from: a John Cayley
to: a cris cheek
Dear field of indeterminate address
(modulated by a programmatological and 'fully explicit'
military-industrial (now commercial) technology -- plus ça change, as
a cris cheek noted),
Potential parallel? :
- reading (writing) a Prynne poem
- reading (writing) an (explicitly) programmed work.
When and how to read? (Noting that certain conventional difficulties
inhere in the idea of anyone else '*writing* a Prynne poem' which may
not be as troublesome in attempting the suggested parallel.)
If you -- as a John Cayley might put it, programmatologically -- worm
your way successively into both these literary engagements, what are
you (successively) doing? The same thing in either case? Something
different?
For me one (non-essential) distinction is in the systems of
inscription used to transcribe the underlying 'programs' in either
case. The reading (and writing) of the Prynne poem is still strongly
associated with a monogrammatic majesterial reserve (penetrable by
intimate colleague-readers who often correctly claim that everything
in the language of the poem, far from being 'difficult' is as
'simple' and 'accessible' as any other everyday language or
(Heaneyesque) rhetorical/poetic usage), whereas the reading and
writing of the explicitly programmed work (albeit evoking all kinds
of difficult-to-access technologies) is either open-source or invites
hacking, re-configuration, re-engineering; it becomes harder to
maintain the moral rights concerning integrity of the work and
alienable authorial association -- rights which I consider highly
problematic -- problems which I prefer not to see bracketed, and
hence I continue to pursue a particular type of poetic making, while
(as I've already said) denying any essential difference in this
manner of making (plus ça change). [This is without going on to
discuss dynamic, transient or collaborative texts.]
I appreciate your identification of the "killer app' since yes, I do
think a programmatological practice and its associated critical
stance implies a commitment, however hypocritical, to coding in the
open, and, if you code in the open, then the programs and/or the
'writing-as-record' which are subsequently generated can not be the
same as 'what I wrote as a matter of (poetic, literary) record'.
[further extract as contextual annotation:]
>... it isn't enough [explicitly criticizing my own and others'
>previous formulations] simply to take a stance on some question of
>whether 'programming' should program 'writing,' or whether 'writing'
>should codify 'programming.' Such formulations beg further questions
>of greater complexity which are indicated by the formulation itself,
>by the way in which the programmatological determinations
>('programming programs writing') are embedded in the structures
>(clauses) linking the related terms, terms whose position in some
>supposed hierarchy seems to be at issue. The supposed hierarchy, in
>this case, is actually a necessary intersection of structures which
>emerge from different dimensions of writing, in practice and
>performance.
>One of Derrida's insights, in preferring writing/grammatology over
>originary (voiced) speech as a way of rethinking inscription in
>general (the inscription of cultures), was to recognise that all
>inscription (including speech) defies time (and hence priority and
>origins) by creating an archivable record, one which persists but
>also enters into the intertextual without necessarily retaining any
>associations with an origin or originary moment. This is writing as
>record, as extended in space, seen as a (provisionally) bounded
>whole, the residue or excess of its own processes of production and
>a necessary anticipation of further processing. I'm going to call
>this, simply, 'writing' from now on, so as to distinguish it from my
>subsequent uses of 'programming.' Programming, then, is any aspect
>or duration of an act of inscription, which is involved in the
>production or distribution or performance of writing-as-record. It
>is inherently time-based and time-dependent. In the durational
>performance of a text (when it is read or staged or animated or when
>it is intrinsically transient) its programs are 'running,' the
>programming of the piece is in operation, realised in and as time.
...
>Here I am distinguishing between two 'dimensions' of inscription -
>call them space and time - which are commonly conflated, while also
>implicitly establishing an equivalence that is just as commonly (and
>heatedly) contested in the age of digital transliteration. Today,
>everyone knows that if you give a set of inputs to a programmaton
>and supply it with an appropriately encoded program, then you will
>generate a set of outputs. It's easy to see that the inputs,
>program, and outputs are all within the field of writing in my sense
>of the term (and Derrida's), and that programming is what happens
>over an unspecified duration during the production and
>representation of the (anticipated) outputs. But I am also
>suggesting that just as writing (or pre-structuralist, logocentric
>speech) may become a paradigm for the representations of 'thought'
>or 'nature,' so programming may serve as a model for those processes
>of inscription which are usually conceived as equally inaccessible
>or revealed by faith - the interior creative genius of the author;
>the mysterious emergence of 'natural' beauty from chaos.
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