Cayley, John. "Time Code Language: New Media Poetics and Programmed Signification." Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art
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Cayley, John. "Time Code Language: New Media Poetics and Programmed Signification." Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 95–114. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501335792.ch-008>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 03:46 UTC. Copyright © John Cayley 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 7 Time Code Language: New Media Poetics and Programmed Signification One of the defining characteristics of poetic writing is its attention to the materiality of language, which has become an important critical concept in literary studies. We speak of “the materiality of text” or “the materiality of language” in general, as if this might be an abstract characteristic when, in fact, it is the critical marker of linguistic and literary embodiment, recognizable only in terms of that embodiment. As N. Katherine Hayles puts it, “The materiality of an embodied text is the interaction of its physical characteristics with its signifying strategies.” 1 The presence and operation of code is, in many, though not all, instances, a significant part of the complex physical makeup of electronic text and is often a sine qua non for the operation of its signifying strategies. In so far as we are interested in identifying and defining certain specific aspects of the materiality of language that are foregrounded by writing in networked and programmable media, we are called to pay close attention to the role of code and coding in this type of work. We must keep asking ourselves, what is code? What is the relationship of code and text in cultural objects that are classified as literary and that are explicitly programmed? The context of this chapter is current and continuing discussion which addresses these questions. It refers implicitly and explicitly to other critical interventions that have begun to identify a genre of electronically mediated writing as “codework.” According to Rita Raley, “Broadly, codework makes exterior the interior workings of the computer.”2 Code is indeed an archive of the symbolic inner workings of the computer. However, not only is it brought to the surface in the writing of new media, it may function to generate the language displayed on this surface, without itself appearing. In an earlier piece of mine, a prequel to this chapter, I argue that we must 96 GRAMMALEPSY: ESSAYS ON DIGITAL LANGUAGE ART be more articulate about the distinctions we make between code and text.3 These distinctions are creatively challenged by codework that brings “inner workings” to an “exterior,” especially when such work is manifested as a generative cross-infection of text and code-as-text, of language and code- as-language. In this earlier piece, I argued that “the code is not the text, unless it is the text.” Code that is not the text, code that remains unbroken and operative, may instantiate—as durational performance—the signifying strategies of a text. As such, it does not appear on the complex surface of the interface text as part of or as identical with it. There are, therefore, further distinctions within codework, between those works that bring the traces of an interior archive of code into the open, and those works that depend on the continuing operation of code, where the code, in fact, reconceals itself by generating a complex surface “over” itself. The present chapter addresses these distinctions and then takes on questions concerning the characteristics of a textuality whose very atoms of signification are programmed. What is textuality where it is composed from programmed signifiers? In particular, the temporal properties of such signifiers are highlighted, and the significance of this temporality is examined. Literal performance literal process Clearly, it is difficult to articulate and share a detailed, nuanced conception of what we do—how we perform and process—as we write and read and play with language. Out of our difficulties entire fields of critical thought emerge. I begin, for example, to use words to refer, provisionally, to phenomena, like words, which I assume have some kind of separate, atomic existence, however provisional or temporary. Word as word (re)presentation refers to word as thing (re)presentation. The implicit atomism—treating something as irreducible in order to try to assay its significance and affect—is always provisional, even where established by lexical authority, and is ever mobile. At one instant I refer to some word-sized atom of language, the next instant another, then, as suddenly, I recompile and shift “upward”—many levels in the hierarchies of code and language—and refer to the specific work or to “text” itself, which suddenly becomes not only a conceptual automaton in our minds but also an atom of linguistic matter in my discourse itself, even though my discourse is, as it were, contained within its significance. Foregrounded in this way, the procedural, performative nature of the literal is demonstrable. Despite your understanding that, for example, these words are inscribed as writing—temporally stunned, deferred, and spatialized— you will sense words shifting their meanings as I write/speak and you read/ hear. No matter how little attention you or I pay to what is going on as we process, it is easy to concede that, for example, the meanings of words like TIME CODE LANGUAGE 97 “code” and “text” change during the shifting “now”—the distinct present moments as I write and you read—and may well change radically over the course of my intermittent writing/speaking and your intermittent reading/ hearing. The generation of altered and new meaning is, after all, one of my explicit aims in addressing these terms. It follows, even from this simple, on-the-fly phenomenology of language, that atoms or instances of language (of whatever extent), though we treat them as “things,” are, in fact, processes. If they are ever static or thing- like, they are more like the “states” of a system, provisionally recognized as identifiable, designated entities. In themselves they are, if anything, more similar to programmed, procedural loops of significance and affect, isolated for strategic or tactical reasons, be they rhetorical, aesthetic, social, or political. This characterization is good linguistics and good critical thought. However, usually our perception and appreciation of linguistic and critical process are more broadly focused, bracketing the micro-processes that generate and influence significance and affect in the “times” taken to move from statement to statement, let alone those which pass so fleetingly and function so invisibly in the move from letter to letter. Moreover, as Hayles demonstrates in her recent critique of prevailing notions of textuality, an abstracted conception of both “the text” (a physical and literal manifestation of the ideal object of textual criticism, more or less identified with an author’s intended work) and “text” (as a general concept), is allied to the apparent stasis and persistence of print, and still dominates our understanding of textuality in literary criticism.4 By contrast, for Hayles all texts are embodied in specific media. In her view, electronic texts represent a mode of embodiment through which literary works are able to perform a realization of a latent materiality, and perhaps also the revelation of such texts’ present and future informatic post-humanity, where they “thrive on the entwining of physicality with informational structure.”5 Hayles sets out some of the elements of an electronic text and emphasizes the dynamism of their symbolic relationships: There are data files, programs that call and process the files, hardware functionalities that interpret or compile the programs, and so on. It takes all of these together to produce the electronic text. Omit any one of them, and the text literally cannot be produced. For this reason, it would be more accurate to call an electronic text a process rather than an object.6 Such a text, unlike that which has print for its medium, has no materially accessible existence prior to its generation when displayed on the screen: “electronic textuality … cannot be separated from the delivery vehicles that produce it as a process with which the user can interact.”7 For an object to be identified as a process, at the very least, there must be some way for its state to change over time, and perhaps also the possibility of 98 GRAMMALEPSY: ESSAYS ON DIGITAL LANGUAGE ART enumerating the temporal sequence of such states, or some way to describe a procedure or procedures that generate the states and changes of state in the object. In other words, there have to be programs to be followed, to be run. In Hayles’s analysis, however, the programming seems to reside chiefly in the delivery media of electronic textuality—the “data files, programs that call and process the files, hardware functionalities, and so on”—rather than operating from within the text itself, the text of interpretation.8 In earlier essays she has described and characterized a “flickering signifier” in digital textuality, but this flickering of signification is a function of the same peripheral processing of text and its image—both screen image and underlying encoded representations. Where the flickering is indicative of depth—like ripples on the surface of a lake—this is a function of code in the sense of encoding.9 We imagine depths behind the screen, within the box, underneath the keyboard, because we know that the surface text is multiply encoded in order that it can be manipulated at the many and various levels of software and hardware. However, much of this underlying programmatological manipulation is typically treated as insignificant for the purposes of interpretation.