an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, December 2005, ISSN
1552-5112
What is
code? A conversation with Deleuze, Guattari and code*
David
M. Berry & Jo Pawlik
The two of us wrote this article together.
Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. We have made use
of everything that came within range, what was closest as well
as farthest away. We have been aided, inspired multiplied.[1]
JP: Code is described as many
things: it is a cultural logic, a machinic operation or a process that is
unfolding. It is becoming,
today's hegemonic metaphor; inspiring quasi-semiotic investigations within
cultural and artistic practice (e.g. The Matrix). No-one leaves before it
has set its mark on them...
DB: Yes, it has become a narrative,
a genre, a structural feature of contemporary society, an architecture for
our technologically
controlled societies (e.g. Lessig) and a tool of technocracy and
of capitalism and law (Ellul/Winner/Feenberg). It is both metaphor
and reality, it serves as a translation between different discourses
and spheres, DNA code, computer code, code as law, cultural code,
aristocratic code, encrypted code (Latour).
JP: Like the code to nourish you?
Have to feed it something too.
DB: Perhaps. I agree that code
appears to be a defining discourse of our postmodernity. It offers both
explanation and saviour, for example, the state as machine, that runs a
faulty form of code that can be rewritten and re-executed. The constitution
as a microcode, law as code. Humanity as objects at the mercy of an
inhuman code.
JP: True and it gathers together a
disturbing discourse of the elect. Code as intellectual heights, an
aristocratic elect who can free information and have a wisdom to transform
society without the politics, without nations and without politicians.
Code becomes the lived and the desired. Both a black box and a glass box.
Hard and unyielding and simultaneously soft and malleable.
DB: Code seems to follow information
into a displaced subjectivity, perhaps a new and startling subject of
history that is merely a reflection of the biases, norms and values of
the coding elite. More concerning, perhaps, code as walls and doors of the
prisons and workhouses of the 21st Century. Condemned to make the
amende honorable before the church of capital.
JP: So, we ask what is code? Not
expecting to find answers, but rather to raise questions. To survey and
map realms that are yet to come (AO:5). The key for us lies in code's connectivity,
it is a semiotic-chain, rhizomatic (rather like a non-hierarchical network
of nodes) and hence our map must allow for it to be interconnected
from anything to anything. In this investigation, which we know
might sometimes be hard to follow, our method imitates that outlined
by Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (2004). It will analyse
by decentering it onto other dimensions, and other registers (AO:8).
We hope that you will view this article as a 'little machine' (AO: 4),
itself something to be read slowly, or fast, so that you can take from it
whatever comes your way. It does not ask the question of where code stops
and the society starts, rather it forms a tracing of the code-society or
the society-code.
DB: Dystopian and utopian, both can
cling like Pincher Martin to code. Code has its own apocalyptic fictions;
crashes and bugs, Y2K and corruption. It is a fiction that is becoming a
literary fiction (Kermode). We wish to stop it becoming a myth, by
questioning code and asking it uncomfortable questions. But by our
questioning we do not wish to be considered experts or legislators, rather
we want to ask again who are the 'Gods' of the information age
(Heidegger). By drawing code out and stretching it out, we hope to make
code less mysterious, less an 'unconcealment that is concealed'
(Heidegger).
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.
DB: And let us not forget the debt
that code owes to war and government. It has a bloody history, formed from
the special projects of the cold war, a technological race, that got mixed up with
the counter-culture but still fights battles on our behalf. He laid
aside his sabre. And with a smile he took my hand.
--Code as concept--
DB: A stab in the dark. To start
neither at the beginning or the end, but in the middle: code is pure
concept instantiated into the languages of machines. Coding is the art of
forming, inventing and fabricating structures based on these languages. Structures
that constrain use as well as free. The coder is the friend of the
code, the potentiality of the code, not merely forming, inventing
and fabricating code but also desiring. The electric hymn book
that Happolati invented. With electric letters that shine in the dark?
JP: And what of those non-coders who
use code, or rather are used by code instead of forming it? Code can
enable but it can also repress. Deleuze believes that we live in a society
of control and that code is part 'of the numerical language of control'
requiring of us passwords, user names, and the completion of form fields
to either grant or deny access to information, goods and services (1992).
