiction leave residue as content 5 st: stuttering, stumbling, wobbling, jostling, shuddering, sputtering 5 the abject is that which cannot be recuperated 5 the semiotics of emission and spew replace the semiotics of signifiers 5 we are always already within the virtual 5 with the beginning of hieroglyph one enters the beginning of speech 5 x^-x = 0 rel x 6 assemblages of ideas constitute inscriptive domains 6 culture doubles epistemologies 6 desire transforms the speech of the other under the guise of freedom 6 emission and spew transform vector into flow and flow into turbulence 6 erotics: fissuring, inscription, puncture, delirium, liquidity 6 in noise culture 0 is a positivity characterized as {x: x = -x} 6 negation is at the core of human existence and communality 6 the masochistic assemblage creates the cultural context of narratology 6 the other is that which is unaccountable and unaccounted-for 6 the topology of intention is also secondary 6 the world stains, is stained, is constituted by stains 6 truth is a wager and a strategy among constituted regimes 6 we exist in-between paths and plasmas 6 we exist inbetween paths and plasmas 7 all thought is narratology 7 eccentric space: smattering, scattering, skittering, spitting 7 facticity and truth are contiguous at best 7 governance constitutes the foci of assemblages of ideas 7 only a radical disbelief necessarily binds and blinds one to the truth 7 our worlds are nearly decomposable into discrete entities 7 the abject other is simultaneously wayward and abject 7 the ego is always catastrophic in the mathematical sense 7 the imaginary carries no force and its totality 7 the topology includes non-distributive transgressive logics 7 the world constitutes by stains 7 turbulence leaks around the simulacrum of death but not abjection 7 we are driven by annihilation 8 body and inscription are doubly transparent and doubly fixed 8 communication is presence and communality 8 desire is a flux-emission without source or objects 8 entities are by virtue of the name, maintenance, and contour 8 fissures require low maintenance 8 flow leaks around inscription which carries its own inward dissipations 8 foci exist as if the totality of nodes hierarchically connected to them 8 infinite copying exists past the heat-death of the universe 8 inscriptive components include maintenance and legitimation structure 8 perfect authority is authentic circulation 8 the ego is inscribed and inscriptive 8 the narratological turns speech towards foreclosure 8 third level of the social involves economic and other parabolas 9 at the limit epistemologies and ontologies coalesce 9 desire is always submerged 9 eye and i shift and stutter around deep linguistic coding 9 inscription domains are abject emissions both unwieldy and temporary 9 inscription is maintained in deferral and division 9 nothing is constituted as axiological 9 the ego exists within the certain style of the world 9 the imaginary is speechless 9 the narratological loops the ouroborosean tale back into the mouth 9 the parabolas are a means towards totalization and constitution 9 the world has no requirements 9 theory is enumerated 9 they also include embodiment, impulse, fueling, and linkage Splayed Splayed from glowing laptop screen, analog and digital camera, video, even [1-13[1-9]? [1-4]?[1-9]? [1-9]?[1-9]?

analog and digital interpenetrate 5 analog and digital interpenetrate. The and digital, at least to this extent. and number. (distinction between analog and digital orders here - chaotic. digital regimes in the world. Abjure any clear distinction between analog everyday virtual life. Phenom- enology of the analog and digital. Modernisms fucking each other and the general public. It covers both analog- and digi-machines ranging from yesterday to forty years ago, analog and digital programs are operating in the space between analog and digital. The semiotal machines, focusing on fundamental differences between analog and tic can be described as both analog and digital: the analog and digital.

_

Re: --MattK?, Wed, 23 Mar 2005 16:26:33 -0500 reply
Alan,

Thanks for such a complete response. In brief, my position is this: I believe codework trades on certain commonly held conceptions about what electronic language looks like in its "natural" state, while in fact there is no such natural state because all code, both high and low--from object oriented to shell scripts to machine code--is an abstraction of nanomagnetic or other physical phenomena unavailable to the sensorium absent some fairly exotic instrumentation. The fact that Mez does not write functional code (of which I'm aware) makes the point--it looks like code just enough to capitalize on a shared aesthetic which itself is highly engineered, politicized, commodified. This is not meant as an indictment of the work, but something I would like to see more explicit because I think it can be generative: codework at the machine/assembly level, as opposed to "higher" levels for example.

