In her book Poétique des codes sur le réseau informatique: une investigation critique, Camille Paloque-Bergès examines the history of the writing practices of software code poetry. Her ultimate emphasis is on the concept of Codeworks which was originated by the theorist, artist, and poet Alan Sondheim. Codeworks is the literary writing of informatic code. It is the artistic challenge of expressing cultural articulations or personal subjectivity within the constraints of a formal language. The thesis of Paloque-Bergès is to see Codeworks through the lens of the Situationist practice of détournement where programming languages are both understood and proactively enhanced with “writerly” textuality to discern the language of the informatic network. Her study is a review and inquiry into “textual programming.” Regarding the relation between text and code, a reversibility takes place in the creativity of software poets where text is approached quantitatively, and code gets approached qualitatively.
Paloque-Bergès cites Ted Nelson, the visionary who originated the Xanadu hypertext project (already in 1960) and coined the terms hypertext and hyper-media, as speaking of computers as “literary machines.” Nelson conceived of literature as a “system of interconnected writings.” His view was not unlike the poststructuralist-deconstructionist idea of textuality or grammatology. All writing, for Nelson – ranging from belles lettres to scientific tracts to commercial exchanges – is part of this hypertext literature. Documents are textual, dynamic, and intimately interrelated in their essence. Paloque-Bergès draws as well from N. Katherine Hayles’ notion of computers as “writing machines.” For Hayles, informatic code and human language meet in the “synecdoche of information.” How do the formal language of code and the “cultural” language of text and speech rub against each other?
Paloque-Bergès is deeply influenced by Florian Cramer’s work in the two pioneering essays “Program Code Poetry” and “Exe.cut[up]?able Statements: The Insistence of Code.” Cramer brings together the poetic détournement of informatic code with precedents in twentieth century avant-garde literature and poetry: a rich and diversified history ranging from Dada to Fluxus to the beat poets. For Cramer, the writing of software code is characterized by performativity (executability) and textuality. He applies Roland Barthes’ distinction (made in the latter’s book S/Z) between the “readerly” (lisible) and “writerly” (scriptible) qualities of text to comment on the difference between using computers in the superficial “user-friendly” way (the graphical interface) and programming languages which are closer to the operating system and the hardware. The code is that genuine textuality which is not readily accessible.When the artistic programmer creates an interactive graphical artwork by writing code, she is not directly creating an artwork as it was before digitalization. Now the artist writes code to create a system. The system, in its turn, generates instances of art which are dynamic and change in real time and in response to user actions. In the field of language rather than images, there is a sub-genre of generative art that is a poetic and literary art and that fosters coding projects which are generators of text. The pre-digital project Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes of Raymond Queneau was a significant precursor of this in art history. It was intended to be an experimental automatic poetry generator or code-to-text book-machine.
Paloque-Bergès documents the significant history of programmed poetry, ranging from the aleatory generation of fragments and template methods of Charles O. Hartman to the cybernetic poetry experiments of the ALAMO group to the “programmatology” of John Cayley. There is the poetic writing and reading of programming languages. There was the strategy of obfuscation that spawns obscure performances of code. There was the notable “International Obfuscated C Code Contest.” There is the Perl Poetry community. Perl is a programming language that has special qualities binding “natural” and formal language. It has powerful expression and string parsing features. Code becomes text both in its expressivity and in its building of community. In the competition of “The Perl Poetry Contest,” four possible strategies are stipulated:
• Choose a famous poem and translate it into Perl
• Write a Perl Poem that accompanies a useful task
• Write a haiku, or a tanka, or a limerick in Perl, and which has the Perl language as its subject
• Write a poem embedded in code that generates further Perl poetry
With Perl Poetry (for example), the Situationist idea of détournement is put into practice in the arena of software code. The Perl poet exhausts the lexical possibilities of the language. The constraints defined in the specification of a formal language become a stylistic justification for forging new arbitrary signifying relations among the language’s terms.
Literary coding projects which are grouped under the rubric of Codeworks bring into collaboration two ways of thinking about and writing code: code as formal logical language in the sense of traditional informatics and code as metonymy of cultural patterns – a practical semiotic intervention into personal or cultural signification processes. There is a functional code inherent to the digital and a communicative code. The result is a double code.
The founder of European semiotics Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between le langage (a system with an underlying structure and based on rules), la langue (a culturally shared and meaningful signification reservoir like French), and la parole (the individual speech act). With a series of Situationist détournements, acts of software poetry like Codeworks elevate informatic langages to the level and dimension of langue. Code becomes text becomes literature. It becomes literary in the sense of activating communication within a community. Code matures to langue (tongue) as the expression of an individuality, an intentionality, a society. It is both executable and readable and is a re-mediation of signs.
Alan Sondheim’s Codeworks is conceived by him as the treatment of the massive data of the informatic networks by an arbitrary (poetic) – rather than only purposeful – code. The web is a giant text to be playfully massaged and catalogued. Codeworks is a hybrid that combines the text as free form with a semiotic-deconstructionist textual strategy. Sondheim theorizes and practices engaging with the language of the machine to make texts emerge, establishing a symbolic relation between code and text. Codeworks
is activism that intervenes with e-mails, listserv mailing lists, blogs, and other “hacker” artefacts of the distributed network. Influenced by Saussure, Baudrillard, and Debord, Paloque-Bergès interprets Codeworks as a contestation of the “society of the spectacle,” transforming informatic formalistic langues into cultural languages of communication and symbolic exchange.
In Codeworks, code is mimicked by pseudo-code that sometimes also executes. The code has import for both human and machine. Code imitates the performativity of purposive code and reveals code to be a discourse of culture and personal expressivity. This connects with Hayles’ idea of “embodied metaphors.” The sign of pseudo-code become a signifier of program code which itself becomes a signified. The literary dimension is what remains when information has disappeared into the hyperreality of its own excess.
Yet in the Conclusion to her book, Paloque-Bergès is self-critical about her own project. The hacker-activists of the turn-of-millennium (Codeworks, net.writing, net.art, network culture researchers, open-source advocates, etc.) operate with a “series of epistemological confusions.” At what level are these social agents intervening? What do they in fact transform? How are their actions inscribed in social contexts?What do they generate practically? How can aesthetics, technics, and critical politics go together? What is art-oriented programming? Paloque-Bergès writes:
It seems to me that an exploration of code writings must be carried out in the regions
of programming themselves rather than in those where the literary flag has already
been planted… One must first deeply study the informatic codes before diving into a
literary interpretation… One must enter the logic of programming above all.
Sondheim writes of “the computer stirring into the text, and the text stirring into the computer.” He identifies three categories of Codeworks: (1) works playing syntactically on the surface of language (2) works bringing submerged code to the surface of language (the dual source-code/poem can be interpreted/compiled and executed as program), and (3) works (such as “live coding”) in which deep informatic code is itself the content. Code becomes hybrid with human language in syntactic interplay, surface transfiguration, and the materiality of code.