poetique des codes

## camille paloque-berges

computers no longer with the expression of idea, but with their constitution (katherine hayles, talking about incorporated cultural metaphors in My Mother Was A Computer)
a crossing of literary theory (jakobson) and information theory (shannon)
JAKOBSON: if literature is made of interconnected structures, the “most literary” is the least familiar, the innovative engine which renews the system, relocates the expectations and repeats in a system of probabilities
programming languages are composed of symbols rather than signs (in the semiotic sense)
code is not only a tool of language, it also manipulates and restricts environments (and possibly linguistic environments, the brain)
code can be (1) executed and (2) writeable (in the Barthes-ian sense of the term, texte scriptible, which is then linked to a subjective appropriation of the code-object -making one’s own through writing/completing)
robert pinsky: poetry is a tool, and an individual tool, a tool which is limited to a small group of people (if not one person at a time), and is therefore very necessary in an age where the computer accelerates the advent of mass media). poetry would be critical access to media
studying code is bringing it back to the social structures in which it lives, from which it emerges (saussure)
georges mounin: the biggest difference between language and code is that the structures of language are implicit, bottom-up, and the structures of code or explicit, top-down
the real hermeneutical question is: what SHOULD the code do? both in effect and in affect
jerome mcgann: code as material symbol of social and ideological conditions of the production of texts (what are these conditions? network, messages, data)
history of oulipo (le lionnais) + calvino (la machine litterature)
lyotard oversees an exhibition on les immateriaux at pompidou (1985), including the uncertainty principle in literature, coming from information theory, and emphasis on a “material which disappears as an independant entity” and a material “in which the language model supersedes the matter (matiere)”
generative lit exists in the temporary, in the ephemeral, the instant, the interactive, while classical lit exists in the intangible, in the universal. TEMPORALITY OF CODE
the virtuality of the text, the potential (oulipo again, heh), the principles of creation
“les arts d’avant-garde procedent a des actions artistiques qui sont des gestes conceptuels d’intervention et d’action contre les discours sans fin des critiques”
TYPOLOGIE OF PROGRAM STRUCTURE -> structuralist, rhizomatic, modular, MVC, etc. there are plenty.
each writer should be aware that they are writing in a tradition of ideas and practices (hartman, but bacon said the same), and therefore should distinguish itself from it
aesthetics cannot disentangle themselves from the new and the surprising
how does the use of a computer help us identify the process of writing?
TEMPLATE && DATA
digital poetry and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is putting forth the relevance of “position, location and structure”, and how these can have generative (aka poietic) effects and outcomes
language is a “structure of differences” (+social context), since they (words) are all relational, and so writing code is playing with the codes of language (la langue), within the system of language (langages): functionally (generates la langue), and structurally (recomposes le langage): language is defamiliarized, and therefore becomes aesthetic (according to jakobson’s innovation thesis, supra). but you also need some sort of familiarity a priori to play with those words
BOOTZ double text: technical and semiotic, which coexist within symbols in code (respectivement, texte-auteur, tel qu’il est, et texte-a-voir, tel qu’il est imaginable, comprehensible, interpretable, potentiel)
the figure of the cyborg author, as described by Aarseth, is not valid because it doesn’t matter, in practice, what the code does, but it suffices to know that it does.

stopped at p.42 cause the library closed :(