------- Forwarded message -------
From: "David M. Berry" <d.berry@sussex.ac.uk>
To: NetTime <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>, nettime@bbs.thing.net
Cc:
Subject: <nettime> What is code? A conversation with Deleuze, Guattari and
code
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 14:32:34 +0100
What is code? A conversation with Deleuze, Guattari and code
---------------------------------------------------------------
By David M. Berry & Jo Pawlik
--Code--
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, who's
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 Heseinberg'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 bedivelled
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?
AL: For me the only code is that which places an explosive device in
its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency. Which in part the
knowing children sang to me.
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, caf??s 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 hecceities. 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' 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.
--Notes--
[1] We were, in fact, at least four, and we think you can guess who
the others were.
--Bibliography--
Deleuze, G. (1990). Postscript on the Societies of Control. L'autre
Journal, Nr. 1.
Deleuze, G. (2004). Foucault. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is Philosophy? London: Verso.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2003). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.
--License--
(c) 2005 David M. Berry, Jo Pawlik
This article is made available under the "Attribution-Share-alike"
Creative Commons License 2.0 available from http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.
--About the authors--
David Berry is a researcher at the University of Sussex, UK and a
member of the research collective The Libre Society. He writes on
issues surrounding intellectual property, immaterial labour,
politics, free software and copyleft.
Jo Pawlik is a doctoral student at the University of Sussex
researching the interaction between the American counterculture and
French poststructuralism, focusing in particular on the deployment
and political purchase of the concepts of madness and schizophrenia.
---------
Originally published in Free Software Magazine
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_09/what_is_code/
PDF:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_09/pdfs/
FSM_issue_09_what_is_code.pdf
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