Codex leads to code

This week, we have read the first two chapters from Katherine Hayles’ book Writing Machines in which we learn of the life trajectory that led the author to dedicate her studies to electronic literature, mainly rooted in a desire to bridge what have been traditionally perceived as binaries: media and materiality, science and literature, and code vs. “natural language.” Through her work, Hayles fills a void in literary studies by bringing attention to the material artifact and its potential to determine and affect the meaning of a work. In other words, she posits that the medium is a meaning-bearing entity that must be taken into consideration when analyzing, along with content and form. She proposes, therefore, the term “material metaphor” in order to “foreground the traffic between words and physical artifacts” and presents the codex (or book) as a material metaphor since it has the ability to structure the act of reading and transform the “relation of word to world.” This concept not only opens new doors of analysis of electronic literature, but also provides the opportunity to study print literature with fresh eyes. 

When thinking of the relationship between codex and code from the perspective of the “medium is the message” as Marshall McCluhan argues in his chapter titled as such, it is evident that codex and code function in a similar fashion. One of the examples that McCluhan presents in his work is the invention of the railway. With the railway, he states, humans did not invent movement, but rather accelerated the speed of movement which had consequences in the ways humans lived and carried out their affairs, whether relating to work or leisure. As the scholar argues, since a medium only represents a change in the scale of human affairs, then code must be a new scale of the codex. In other words, code is only a change in the realm of writing technologies. I now wonder: what does code achieve that the codex cannot? 

As a starting point, code is able to animate, instantiate and make algorithms come alive on the screen, thereby engendering a result out of its static numbers and letters in which both code and its result function simultaneously and yet appears differently. In contrast to a codex, there is only one level of words existing or animating the page, at least without taking into account concrete poetry. With the constant technological advances, code also allows greater animation and the creation of effects that appeal to almost all of the bodily senses. When considering works such as Belén Gache’s Augmented Reality Poetry Readings, it is clear that code makes the text function at multiple levels at the same time. For example, code is able to produce animated three-dimensional images that correspond with the poems as Gache reads them. In this example, the visual sense is fully taken advantage as the audience is able to see different colors and movements at work. Specifically, when she performs “Chaos Theory,” a group of 3-D words moving in all directions appear on the screen that further create a sense of chaos and could even cause anxiety in the body of the spectator than reading the codex alone perhaps could not produce. Thus, code changes the pace, accelerates and deestabilizes writing in a way that the codex could not.