Personally I find the wd. code so miused at this point as to be close to pointless itself. I go back to things like Shannon/Weaver/information theory on one hand, Eco on the other. D/G have nothing to say about it, and for me overly-theorizing/metamorphizing the concept makes it even more useless. It's the new cant word in a sense; everything is now code instead of mediation/representation/structure/post-structure/existent/blahblah. I don't think most people would understand code in a technical sense, and like Lacan's borrowing from topology, it's in danger of Sokolic critique. The word is also used verbally in the senses of 'I code' = I translate X into code in the sense of Morse or other code; or I program computers.
When did code ever 'order the world'? Not even the Dewey Decimal System does that. If you want to pick apart 'code,' why w/ D/G in the first place? I get so tired of theoretical stuff - and for me, and I'm being selfish here, narcissistic, it's a shame, because somewhere in rhetoric there's something to say/be said/make a difference in the world (re: Bateson's difference that makes a difference). But most progressive, whatever, functional thinking today isn't in philosophy or theory; it's in the scientific/cosmological/fundamental particle/technological/computational sectors. The humanities seems backwards in thinking through these things, moving back and forth (Lacan, D/G) from the ideolectical. - Apologies, the article seems to me to be sloppy thinking - Alan On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, phanero wrote:
This is a great article.. Have a character. JP: Perhaps to ask code and coders to think again about the way in which they see the world, to move from objects to things, and practice code as poetry (poeisis). Rather than code as ordering the world, fixing and overcoding. Code as a craft, 'bringing-forth' through a showing or revealing that is not about turning the world into resources to be assembled, and reassembled forever. A nice bit of punch and judy, although that hammer word 'code' seems to get in the way abit of the thinking (whatever that is..). and I don;t say that to be rude to the authors who are obviously just warming up to their 'subject'.. and I agree that poeisis is poetry and vice versa, but you won't find many 'poets' saying this.. This is something the philosopher knows, something she says offhanded as a matter of course.. no big deal.. Because substance itself IS the only poetics.. Let's call it a "facet" of the meaning and just move on. but there are some glaring absences in the text.. for one.. in the above section: Code as a craft, 'bringing-forth' through a showing or revealing that is not about turning the world into resources to be assembled, and reassembled forever. Well, as this is mostly the only possible way for the world to work. I'll have to say "good luck".. How old are the water molecules in your body? the 'bringing-forth' is possibly best represented as tecne itself.. tecne is 'a letting appear' tiktein is to give birth. tektein to build.. there is also epiphaneia (an appearing).. Code is daidala, a 'daidalonics' within the body of tecne, and the body of tecne is not unlike the curious working or daidala of incarnation within Greek religion, within the pleroma, the pneuma, the breath which is both made and the maker: Gods were divine because they were athanatoi, deathless. This unending appearingness of the Greek gods, their genesis which is life and movement, is what resided in the scintillating surface of the daidalon. Insofar as the appearing of the daidalon was understood as itself the product of reassembly, the daidalon must also have been understood as something that could always be remade. Like the gods, and unlike the human person (brotos, mortal), the daidalon never entirely disappeared. It is because it was itself a deathless appearing that the well made, the cunningly crafted thing was able to reveal an unseen divine presence. Thus, for example, are the gold and silver dogs, crafted by Hephaestus, which guard Alcinous' palace in book VII of the Odyssey, athanatous ontas, deathless beings, just like gods.. (or applets, or golems, or daimons, etc) It's like tecne is always already the field, like sheldrake's morphological fields, and code like the daidalon appears within the appearing of tecne daidala is the expression of techne, the same way code is the expression of a kind of rhizomatics.. maybe I'm getting mixed up.. at any rate they missed the fundamental tecne reference which I think is really essential, because code isn't modern or post-modern at all. ITS PRIMORDIAL and we are still living within a PRIMORDIA.. another thing I found a bit lacking was any reference to the discussion of 'code' itself within Deleuze and Guattari' A Thousand Plateaus. There is a pretty extensive discussion of 'code' (in various registers) within that text that might have been useful to pick apart.. anyhoo.. still reading.. thanks for sending this out.. your rustic code-mythographer schitzo-idiot person Lanny
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