Codex and Code: two different ideologies

The topic for this week’s class is Technotexts and Augmented Reality Reading. The readings assigned were “The medium is the Message” by Marshall McCluhan; “Media and Materiality” and “Material Metaphors, Technotexts, and Media-Specific Analysis” by Katherine Hayles and Élika Ortega’s “Not a case of words: Textual environments and multimateriality in Between Page and Screen.” The prompt for today’s blog entry is on the relationship between codex and code.

Katherine Hayles her “technotexts” section states, “the long reign of print made it easy for literary criticism to ignore the specificities of the CODEX book when discussing literary texts. With significant exceptions, print literature was widely regarded as not having a body, only a speaking mind” (32).  The author considers that for some critics the form of the CODEX was irrelevant to its content. What really mattered to them was what it had to say. They were not concerned with its shape, but on the actual message that lied on the printed pages. In a way, it was not important to analyze the form of the text in order to understand the message or ideology it transmitted. The book was simply a vehicle that carried the message.

In the other hand, Élika Ortega sees some complexities in the codex that are further complicated when media is at play. On her article “Not a case of words: Textual environments and multimateriality in Between Page and Screen” she mentions:

“…although the book format seems the familiar and conventional component of BPaS, as a matter of fact, as a codex, its configuration is quite odd. The initial impossibility of reading the book removes many, if not most, of its protocols…The capacity to read it through a website on a computer screen, furthermore, transfers the book’s conventions onto another medium where other protocols operate.” (8)

Ortega does note the complexities of the medium in which the message operates. For her, the reading a poem in a printed book required a set of “protocols” that are quite different from a website or different type of media. This makes me think about new media, electronic literature and specifically on code and codework poetry where the medium seems as important as the message itself or some times even more important.

            Eduardo Ledesma on his article, “The Poetics and Politics of Computer Code in Latin America: Codework, Code Art, and Live Coding” establishes that, “Code is the invisible virtual mechanism underlying software, the instructions that make it run. Sometimes code surfaces and becomes the focus of representation, as is the case of codework poetry…”(91). Thus, poetry read in a printed book requires a set of skills that differ from reading digital poetry. I would venture to say that it also requires a different type of sensibility.

            Ledesma cites Mark Marino who argues that, “we must understand it in order to demystify its ideological operations, since ‘computer code is ideology, yet an ideology that is doubly hidden by our illiteracy and by the very screen on which its output delight and distracts.’” (92).  Code acts at times as if it were a whole new language. The reader must learn its characters and symbols in order to interpret the text. This brings to mind a similar process in which we learn the alphabet in order to form words and learn how to read them and interpret them in printed text. The intricacy of code is, however, that it is not as accessible and apparent at the words in a book. Code is hidden underneath of the computer screen. It is not as accessible as the printed text and for the code illiterates it might always remain unreachable. Thinking of code as an ideology then one must ask, for whom is really code operating or who is benefiting from it?

            As it is observed Code and Codex required different set of mechanisms to operate. They also required a different set of skills from the readers. Furthermore, their ideologies and medium from which they operate are worth of study for it is there were we begin to understand the messages they both attempt to transmit to the reader. I wonder if there is also a message here for illiterate individual or the person that does not have access to this type of technology.