DB: Yes, code becomes the
unavoidable boundary around which no detour exists in order to participate
fully in modern life. It is ubiquitous. Formatted by code, harmonised with
the language of machines, our life history, tastes, preferences and
personal details become profiles, mailing lists, data and ultimately
markets. Societies of control regulate their population by ensuring
their knowing and unknowing participation in the marketplace
through enforced compatibility with code. Watch over this code! Let me see some code!
JP: But there is no simple code.
Code is production and as such is a machine. Every piece of code has
components and is defined by them. It is a multiplicity although not every
multiplicity is code. No code is a single component because even the first
piece of code draws on others. Neither is there code possessing all
components as this would be chaos. Every piece of code has a regular
contour defined by the sum of its components. The code is whole because it
totalises the components, but it remains a fragmentary whole.
DB: Code aborescent. Plato's
building agile, object-oriented and postmodern codes under the spreading
chestnut tree.
JP: But computers are not the only
machines that use code. Deleuze believes that everything is a machine, or
to be more precise every machine is a machine of a machine. By this he
means that every machine is connected to another by a flow, whether this
flow is air, information, water, desire etc. which it interrupts, uses,
converts and then connects with another machine.
DB: I agree that human beings are
nothing more than an assemblage of several machines linked to other
machines, though century's worth of history have us duped into thinking
otherwise.
JP: But, does every machine have a
code built into it which determines the nature of its relations with other
machines and their outputs? How else would we know whether to swallow air,
suffocate on food or drink sound waves? There is even a social machine,
whose task it is to code the flows that circulate within it. To
apportion wealth, to organise production and to record the particular constellation
of linked up flows that define its mode of being.
DB: Up to this point, code is
verging towards the deterministic or the programmatic, dependent upon some
form of Ur-coder who might be synonymous with God, with the Despot, with
Nature, depending on to whom you attribute the first and last words.
JP: But Deleuze delimits a way of
scrambling the codes, of flouting the key, which enables a different kind
of de/en-coding to take place and frees us from a pre-determined
input-output, a=b matrix. Enter Desire. Enter Creativity. Enter the
Schizo. Enter capitalism? You show them you have something that is really
profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your
ability.
--Code as Schizo--
DB: Deleuze & Guattari warned us
that the Schizo ethic was not a revolutionary one, but a way of surviving
under capitalism by producing fresh desires within the structural limits
of capitalism. Where will the revolution come from?
JP: It will be a decoded flow, a
'deterritorialised flow that runs too far and cuts too sharply'. D & G
hold that art and science have a revolutionary potential. Code, like art
and science, causes increasingly decoded and deterritorialised flows to
circulate in the socius. To become more complicated, more saturated. A few
steps away a policeman is observing me; he stands in the middle of the
street and doesn't pay attention to anything else.
DB: But, code is bifurcated between
a conceptual and a functional schema, an 'all encompassing wisdom
[=code]'. Concepts and functions appear as two types of multiplicities or
varieties whose natures are different. Using the Deluezean concept of
Demon which indicates, in philosophy as well as science, not something
that exceeds our possibilities but a common kind of these necessary intercessors
as respective 'subjects' of enunciation: the philosophical friend, the
rival, the idiot, the overman are no less demons that Maxwell's demon or
than Einstein's or Heisenberg’s observers. (WIP: 129). Our eyes meet as I
lift my head; maybe he had been standing there for quite a while just
watching me.
JP: Do you know what time it is?
HE: Time? Simple Time?... Great
time, mad time, quite bedeviled time, in which the fun waxes fast and
furious, with heaven-high leaping and springing and again, of course, a
bit miserable, very miserable indeed, I not only admit that, I even
emphasise it, with pride, for it is sitting and fit, such is artist-way
and artist-nature.
--Code and sense perception--
DB: In code the role of the partial
coder is to perceive and to experience, although these perceptions and
affections might not be those of the coder, in the currently accepted
sense, but belong to the code. Does code interpolate the coder, or only
the user? Ideal partial observers are the perceptions or sensory
affections of code itself manifested in functions and 'functives', the
code crystallised affect.
