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[autonoemata] Fwd: <nettime> What is code? A conversation with Deleuze, Guattari
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Nov 25, 2005 05:20 PST
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------- Forwarded message -------From: "David M. Berry" <d.be-@sussex.ac.uk>To: NetTime <netti-@bbs.thing.net>, nett-@bbs.thing.netCc:Subject: <nettime> What is code? A conversation with Deleuze, Guattari and codeDate: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 14:32:34 +0100What 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 wasseveral, there was already quite a crowd. We have made use ofeverything that came within range, what was closest as well asfarthest away. We have been aided, inspired multiplied [1].JP: Code is described as many things: it is a cultural logic, amachinic operation or a process that is unfolding. It is becoming,today's hegemonic metaphor; inspiring quasi-semiotic investigationswithin cultural and artistic practice (e.g. The Matrix). No-oneleaves before it has set its mark on them...DB: Yes, it has become a narrative, a genre, a structural feature ofcontemporary society, an architecture for our technologicallycontrolled societies (e.g. Lessig) and a tool of technocracy and ofcapitalism and law (Ellul/Winner/Feenberg). It is both metaphor andreality, it serves as a translation between different discourses andspheres, 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 ofour postmodernity. It offers both explanation and saviour, forexample, the state as machine, that runs a faulty form of code thatcan 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 freeinformation and have a wisdom to transform society without thepolitics, without nations and without politicians. Code becomes thelived and the desired. Both a black box and a glass box. Hard andunyielding 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 areflection of the biases, norms and values of the coding elite. Moreconcerning, perhaps, code as walls and doors of the prisons andworkhouses of the 21st Century. Condemned to make the amendehonorable before the church of capital.JP: So, we ask what is code? Not expecting to find answers, butrather to raise questions. To survey and map realms that are yet tocome (AO:5). The key for us lies in code's connectivity, it is asemiotic-chain, rhizomatic (rather like a non-hierarchical network ofnodes) and hence our map must allow for it to be interconnected fromanything to anything. In this investigation, which we know mightsometimes be hard to follow, our method imitates that outlined byDeleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (2004). It will analyse bydecentering it onto other dimensions, and other registers (AO:8). Wehope 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 ofwhere code stops and the society starts, rather it forms a tracing ofthe code-society or the society-code.DB: Dystopian and utopian, both can cling like Pincher Martin tocode. Code has its own apocalyptic fictions; crashes and bugs, Y2Kand corruption. It is a fiction that is becoming a literary fiction(Kermode). We wish to stop it becoming a myth, by questioning codeand asking it uncomfortable questions. But by our questioning we donot wish to be considered experts or legislators, rather we want toask again who are the 'Gods' of the information age (Heidegger).By drawing code out and stretching it out, we hope to make code lessmysterious, less an 'unconcealment that is concealed' (Heidegger).JP: Perhaps to ask code and coders to think again about the way inwhich they see the world, to move from objects to things, andpractice code as poetry (poeisis). Rather than code as ordering theworld, fixing and overcoding. Code as a craft, 'bringing-forth'through a showing or revealing that is not about turning the worldinto resources to be assembled, and reassembled forever.DB: And let us not forget the debt that code owes to war andgovernment. It has a bloody history, formed from the special projectsof the cold war, a technological race, that got mixed up with thecounter-culture but still fights battles on our behalf. He laid asidehis 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 thelanguages of machines. Coding is the art of forming, inventing andfabricating structures based on these languages. Structures thatconstrain use as well as free. The coder is the friend of the code,the potentiality of the code, not merely forming, inventing andfabricating code but also desiring. The electric hymn book thatHappolati invented. With electric letters that shine in the dark?JP: And what of those non-coders who use code, or rather are used bycode instead of forming it? Code can enable but it can also repress.Deleuze believes that we live in a society of control and that codeis part 'of the numerical language of control' requiring of uspasswords, user names, and the completion of form fields to eithergrant or deny access to information, goods and services (1992).DB: Yes, code becomes the unavoidable boundary around which no detourexists in order to participate fully in modern life. It isubiquitous. Formatted by code, harmonised with the language ofmachines, our life history, tastes, preferences and personal detailsbecome profiles, mailing lists, data and ultimately markets.Societies of control regulate their population by ensuring theirknowing and unknowing participation in the marketplace throughenforced compatibility with code. Watch over this code!... Let me seesome code!JP: But there is no simple code. Code is production and as such is amachine. Every piece of code has components and is defined by them.It is a multiplicity although not every multiplicity is code. No codeis a single component because even the first piece of code draws onothers. Neither is there code possessing all components as this wouldbe chaos. Every piece of code has a regular contour defined by thesum of its components. The code is whole because it totalises thecomponents, but it remains a fragmentary whole.DB: Code aborescent. Plato's building agile, object-oriented andpostmodern codes under the spreading chestnut tree.JP: But computers are not the only machines that use code. Deleuzebelieves that everything is a machine, or to be more precise everymachine is a machine of a machine. By this he means that everymachine is connected to another by a flow'whether this flow is air,information, water, desire etc'which it interrupts, uses, convertsand then connects with another machine.DB: I agree that human beings are nothing more than an assemblage ofseveral machines linked to other machines, though century's worth ofhistory have us duped into thinking otherwise.JP: But, does every machine have a code built into it whichdetermines the nature of its relations with other machines and theiroutputs? How else would we know whether to swallow air, suffocate onfood or drink sound waves? There is even a social machine, who'stask it is to code the flows that circulate within it. To apportionwealth, to organise production and to record the particularconstellation of linked up flows that define its mode of being.DB: Up to this point, code is verging towards the deterministic orthe programmatic, dependent upon some form of Ur-coder who might besynonymous with God, with the Despot, with Nature, depending on towhom you attribute the first and last words.JP: But Deleuze delimits a way of scrambling the codes, of floutingthe key, which enables a different kind of de/en-coding to take placeand frees us from a pre-determined input-output, a=b matrix. EnterDesire. Enter Creativity. Enter the Schizo. Enter capitalism? Youshow them you have something that is really profitable, and thenthere will be no limits to the recognition of your ability.--Code as Schizo--DB: Deleuze & Guattari warned us that the Schizo ethic was not arevolutionary one, but a way of surviving under capitalism byproducing 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 runstoo far and cuts too sharply'. D & G hold that art and science havea revolutionary potential. Code, like art and science, causesincreasingly decoded and deterritorialised flows to circulate in thesocius. To become more complicated, more saturated. A few steps awaya policeman is observing me; he stands in the middle of the streetand doesn't pay attention to anything else.DB: But, code is bifurcated between a conceptual and a functionalschema, an 'all encompassing wisdom [=code]'. Concepts andfunctions appear as two types of multiplicities or varieties whosenatures are different. Using the Deluezean concept of Demon whichindicates, in philosophy as well as science, not something thatexceeds our possibilities but a common kind of these necessaryintercessors as respective 'subjects' of enunciation: thephilosophical friend, the rival, the idiot, the overman are no lessdemons that Maxwell's demon or than Einstein's or Heseinberg'sobservers. (WIP: 129). Our eyes meet as I lift my head; maybe he hadbeen 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 bedivelledtime, in which the fun waxes fast and furious, with heaven-highleaping and springing'and again, of course, a bit miserable, verymiserable indeed, I not only admit that, I even emphasise it, withpride, 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 toexperience, although these perceptions and affections might not bethose of the coder, in the currently accepted sense, but belong tothe code. Does code interpolate the coder, or only the user? Idealpartial observers are the perceptions or sensory affections of codeitself manifested in functions and 'functives', the codecrystallised affect.JP: Maybe the function in code determines a state of affairs, thingor body that actualises the virtual on a plane of reference and in asystem of co-ordinates, a dimensional classification; the concept incode expresses an event that gives consistency to the virtual on aplane of immanence and in an ordered form.DB: Well, in each case the respective fields of coding findthemselves marked out by very different entities but that nonethelessexhibit 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? Inadapting, in co-adapting, with a higher taste as problematic faculty,are corresponding elements in the process being determined? Do we notreplicate the chains of equivalence, allowing the code, to code, soto speak, how we might understand it?DB: Coders are writers, and every writer is a sellout. But an honestjoy/Does itself destroy/For a harlot coy.JP: We might ask ourselves the following question: is the softwarecoder a scientist? A philosopher? Or an artist? Or a schizophrenic?AL: For me the only code is that which places an explosive device inits package, fabricating a counterfeit currency. Which in part theknowing children sang to me.Dr. K: This man is mad. There has been for a long time no doubt ofit, and it is most regrettable that in our circle the profession ofalienist is not represented. I, as a numismatist, feel myselfentirely incompetent in this situation.DB: For Deleuze, the ascription of these titles exceeds determiningwhether the tools of the trade in question are microscopes and test-tubes, caf??s and cigarettes, or easels and oil-paints. Rather theyidentify the kind of thinking that each group practices. Latourclaimed that if you gave him a laboratory he could move the world.Maybe prosopopoeia is part of the answer, he should ask code what itthinks.JP: But not just the kind of thinking, but the kind of problems whichthis thought presupposes, and the nature of the solutions that it canprovide. To ask under which category the coder clicks her mouse is toquestion whether she is creating concepts as opposed to dealing infunctives like a scientist, or generating percepts and affects likean artist.DB: If you're actually going to love technology, you have to give upsentimental slop, novels sprinkled with rose water. All these storiesof efficient, profitable, optimal, functional technologies.JP: Who said I wanted to love technology?DB: The philosopher loves the concept. The artist, the affect. Do thecoders love the code?JP: If we say that code is a concept, summoning into being orreleasing free software as an event, the coder is cast first andforemost as a philosopher. The coder, as philosopher, could neitherlove nor covet her code prior to its arrival. It must take her bysurprise. For the philosopher, or more specifically the conceptualpersonae through whom concepts come to pass and are given voice,(Deleuze does not strictly believe in the creativity of an individualego), Deleuze reserves a privileged role in the modern world which isso woefully lacking in creation and in resistance to the present. Hewrites: '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 virtueof its dislocation from the present.DB: If the software coder really is a philosopher, what kind of afuture is free software summoning and who are the new people whomight later exist?JP: Thanks to computers, we now know that there are only differencesof degree between matter and texts. In fact, ever since a literaryhappy few started talking about 'textual machines' in connectionwith novels, it has been perfectly natural for machines to becometexts written by novelists who are as brilliant as they are anonymous(Latour). But then is there no longer any difference between humansand nonhumans.DB: No, but there is no difference between the spirit of machines andtheir matter, either; they are souls through and through (Latour).JP: But don't the stories tell us that machines are purported to bepure, separated from the messy world of the real? Their internalworld floating in a platonic sphere, eternal and perfect. Is thebasis of their functioning deep within the casing numbers tickingover numbers, overflowing logic registers and memory addresses?DB: I agree. Logic is often considered the base of code. Logic isreductionist not accidentally but essentially and necessarily; itwants to turn concepts into functions. In becoming propositional, theconceptual idea of code loses all the characteristics it possessed asa concept: its endoconsistency and its exoconsistency. This isbecause of a regime of independence that has replaced that ofinseparability, the code has enframed the concept.--Code as science--DB: Do you think a real hatred inspires logic's rivalry with, or itswill to supplant, the concept? Deleuze thought 'it kills the concepttwice over'.JP: The concept is reborn not because it is a scientific function andnot because it is a logical proposition: it does not belong to adiscursive system and it does not have a reference. The concept showsitself and does nothing but show itself. Concepts are really monstersthat are reborn from their fragments.DB: But how does this relate to the code, and more specifically tofree software and free culture? Can we say that this is thatsummoning? Can the code save us?JP: Free software knows only relations of movement and rest, of speedand slowness, between unformed, or relatively unformed, elements,molecules or particles borne away by fluxes. It knows nothing ofsubjects but rather singularities called events or hecceities. Freesoftware is a machine but a machine that has no beginning and no end.It is always in the middle, between things. Free software is wherethings pick up speed, a transversal movement, that undermines itsbanks and accelerates in the middle. But that is not to say thatcapital does not attempt to recode it, reterritorialising its flowswithin the circuits of capital.DB: A project or a person is here only definable by movements andrests, speeds and slowness (longitude) and by affects, intensities(latitude). There are no more forms, but cinematic relations betweenunformed elements; there are no more subjects but dynamicindividuations without subjects, which constitute collectiveassemblages. Nothing develops, but things arrive late or in advance,and enter into some assemblage according to their compositions ofspeed. Nothing becomes subjective but haecceities take shapeaccording 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 andslowness: their common quality is to grow from the middle, to bealways in-between; they have a common imperceptible, like the vastslowness of massive Japanese wrestlers, and all of a sudden, adecisive gesture so swift that we didn't see it.DB: Good code, Bad code. Deleuze asks: 'For what do privateproperty, wealth, commodities, and classes signify'? and answers:'The breakdown of codes' (AO, 218). Capitalism is a generalizeddecoding of flows. It has decoded the worker in favour of abstractlabour, it has decoded the family, as a means of consumption, infavour of interchangeable, faceless consumers and has decoded wealthin favour of abstract, speculative, merchant capital. In the face ofthis, it is difficult to know if we have too much code or too littleand what the criteria might be by which we could make qualitativedistinctions between one type of code and another, such as code asconcept and code as commodity.JP: We could suggest that the schizophrenic code (i.e. theschizophrenic coding as a radical politics of desire) could seek tode-normalise and de-individualise through a multiplicity of new,radical collective arrangements against power. Perhaps a radicalhermeneutics of code, code as locality and place, a dwelling.DB: Not all code is a dwelling. Bank systems, facial recognitionpackages, military defence equipment and governmental monitoringsoftware is code but not a dwelling. Even so, this code is in thedomain of dwelling. That domain extends over this code and yet is notlimited to the dwelling place. The bank clerk is at home on the banknetwork but does not have shelter there; the working woman is at homeon the code but does not have a dwelling place there; the chiefengineer is at home in the programming environment but does not dwellthere. This code enframes her. She inhabits them and yet does notdwell 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 codethat is reterritorialised is code that is proprietary andinstrumental, has itself become a form of 'standing-reserve'.DB: So how are we to know when code is a 'bringing-forth'? Howwill we know if it is a tool for conviviality. How will wedistinguish between the paranoiac and the schizophrenic?JP: We know, that the friend or lover of code, as claimant does notlack rivals. If each citizen lays claim to something then we need tojudge the validity of claims. The coder lays claim to the code, andthe corporation, and the lawyer, who all say, 'I am the friend ofcode'. First it was the computer scientists who exclaimed 'This isour concern, we are the scientists!'. Then it was the turn of thelawyers, the journalists and the state chanting 'Code must bedomesticated and nationalised!' Finally the most shameful momentcame when companies seized control of the code themselves 'We arethe friends of code, we put it in our computers, and we sell it toanyone'. The only code is functional and the only concepts areproducts to be sold. But even now we see the lawyers agreeing withthe corporations, we must control the code, we must regulate thecode, the code must be paranoiac.DB: This is perhaps the vision offered by William Gibson'sNeuromancer, a dystopian realization of the unchecked power ofmultinational corporations which, despite the efforts of outlawsubcultures, monopolize code. Through their creation of AI entitiescode becomes autonomous, it exceeds human control. If indeed it makessense to retain the term human, which Gibson pejoratively substituteswith 'meat'. The new human-machinic interfaces engendered bysoftware and technological development demand the jettisoning ofreceived 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 asdesiring-production, making connections, to ever new connections.DB: Code can be formed into networks of singularities into machinesof struggle. As Capital de-territorializes code there is thepotential through machines to re-territorialize. Throughtransformative constitutive action and network sociality'in otherwords the multitude'code can be deterritorializing, it ismultiplicity and becoming, it is an event. Code is becoming nomadic.JP: This nomadic code upsets and exceeds the criteria ofrepresentational transparency. According to Jean Baudrillard, theomnipresence of code in the West'DNA, binary, digital'enables theproduction of copies for which there are no originals. Unsecured andcut adrift from the 'reality' which representation has forcenturies prided itself on mirroring, we are now in the age ofsimulation. The depiction of code presents several difficulties forwriters, who, in seeking to negotiate the new technologicallandscape, must somehow bend the representational medium of languageand the linear process of reading to accommodate the proliferatingontological and spatio-temporal relations that code affords.DB: This tension is as palpable in Gibson's efforts to rendercyberspace in prose (he first coined the term in Neuromancer) as itis on the book cover, where the flat 2D picture struggles to conveythe multi-dimensional possibilities of the matrix. The aesthetics ofsimulation, the poetics of cyberspace and of hyperreality are, wemight say, still under construction.JP: Perhaps code precludes artistic production as we know it. Untilthe artist creates code and dispenses with representational mediaaltogether, is it possible that her work will contribute onlyimpoverished, obsolete versions of the age of simulation?DB: Artists have responded to 'code' as both form and content. Asform, we might also think of code as 'genre', the parodying ofwhich 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 productionand interpretation of meaning depends. More drastically, Paul Austersets his 'New York Trilogy' in an epistemological dystopia inwhich the world does not yield to rational comprehension as the genreof detective fiction traditionally demands. If clues are totallyindistinguishable from (co)incidental detail, how can the detectiveguarantee a resolution, how can order be restored? As Austeremphasizes, generic codes and aesthetic form underwrite ideologicalassumptions and can be described as the products of specific socialrelations.JP: And what of code as content? Like the 'Matrix'. Here is a filmwhich has latched onto the concept of code and also its discussion incontemporary philosophy, almost smugly displaying its dexterity inhandling both.DB: Or 'I' Huckabees' with its unfolding of a kind ofexistential code that underlies human reality. Are ourinterpretations shifting to an almost instrumental understanding ofcode as a form of weak structuralism? Philosophy as mere code, to bewritten, edited and improved, turned into myth so that our societiescan run smoothly.JP: The hacker stands starkly here. If code can be hacked, thenperhaps we should drop a monkey-wrench in the machine, or sugar inthe petrol tank of code? Can the philosopher be a model for thehacker or the hacker for the philosopher? Or perhaps the hacker, withthe concentrations on the smooth, efficient hacks, might not be thebest model. Perhaps the cracker is a better model for the philosophyof the future. Submerged, unpredictable and radically decentred.Outlaw and outlawed.DB: Perhaps. But then perhaps we must also be careful of the fictionsthat we both read and write. And keep the radical potentialities ofcode and philosophy free.Wet with fever and fatigue we can now look toward the shore and saygoodbye to where the windows shone so brightly.--Notes--[1] We were, in fact, at least four, and we think you can guess whothe others were.--Bibliography--Deleuze, G. (1990). Postscript on the Societies of Control. L'autreJournal, 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 andSchizophrenia. London: Continuum.Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2003). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalismand Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.--License--(c) 2005 David M. Berry, Jo PawlikThis 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 amember of the research collective The Libre Society. He writes onissues surrounding intellectual property, immaterial labour,politics, free software and copyleft.Jo Pawlik is a doctoral student at the University of Sussexresearching the interaction between the American counterculture andFrench poststructuralism, focusing in particular on the deploymentand political purchase of the concepts of madness and schizophrenia.---------Originally published in Free Software Magazinehttp://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----- End forwarded message -----# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: major-@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett-@bbs.thing.net --Posted by noemata to autonoemata at 11/25/2005 05:19:54 AM
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