On graphesis: this is a general epistemological framework that goes beyond JD's earlier poetics as manifested in her books and writing. In my opinion, the visual response to codework--I love the image of a debris field, by the way--is an integral element of its reception, pipes and hashes and keyboard artifice all competing with the standard letterforms for the eye's attention (not incidentally, all flattened within the same 0-127 bit range of ASCII).

Matt

Re: --sondheim, Thu, 24 Mar 2005 12:19:58 -0500 reply
This is of great interest to me; it becomes an ontological issue. I think that mathesis exists within its own ontology, i.e. is neither inherently conventionalist or intuitionist. In this I actually follow Godel. If one looks for a larger prime, for example - this for me parallels astronomy and a search, say, for planets. It doesn't mean that the larger prime is machine-embedded, although the explication of the processes are. Those primes exist whether we continue to find them or not. For me mathematics is discovery more than invention; even Wolfram's cellular automata are such - the opening of a new world in which patterning appears chaotic (even given the simplest of laws), but isn't.

In other words, it's the opposite for me - nanomagnetic and physical phenomena refect, but do not embody, abstract phenomena...

Alan

Denaturalzing Codework --sbaldwin, Mon, 28 Mar 2005 22:24:24 -0500 reply
There are many codeworks. There is almost no codework.

First observation. For want of a better term, I'll identify a "thematic codework" in Matt’s initial point that codework "is performed almost exclusively in high level programming languages or their derivations." So, this is codework as a thematics of code jargon and syntax, mixed and re-hashed at "a specific, permeable boundary," building on the proximity of natural language and high level language. (I think of Kittler’s well known remarks, citing Lohmann, of the significance for the development of programming languages of non-conjugated English language verbs such as read and write.) The work here is the activation of the semiotics of code, and a set of cultural relations around this sememe. Codework as connotative semiotics. (I think here of Kate Hayles' assessment of Talon Memmott's "creole" use of code terminology and John Cayley's critique.) It seems accurate then, to say that “the unseen element in much codework is that its elaborate visual patternings refer the signs of computation to the forms and traditions of visual knowledge production.” The naturalization involved is the phenomenology of this code thematics, which hides its re-troping of an older visual rhetoric.

Second observation. Where is codework is “nearly always discussed in terms of making the computer’s internal processes ‘visible,’ of bringing them to the ‘surface’”? No doubt such discussions maintain the mytheme of thematic codework as revelation, whereas critiquing discussions of codework for such distinctions is a way of ensuring that these discussions remain at the level of a connotative semiotics. Such policing conserves for the critic an inaccessible reserve (source) of code at a lower or natural level. The pseudo-epiphany of thematic codework is the critical paradigm of medial insight into what resists “surfacing” or “visibility.” No doubt this is precisely the aesthetic inheritance of forms and traditions of visual knowledge production, and no doubt this is where codework makes a differences.

I'm reminded of years ago, when I worked for a company making compilers and assemblers. The compiler people declared that their work was more creative, while the assembler folks complained of the lack of rigor of anyone who couldn't program assembler.

It is true that higher level languages are “far removed from the stacks and registers of deep computation.” When I think about it, I’m not sure what deep computation is, though it sounds good. Stacks and registers are far removed from flip flops and doped silicon atoms. We could measure how far Flash is relative to 8086 op code, producing a kind of literal instrument of the work involved. No doubt this would satisfy a critical interest in code but would not complete the work of code.

There is more or less another codework. The visible text of thematic codework is more or less the shell of this ill-defined codework. If thematic codework is no more than the quotation of codework, a quotation of the form of codework, this still may be codework.

What if thematic codework is not codework?

What if all thematization is codework?

What if both are true?