JP: Maybe the function in code
determines a state of affairs, thing or body that actualises the virtual
on a plane of reference and in a system of co-ordinates, a dimensional
classification; the concept in code expresses an event that gives
consistency to the virtual on a plane of immanence and in an ordered form.
DB: Well, in each case the
respective fields of coding find themselves marked out by very different
entities but that nonetheless exhibit a certain analogy in their task: a
problem. Is this a world-directed perspective'code as an action facing the
world?
JP: Does that not consisting in
failing to answer a question? In adapting, in co-adapting, with a higher
taste as problematic faculty, are corresponding elements in the process
being determined? Do we not replicate the chains of equivalence, allowing
the code, to code, so to speak, how we might understand it?
DB: Coders are writers, and every
writer is a sellout. But an honest joy/Does itself destroy/For a harlot
coy.
JP: We might ask ourselves the
following question: is the software coder a scientist? A philosopher? Or
an artist? Or a schizophrenic?
Dr. K: This man is mad. There has
been for a long time no doubt of it, and it is most regrettable that in
our circle the profession of alienist is not represented. I, as a
numismatist, feel myself entirely incompetent in this situation.
DB: For Deleuze, the ascription of
these titles exceeds determining whether the tools of the trade in
question are microscopes and test- tubes, cafes and cigarettes, or easels and
oil-paints. Rather they identify the kind of thinking that each group
practices. Latour claimed that if you gave him a laboratory he could move
the world. Maybe prosopopoeia is part of the answer, he should ask code
what it thinks.
JP: But not just the kind of
thinking, but the kind of problems which this thought presupposes, and the
nature of the solutions that it can provide. To ask under which category
the coder clicks her mouse is to question whether she is creating concepts
as opposed to dealing in functives like a scientist, or generating
percepts and affects like an artist.
DB: If you're actually going to love
technology, you have to give up sentimental slop, novels sprinkled with
rose water. All these stories of efficient, profitable, optimal,
functional technologies.
JP: Who said I wanted to love
technology?
DB: The philosopher loves the
concept. The artist, the affect. Do the coders love the code?
JP: If we say that code is a
concept, summoning into being or releasing free software as an event, the
coder is cast first and
foremost as a philosopher. The coder, as philosopher, could neither love
nor covet her code prior to its arrival. It must take her by surprise.
For the philosopher, or more specifically the conceptual personae through
whom concepts come to pass and are given voice, (Deleuze does not strictly
believe in the creativity of an individual ego), Deleuze reserves a
privileged role in the modern world which is so woefully lacking in
creation and in resistance to the present. He writes: 'The creation of
concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people
that do not yet exist' (1994, 108). Deleuze would hope this future form
would be recognizable by virtue of its dislocation from the present.
DB: If the software coder really is
a philosopher, what kind of a future is free software summoning and who
are the new people who might later exist?
JP: Thanks to computers, we now know
that there are only differences of degree between matter and texts. In
fact, ever since a literary happy few started talking about 'textual
machines' in connection with novels, it has been perfectly natural for
machines to become texts written by novelists who are as brilliant as they
are anonymous (Latour). But then is there no longer any difference between
humans and nonhumans.
DB: No, but there is no difference
between the spirit of machines and their matter, either; they are souls
through and through (Latour).
JP: But don't the stories tell us
that machines are purported to be pure, separated from the messy world of
the real? Their internal
world floating in a platonic sphere, eternal and perfect. Is the basis of
their functioning deep within the casing numbers ticking
over numbers, overflowing logic registers and memory addresses?
DB: I agree. Logic is often
considered the base of code. Logic is reductionist not accidentally but
essentially and necessarily; it
wants to turn concepts into functions. In becoming propositional,
the conceptual idea of code loses all the characteristics it possessed
as a concept: its endoconsistency and its exoconsistency. This
is because of a regime of independence that has replaced that
of inseparability, the code has enframed the concept.
