ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

Summed up my thoughts perfectly.

Lately, I am becoming very much aware of writing code as constructing narrative, due to the fact that I am going to try to attempt the use of the MUD to construct a personal narrative for another class project and considering how and if a game can be used to construct a narrative. Aarseth makes a nice distinguishment between narrative and narration and ergodics, and I think the MUD has it's own issues resolving those three points in similiar ways that [i]Afternoon[/i] does.

Thinking on this while coding for a MUD, I am very much aware of spaciality, pathways, where to hide the layers/exits, assemblage, language to shape it, and how to shape the code to produce or hide what I wish.

I find myself most often looking at how to construct my narration to offer the reader the best means to construct a narrative. Currently, I think in MUDspace that may be a good strategy to embark on, or at least, an interesting one, leaving my narrative in the reader's hands--isn't that partially how we in the "real" world construct the narratives of who our friends are, from our memories and bits and pieces of what we know as "them"? Where could they go? What could they see? What paths will I open and close? What's the game/goal?

Some of this I have pre-sketched out, but much of it I will write, as an author, in the moment, creating story bits as I create rooms and spaces that hold the database of memories and stories within the narration. Books in the MUD will be opened with links to my actual livejournal, exposing different layers. Code will insert me--and people, memories--as an "object" into the game (and I might even see if I can log on to it when it's viewed, to create yet another interactive level in the game with the author herself, as well as the ghost in the machine).

In short, there is a certain type of authorship one achieves when working with code, a method of thinking hypertextually that I find just as fascinating when creating the hypertexts and code as I do when reading another's work, a growing into a sort of posthuman authorship, if you will. It opens up levels of my own story to me when placed in code that I may have never have had access to other wise. (Ah, to say my life began to take root on the 'net has so many different meanings).

I'll have to think on that precise way of thinking further--and then think of how it applies to traditional codex narrative. I am now wondering at comparisons with code and hypertextual thinking and comics and graphic storytelling.

Kell

Ed, I think your point about variable names is an excellent one. Not to mention REMs. Even down to the particular nesting of subprocedures, everyone's code probably looks a little bit different.

I think Berta's revelation about the sheer distance between her code and the workings of the computer serves, for me, as the best metaphor between coding and writing. The code is a translation of the assembly language is a translation of the binary is only a representation of what really goes on at the computer level. Anyone who's done both Boolean logic and circuitry can tell you just how much resemblance those last two bear... even when we say that the computer really speaks binary, not C++ or Java or BASIC, it's an oversimplification. The code is a language many, many levels of mediation away from the electrical pulses it eventually represents.

And so is writing -- or to be simpler and cut out the idea of art, so is verbal communication. The words that come out of my mouth are parsed by your ears (turning vibrations into sounds), then by Wernicke's area I think (turning sounds into meanings), mediated by your fluency with whatever language I'm speaking and affected by your associations and connotations... and eventually, it all comes down to the firings of your neurons. My speech is a code for how I want your neurons to fire, and it breaks down just as often as computer code, though it's a bit harder to trace.

This is all tangential to Ed's point, but it's what I think of when considering writing, code, or the relation between them -- the Zeno's paradox of attempting to manage the distance between high-level language and electrical impulses.

Well said, Jess. And I don't think it's all that tangential. It's interesting that we're naturally (in the midst of this discourse, that is) coming around to the idea that we may at one point stop and realize that humanity has been inadvertantly cloning itself in mechanical/ electrical/ digital devices for quite a long time (something them cybernetic folks first began to postulate). This goes way beyond the idea of tech. as prosthetic and bridges the gap between Achilles and the tortoise, so to speak, as each are rendered the same by their association to the agent of their creation.

So on to the real question, then:

Does this relation negate the post-human or validate her?

We have to be careful when we collapse distinctions like programming and writing, prose and code. If there is no difference than why have two words? As interesting as the similarities are I ask you to look at the differences in the prose of this entry and the fragment of code. If I gave you fragments of code and fragments of writing without telling you which was which would you have any difficulty distinguishing them? Would it make a difference?

Now how would Steve answer me?

I like how you connect Ullman's book to this issue. What struck me in _The Bug_ was the Game of Life. Programming simple rules that lead to a complex ecology.

The other thing that Ullman plays with is the difference between the continuous and the discrete. Can we ever fully model the continuous with discrete systems like a digital computer? I comment on Ullman in blog entry at:
http://strange.mcmaster.ca/~grockwel/weblog/notes/000166.html

Ed starts his entry with some code. Untitled #4 actually was originally the fourth of a series of programs designed to generate (and be) statements about textuality. In U4 we tried Knuth's literary programming. The dialogue was our way of presenting a short work meant for the human computer dialogue in the oral setting of a conference. I have put an HTML rendering of the "real" U4ia up at: http://strange.mcmaster.ca/~grockwel/weblog/notes/000296.html

It seems appropriate that Ed had a literary programming response with code and prose intertwingled.

-- quote from Ed --
I disagree that code is not unambiguous. If anything, code is full of ambiguity. Ambiguity that must be reined in for programmer, debugger, and compiler to understand. The fact that a program arbitrarily decides what a variable is called or a function is called creates all sorts of opportunity for close reading, for ambiguity. A variable that holds a person's age could be called quite literally VariableAge or it could be called ClosenessToDeath. There's all sorts of meanings that could and is conjured by even such a simple decision.
-- quote from Ed --

This is dead on, and it reminds me of many a rancorous code review. What's obvious to one is entirely non-obvious to another. If code were unambiguous, presumably there would be nothing to discuss.

But Geoff is right. Collapsing these distinctions runs the risk of creating an epistemological entity that drops out of the equation (if everything were green, would we not be behooved to pass over this fact in silence?). I think Geoff and I chose the dialogue form partly because we found our arguments generating one "yes, but" after another. In the end, for all its points of contact with narrative, code does seem to be something different.

I certainly agree that expanding a term too far leaches it of meaning... pace Andrew and his colleagues in the "everything is text" movement. :> But I think that, with writing and code in particular, there can be significant resistance to recognizing the functional similarities between them. A certain amount of expansion on both terms might serve to overcome prejudices -- the idea that code is unambiguous, for instance, or that verbal communication is proprietary to humans. I think the comparison is particularly useful for understanding the process of writing and interpretation. Without a recognition of the functional equivalencies between writing and code, we end up trying to understand human communication with recourse only to the spooky realms of "art" and "intuition." Which are fine for talking about certain aspects of writing, but I don't think they allow the issue to be fully explored.

I think that what I was trying to argue (cum Jess)is that there are equivalancies in processing both code and writing that find their valence in the levels of mediation inherent to each particular mode of decompression. And, yes, it is certainly possible to say that I would be able to distinguish code from writing (unless it was at its most fragmented point-- the letter itself), but what about those that do speak in French? Chinese? Sanskrit? Would they, too, see the decipherable distances? The inherent "Englishness" of code, then, is also the ultimate expositor of its aims: a decipherability by (Western) human agency (be it programmed or otherwise). Just as writing allowed us to give spatial-symbolism to oral/aural language, so does code allow us to give a similar spatiality to digital memory (how many web pages have ever been sketched in pencil before hand?). Now, however, the executables are not appendices of oral language reception/ processing but, rather, a system of Western symbols moving through a dictated pathway (of program) to produce a given pixelized result. Ahab does not die at the beginning of his tale, nor does code execute its desired function without moving through a parallel symbolic pathway.

Having said all of that, I'm still quite torn.

On the narrativity of code: look to control structures, such as if-then-else statements.

Recall too Queneau's "Story As You Like It", and his assertion that his method was influenced by tree structures in computer programming.

Gardens of forking paths, mazes of twistly little passages all alike--the tropes that have come to delineate literary cybertext apply just as well to exerpience of reading code.

I guess I don't see a problem with referring to programming and writing, prose and code as a category or a rubric or a family of story or narrative. I suppose I should have been more conscientious in my response that I am not looking to collapse them to the point of disintegration. I want to highlight their generic (genre) samenesses and preserve their particular differences.

Afterall, we have a category called literature under which falls all sorts of various different types of texts: prose, poetry, novel, nonfiction, letter, memoir, short story, hypertext, cyberfiction, adventure game.

Furthermore, most of these categories have very different materialities, very different forms and structures, and very different exigences and goals but are still called literature (e.g. novel versus epistulary novel versus a Shakespearean play versus a sestina versus a concrete poem versus a adventure game). I would argue that in some ways a sonnet sequence would look like code to someone not familiar with the conventions. So, in this more macro sense, could writing and programming be bedfellows?