Extreme TrackingNotes of Caution: John Cayley
Ξ September 29th, 2009 | → | by Mark Marino | ∇ CCS, fundamentals |
In John Cayley’s essay “Coding as Practice,” he alludes to, without directly referencing, the Critical Code Studies manifesto.
He notes the line of caution:
The general point I wish to make concerning the critical study of writing digital media is basically a point of persuasion, to try and convince you that there is no critical harm or „loss of cachet‟ or „special insight‟ in treating coding as a distinct practice. I am not saying that writers don‟t or can‟t code or that they will not code; nor am I denying that more and more of them are, as a matter of some certainty, coding every day. Nor am I saying that coders don‟t or can‟t write.
And I am saying, emphatically, that we must take account of the fact that artists do undertake both types of practice, ever- increasingly during the production, often, of one and the same project. And so, I am clearly not saying the if you both code and write the two practices do not or can not have an influence on one another. But, as critical code studies, and software studies emerge, I maintain that they will have to resist what may seem to be urges of pseudo- insight generated by suggestive but misleading correspondences between coding and writing, because these will prove to be reductive urges, or a best attempts to enhance either writing or coding with certain properties and methods of the other distinct practice. Moreover, there is the risk, hinted at above in my initial remarks that, when, for example, applying what I am claiming is a reductive analysis to coding by assimilating it to writing, that rather than reconfiguring our class, writing, we will be applying legacy properties and methods to coding, typically treating its objects as texts, editions, (potentially) canonical exemplar, or (at best) disruptive intervention into some established world of letters and the literary. (I realize that our critical community is, thankfully, as it happens, quite well protected against such risks.)
I wouldn’t disagree with any of these cautions, especially the notion that code cannot be treated as text. It might not have a single author, might not be all “original,” might be misleading, as well as countless other differences. However, cultural studies has given us enough tools to treat objects as “text” in a much broader sense. Certainly, those practices ask us to interpret texts within the context of their own realms, requiring a high level of literacy in the tendencies, requirements, and cultures of those realms.
I would think that there might be other similar notes of caution: notes of caution to computer scientists who discover this project and view it with skepticism and bemusement. The caution would be to avoid seeing their code merely as a functional or even descriptive text but to admit (for surely they recognize) the culture of coding, the vocabularies, the rhetoric that I know they recognize after having listened to them shred someone else’s code with all the contempt and sarcasm they typically reserve for bad science fiction films.
They see not only what is there but what is not. They comment on the conditions of composition as well as the cultural value of the programs. They comment on the profit motive of the code writers as well the coders’ time or knowledge limitations. They readily acknowledge, even in these quips, that there is more to the code.
But perhaps there is a similar note of caution not to regard the humanists and posthumanists as either infadels or kooks — but rather collaborators whose articulations enrich the discussions of code.