--Code as science--
DB: Do you think a real hatred
inspires logic's rivalry with, or its will to supplant, the concept?
Deleuze thought 'it kills the concept twice over'.
JP: The concept is reborn not
because it is a scientific function and not because it is a logical
proposition: it does not belong to a discursive system and it does not
have a reference. The concept shows itself and does nothing but show
itself. Concepts are really monsters that are reborn from their fragments.
DB: But how does this relate to the
code, and more specifically to free software and free culture? Can we say
that this is that
summoning? Can the code save us?
JP: Free software knows only
relations of movement and rest, of speed and slowness, between unformed,
or relatively unformed, elements, molecules or particles borne away by
fluxes. It knows nothing of subjects but rather singularities called
events or haecceities. Free software is a machine but a machine that has
no beginning and no end. It is always in the middle, between things. Free
software is where things pick up speed, a transversal movement, that
undermines its banks and accelerates in the middle. But that is not to say
that capital does not attempt to recode it, reterritorialising its
flows within the circuits of capital.
DB: A project or a person is here
only definable by movements and rests, speeds and slowness (longitude) and
by affects, intensities (latitude). There are no more forms, but cinematic
relations between unformed elements; there are no more subjects but dynamic individuations
without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages. Nothing
develops, but things arrive late or in advance, and enter into some
assemblage according to their compositions of speed. Nothing becomes
subjective but haecceities take shape according to the compositions of
non-subjective powers and effects. Maps of speeds and intensities (e.g.
Sourceforge).
JP: We have all already encountered
this business of speeds and slowness: their common quality is to grow from
the middle, to be always in-between; they have a common imperceptible,
like the vast slowness of massive Japanese wrestlers, and all of a sudden,
a decisive gesture so swift that we didn't see it.
DB: Good code, Bad code. Deleuze
asks: 'For what do private property, wealth, commodities, and classes
signify'? and answers: 'The breakdown of codes' (AO, 218). Capitalism is a
generalized decoding of flows. It has decoded the worker in favour of
abstract labour, it has decoded the family, as a means of consumption,
in favour of interchangeable, faceless consumers and has decoded
wealth in favour of abstract, speculative, merchant capital. In the face
of this, it is difficult to know if we have too much code or too
little and what the criteria might be by which we could make qualitative distinctions
between one type of code and another, such as code as concept and code as
commodity.
JP: We could suggest that the
schizophrenic code (i.e. the schizophrenic coding as a radical politics of
desire) could seek to
de-normalise and de-individualise through a multiplicity of new, radical
collective arrangements against power. Perhaps a radical hermeneutics of
code, code as locality and place, a dwelling.
DB: Not all code is a dwelling. Bank
systems, facial recognition packages, military defence equipment and
governmental monitoring software is code but not a dwelling. Even so, this
code is in the domain of dwelling. That domain extends over this code and
yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The bank clerk is at home on the
bank network but does not have shelter there; the working woman is at
home on the code but does not have a dwelling place there; the
chief engineer is at home in the programming environment but does not
dwell there. This code enframes her. She inhabits them and yet does
not
dwell in them.
--Code as art--
JP: You are right to distinguish
between code as 'challenging-forth' (Heidegger) and code that is a
'bringing-forth'. The code that is reterritorialised is code that is
proprietary and instrumental, has itself become a form of 'standing-reserve'.
DB: So how are we to know when code
is a 'bringing-forth'? How will we know if it is a tool for conviviality.
How will we distinguish between the paranoiac and the schizophrenic?
JP: We know, that the friend or
lover of code, as claimant does not lack rivals. If each citizen lays
claim to something then we need to judge the validity of claims. The coder
lays claim to the code, and the corporation, and the lawyer, who all say,
'I am the friend of code'. First it was the computer scientists who
exclaimed 'This is our concern, we are the scientists!'. Then it was the
turn of the lawyers, the journalists and the state chanting 'Code must
be domesticated and nationalised!' Finally the most shameful
moment came when companies seized control of the code themselves 'We
are the friends of code, we put it in our computers, and we sell it
to anyone'. The only code is functional and the only concepts
are products to be sold. But even now we see the lawyers agreeing
with the corporations, we must control the code, we must regulate
the code, the code must be paranoiac.