Re: code.wurk[s]? --netwurker, Tue, 29 Mar 2005 00:36:16 -0500 reply
An Art Yet Unknown: Art Will Be Code, Or It Will Not Be

Inke Arns, Berlin

written for the Anthology of Art, initiated by Jochen Gerz and organized by the School of Visual Arts of Braunschweig (Germany) and the University of Rennes (France)

The German version of the question I was sent differs slightly from the English version. While the English version asks “What is, in the context of contemporary art, your vision of a future art?”, the German version reads: “What could be, given your vision of art today, a future art yet unknown to you?” As I find it more challenging I will attempt to answer the second question (even if the attempt to describe something yet unknown to oneself is quite paradoxical).

A future art yet unknown to me would definitely be an art of code. Already today within the field of so-called “net art” we can see attempts which point in this direction. The “codeworks” (to borrow a term by Alan Sondheim) by Netochka Nezvanova (or: NN, integer, antiorp), mez, Jodi and others focus their/our attention on the “raw” program code which our increasingly digitized working and living environment is based upon. As in the future this digitization will be rather increasing than decreasing it is important to realize that it’s not the glossy surfaces but rather the underlying program code which has performative properties. One could assume the existence of two texts, a “phenotext” and a “genotext”, when talking about the properties of graphical interfaces. The surface effects of the phenotext, i.e. moving texts, are generated and controlled by other underlying “effective” texts, programming codes or source texts. Programming codes are illocutionary speech acts[1]? insofar as “saying” and “doing” coincide and these speech acts with the “power to act” don’t merely describe or represent something, but directly affect, put into motion.[2]? Thus, code, i.e., text (programming languages / binary code), directly affects the virtual spaces in which we are moving, communicating, living. It has the capabilities to directly mobilize or immobilize its users. This is why Lawrence Lessig in his book Code and other Laws of Cyberspace[3]? claims that “program code increasingly tends towards becoming law.” Today, control functions are directly being built into the very architecture of the Net, i.e., its code. Taking as an example the America Online (AOL) service Lessig poignantly makes clear how code directly enables or disables freedom of movement, of speech, and of behaviour. Code should not be accepted as something “natural” or “God-given”. It is rather written by humans, and can therefore be changed, or conceived of differently.

A future art yet unknown to me would definitely point to the importance of code and do all kinds of things with and to it. This art of the code will primarily deal with “deep code” and not with the mere “surface effects of software”. It will thus essentially be a text-based activity and not a visual representation. This is not to say that images or surfaces will disappear entirely. This is just to say that increasingly the digital realm has to be conceived of in terms of text, not image. What’s political is the code. Staying with the surfaces would deny the fact that the computer is by no means a visual medium, as Florian Cramer has emphasized, but essentially and primarily a text medium to which all kinds of output devices can be connected.[4]?

The future art I am thinking of will be characterized by a genuine processuality. This genuine processuality will be very different from what has become known as “process-oriented” art since the 1960s or even since the 1910s and 1920s. It means that art becomes more processual itself, that it will get more and more integrated into processes, that it will take place within processes, that it will incite or disguise itself as viral-like activities, and work its way deep into the guts of information society’s data body. This will go way beyond what we have seen in terms of the “dematerialisation of the art object” since the 1960s. There won’t be any objects anymore, only processes which (sometimes may even visibly) affect surfaces. Art becoming genuinely processual will thus increasingly step out of a clearly defined art context in order to directly affect and intervene in the control processes of the different realms of the information society. I would not like to loose the term “art” itself, and would not entirely subscribe to Dirk Paesmans/jodi’s radical view, but I am sure that it will definitely be filled with new, appropriate content: „Well, what is art? A pretentious thing that tries to take the fun out of working with the Net and impose its standards on us. Forget about it!”[5]?

Berlin, 26 Nov 2001

[1]? John Langshaw Austin: How to Do Things with Words (dt.: Zur Theorie der Sprechakte, Stuttgart 1979)

[2]? Cf. Inke Arns. Texts That Move (Themselves): Notes on the Performativity of Programming Codes in Net Art. Paper given at the Kinetographien conference, European Academy, Berlin, October 2001

[3]? Lawrence Lessig: Code and other Laws of Cyberspace. New York 1999

[4]? „Es gibt im Computer nichts als Schrift, woraus folgt, dass Schrift, Text der Schluessel zum strukturellen Verstaendnis des Computers und der Digitalisierung analoger Zeichen ist.“ (Florian Cramer: Fuer eine Textwissenschaft des Digitalen. Typoskript, Vortrag auf dem Germanistentag Erlangen, 1.10.2001, 2)

[5]? Dirk Paesmans of Jodi, in: Tilman Baumgärtel. net.art 2.0. New Materials towards Net art. Nuremberg 2001, p.173

• http://www.v2.nl/~arns/

The Hidden --sondheim, Fri, 01 Apr 2005 01:38:49 -0500 reply
Sandy, I'm not sure I understand the first part of your reply on thematic codework. If you could elaborate I'd appreciate t. When you say however "Such policing conserves for the critic an inaccessible reserve (source) of code at a lower or natural level." - not only do I agree but I wonder if this were not a general principle of the phenomenological, that is a level or reserve which is always already inaccessible. This defines a blurred horizon where presumed qualitative ontological (and epistemological) differences reside, a hidden god or linguistic substrate of truth which is both inaccessible and evidentiary. A codework of or by machine language or through the direct modification of the electronics themselves, would be no closer or farther. This is a metaphysics of projection...

The Hidden --sbaldwin, Fri, 01 Apr 2005 09:11:24 -0500 reply
Thanks for your reply Alan. Elaborating my first paragraph on "thematic codework": at that point I'm agreeing with Matt's provocative initial post. I'm granting that there is work which foregrounds code as a theme, that incorporates citations, jargon, references to technical codes of various sorts, while removing these from their contexts; and/or that there's work that remains entirely within a high-level language - say Perl - and riffs on the suggestive proximity of that language to natural language, building on the aesthetic results of this proximity. So, a connotative aesthetics or mytheme of code. Examples might be Perl poetry, Talan's work, Mez's work, and so on; all of these are subsequently problematized in my posting. Equally, I'm thinking of critical discussions of codework by Hayles, Raley, and Cayley. Here I'm simplifying all three positions, but codework becomes a allegorization of cultural attitudes towards code and technology, with a sublime relation to the technology it deals with. (The position of these critics is more subtle than I'm allowing, but I'm moving quickly.) The critical theorist then gains the reflective insight into this allegory qua code / technology, the insight of the decoder of myths if you will.

In all this I'm mirroring and agreeing with Matt K's argument. I do so in order to move to the next part of my argument, where I problematize what I've just argued by asking what role the critic plays (the theorist, the commentator, the one who identifies thematic codework). In all of this, I'm essentially rehearsing the argument I made in that Cybertext Yearbook article...

In the second half of your remark, about this inaccessible reserve: yes, a problem of the phenomenological qua conceptual, or what I'm trying to think of in my work as the crux of the media and philosophy, but I think it's possible to write and perform this crux - it might mean one is doing little more than describing it and repeating it, but possibly this is the only codework that counts.

It seems to me that what's interesting is not a codework of machine language but the interest in this, which is what you're pointing out. (I think here of Kittler's obsession with Alan Turing, part of which was an obsession with Turing's ability to "read" machine code; here Kittler is the poster boy for cutting edge media theory obsession with "source.") What interests me is the mediacy or phenomenal fuzziness still at work in accessing the inaccessable. The medial appearance (ghost but also erscheinung, but I'd probably need to qualify that) is not done away with by rigor in dealing with conceptual levels (here see Cayley's Cybertext Yearbook article), though this does get one the (still allegorical) sense of control over meanings and of accounting for codework. The ghost is not a problem of poor (i.e. not technical enough) modeling of the situation, it is the situation (all that is the case).

Hmmmm.... --sondheim, Sat, 02 Apr 2005 04:52:47 -0500 reply
For me similar, i.e. not a codework of a particular level, but an exploration of the phenomenological horizon in general. Can such a horizon itself be embedded? I'd think only in an indexical (Peirce) sense, elaborated as the gestural. The horizon - of any phenomenological domain - might then be considered that arena or aura of entangled ontologies, not a subsumed episteme, but an epistemic emission which can't be contained -

not closer, not deeper, not lower--but how then? --MattK?, Sat, 02 Apr 2005 11:23:00 -0500 reply
Nice to see this discussion unfolding. Let me clarify something I wrote earlier: when described as "generative" the idea of a "codework at the machine/assembly level, as opposed to higher levels" I wasn't for the conceit of getting "closer" to the "source." I general I think language such as closer, lower, deeper--which is unavoidable when discussing these things--mysifies and misleads. In this respect I like Alan's comment about metaphysics of projection. The most common such projection I know is a specific visual image, that of the "tower" of languages or layers or levels that encode computational events. This image is very much an idealization, yet it seems indispensible. Why is that? What interests me about a "low level" (see?) codework in particular is its capacity to address textual primitives like automation, intention, and intelligibility. By foregrounding these facets of textuality, by rendering them normative and essential, computers open up the most extreme textual fields I know. Matt

not closer, not deeper, not lower--but how then? --sbaldwin, Sat, 02 Apr 2005 12:19:41 -0500 reply
I don't want to labor this, but this is an important discussion. I would say that much contemporary critical theory of technology - in this case the theory I tried to sketch and no doubt ended up parodying above - is within within an aesthetic ideology (or "reality concept," a term from Blumenberg that's pertinent here; wirklichkeitsbegriff) that gains its coherence as theory precisely by distancing itself from putatively anaesthetic sphere such as the source. This is how the source is conserved rather than approached, as it were. The notion that the metaphorics of closer, lower, deeper, etc. are an idealization yet indispensible is part of the aesthetic. Actually, this is a perfect formulation: idealization yet indispensible is a precise description of an aesthetic ideology. I think "metaphysics of projection" is probably equally accurate, but the advantage of insisting on "aesthetic ideology," which means insisting on the rhetorical over the metaphysical (one book of Aristotle over another), is to focus on the process or mechanism involved. I'd say that "metaphysics of projection" can serve as shorhand for this, but what's interesting - it seems to me - is that there is projection, even if we disbelieve the metaphysics involved. (I've always been caught by Wittgenstein's statement that he wasn't so interested in the experience of the divine but the structure of that experience.) "High" "low" etc.: part of what at issue is the metaphoricity of language qua technology - a putatively figural relation that is proven (!) by the misleading metaphorics of language in refering to technology. Error as insight is the paradigm of this figure. Underlining this paradigm = theorizing technology, within this particular aesthetic ideology.

I would use "phenomenological horizon," invoked in Alan's last, to think of Merleau-Ponty's final work - as the finalization and limit of phenomenological theory (as a theory of phenomena; an aesthetics). I'd say that all reflection on the problem of representing technology and the resulting quasi-transcendental status of the machine (idealized yet indispensible; here "quasi-transcendental" in the sense developed by Gasche, where both halves of the phrase are intensified) - that all such reflections are "hyperreflections," in Merleau-Ponty's sense, on the "embeddedness" - Alan's appropriate term from above - or "mediality" (I prefer this term as a displacement of current media theory) of phenomenological horizons. (The media we are in; the mediality of our space / topos as outside of the inside.) I'd say that the computer is the contemporary site of this means of reflection - a distinction that could probably be made even more granular (screen-code-silicon as a schema, something like that). (By site I mean something like "materiality" in Foucault's sense of instituted materiality.)

... --sbaldwin, Sat, 02 Apr 2005 12:47:44 -0500 reply
Matt, following my last: can you elaborate what you mean by codework's "capacity to address textual primitives like automation, intention, and intelligibility"? In the next sentence you state that by "foregrounding these facets of textuality, by rendering them normative and essential, computers open up the most extreme textual fields I know." I'm trying to grasp this: it seems to me that according to at least one reading, "automation, intention, and intelligibility" are names - not even translations - of what's always been claimed for reading. Even automation, which partakes of the connotations of code, is a rhetorical topos. But you may have something else in mind.

With this, I wonder how the opposite tendencies might equally be applied to codework - not intelligiblity but (what? mess? ) not intention but (what? non-negation?), not automation but (what? the analog?). (I see all this in Alan's work - both sides.) Are these tendencies within what I termed the figurality of codework, that is, could we offer a destructive reading that would force the textuality of codework to play itself out? I suppose this is what I wonder about the notion of "extreme textual field." Next step: what makes itself manifest through such a reading? ("Manifest" maintaining the Wittgensteinian references here.) Again, I'm after the kinetics or "emission" that circumscribes the aestheic I described above. It seems to me that this sort of destructive figural reading of codework would be hyperreflective.

analog-digital bibliography --sbaldwin, Sat, 02 Apr 2005 18:48:31 -0500 reply
Alan's original analog-digital bibliography is here on its own page. Please comment and add!

Codework and harrumph + biblio --sondheim, Fri, 08 Apr 2005 01:50:55 -0400 reply
Re: Sandy's last comment - what? mess? - yes! When I was (virtual) writer-in-residence for trAce, I argued that my projects were to be messy - as the Lost project is. And I associate messy with the whole Kristevan thing re abjection, etc. It all fits (harmony, together). The abject, like code, like culture, is both of and not-of the body. One can take it from there.

The harrumph. I've been noticing in all the articles on codework, my work is rarely mentioned; Mez and Talan, sometimes Cayley, etc. are. I don't understand this on one level, since my work - even the pseudo-radar/spherics pieces for example I've just put up here - always deals with these issues. Is it that my "style" is inconsistent, that I'm hard to pin down? Whatever it is, I admit to professional jealousy - I've worked in this area believe it or not since around 1971, but the work remains for the most part unaccounted-for. This isn't entirely true, but as the genre becomes genre, the canon's getting established.

Third and more important - I see code at this point more as a problematic order, an interspersing and menacing of analog-digital. All work in a sense, a deep sense, is codework. And the aesthetics are always problematic (as a result) for works which are called codeworks, just as there are perhaps (I'm not sure) problematic aesthetics for minimalist works - early LeWitt?, Andre, etc. etc. Kant and Plato can come to the rescue, but only by sacrificing the material substratum.

Fourth, some more older books which are perhaps quite essential in different ways:

Data Study, J.L. Jolley, World University Library, 1968. I recently ordered this again; I used it for years. The book is a phenomenological account of data structures, which an emphasis on concrete semantics, both in terms of the terms, and the materiality of the data structures themselves. I've not seen any other book quite like this and recommend it.

Sextus Empiricus on Pyrrho - Sam Harris' The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (Norton, 2004) brought his work to my attention. The 10 modes of Pyrrhic skepticism are relevant in terms of constructing a semantics of daily life; it also has implications for the application of reason itself. (Harris mentions Pyrrho in connection with traces of meditation in early western philosophy - which I find fascinating, but another story.)

And two more or less workbooks on catastrophe theory -

Catastrophe Theory and its Applications, Tim Poston and Ian Stewart, 1978 (Dover, 1996) and A Geometrical Study of the Elementary Catastrophes, A.E.R. Woodcock and T. Poston, Spring-Verlag, 1973. Why is catastrophe theory important here at all? A catastrophe (among other things) is a sudden jump when a threshold is reached - the continuous is mapped onto the discrete at the bifurcation. The bifurcation is a folding or topological singularity of a manifold. Something peaks, the derivative is problematic, and one's at a bit of a loss when the world jump-cuts. The theory itself has been problematized (in ways I don't understand - I'm not a mathematician), but the phenomenology of the curves, "capture morphologies" and so forth is extremely useful. One doesn't even have to transgress Sokal to see the relevance...

Codework and harrumph + biblio --sbaldwin, Fri, 08 Apr 2005 20:29:50 -0400 reply
"All work in a sense, a deep sense, is codework." I agree 100% - this is what I mean by more or less another codework. What I call "thematic codework" as a critical tendency is the retreat from this radicalization of codework, and the symptomatic turn to Talan or Mez (not so much on their part as by Raley or Hayles, etc.). "Is it that my "style" is inconsistent, that I'm hard to pin down?" Yes within a thematics of code: you don't stay put and offer up "code" in nice "works." For me, your work qua code is exactly what I think of as a figural destruction and hyperreflection on embedded phenomenological horizons. I would go so far as to say that your work takes into account the total situation, all that is the case - thus the messy absurdity.