DB: This is perhaps the vision
offered by William Gibson's Neuromancer,
a dystopian realization of the unchecked power of multinational
corporations which, despite the efforts of outlaw subcultures, monopolize
code. Through their creation of AI entities code becomes autonomous, it
exceeds human control. If indeed it makes sense to retain the term human,
which Gibson pejoratively substitutes with 'meat'. The new human-machinic
interfaces engendered by software and technological development demand the
jettisoning of received categories of existence as they invent uncanny new
ones.
JP: This is the possibility of code.
The code as a war machine. Nomadic thought. The code as outsider art, the gay
science, code as desiring-production, making connections, to ever new
connections.
DB: Code can be formed into networks
of singularities into machines of struggle. As Capital de-territorializes
code there is the potential through machines to re-territorialize.
Through transformative constitutive action and network sociality in
other words the multitude-code can be deterritorializing, it
is multiplicity and becoming, it is an event. Code is becoming nomadic.
JP: This nomadic code upsets and
exceeds the criteria of representational transparency. According to Jean
Baudrillard, the omnipresence of code in the West—DNA, binary,
digital—enables the production of copies for which there are no originals.
Unsecured and cut adrift from the 'reality' which representation has
for centuries prided itself on mirroring, we are now in the age
of simulation. The depiction of code presents several difficulties
for writers, who, in seeking to negotiate the new
technological landscape, must somehow bend the representational medium of
language and the linear process of reading to accommodate the
proliferating ontological and spatio-temporal relations that code affords.
DB: This tension is as palpable in
Gibson's efforts to render cyberspace in prose (he first coined the term
in Neuromancer) as it is on the
book cover, where the flat 2D picture struggles to convey the
multi-dimensional possibilities of the matrix. The aesthetics
of simulation, the poetics of cyberspace and of hyperreality are,
we might say, still under construction.
JP: Perhaps code precludes artistic
production as we know it. Until the artist creates code and dispenses with
representational media altogether, is it possible that her work will
contribute only impoverished, obsolete versions of the age of simulation?
DB: Artists have responded to 'code'
as both form and content. As form, we might also think of code as 'genre',
the parodying of which has become a staple in the postmodern canon. Films
such as 'The Scream' series, 'The Simpsons', or 'Austin Powers';
flaunt and then subvert the generic codes upon which the production and
interpretation of meaning depends. More drastically, Paul Auster sets his
'New York Trilogy' in an epistemological dystopia in which the world does
not yield to rational comprehension as the genre of detective fiction
traditionally demands. If clues are totally indistinguishable from
(co)incidental detail, how can the detective guarantee a resolution, how
can order be restored? As Auster emphasizes, generic codes and aesthetic
form underwrite ideological assumptions and can be described as the
products of specific social relations.
JP: And what of code as content?
Like the 'Matrix'. Here is a film which has latched onto the concept of
code and also its discussion in contemporary philosophy, almost smugly
displaying its dexterity in handling both.
DB: Or 'I Heart Huckabees' with its
unfolding of a kind of existential code that underlies human reality. Are
our interpretations shifting to an almost instrumental understanding
of code as a form of weak structuralism? Philosophy as mere code, to
be written, edited and improved, turned into myth so that our
societies can run smoothly.
JP: The hacker stands starkly here.
If code can be hacked, then perhaps we should drop a monkey-wrench in the
machine, or sugar in the petrol tank of code? Can the philosopher be a
model for the hacker or the hacker for the philosopher? Or perhaps the
hacker, with the concentrations on the smooth, efficient hacks, might not
be the best model. Perhaps the cracker is a better model for the
philosophy of the future. Submerged, unpredictable and radically
decentred. Outlaw and outlawed.
DB: Perhaps. But then perhaps we
must also be careful of the fictions that we both read and write. And keep
the radical potentialities of code and philosophy free.
Wet with fever and fatigue we can now look toward the shore and
say goodbye to where the windows shone so brightly.
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, December 2005, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes