The relationship between codex and code

In her work Writing Machines, Katherine Hayles emphasizes the importance of looking at materiality of a specific work: “Materiality of the artifact can no longer be positioned as a subspecialty within literary studies; it must be central, for without it we have little hope of forging a robust and nuanced account of how literature is changing under the impact of information technologies” (pg. 19). This leads us to begin thinking about and exploring the differences (and perhaps, similarities as well) between codex—the traditional book—and code, used for electronic literature.

Marshall McCluhan, in his piece “The Medium is the Message,” also discusses the importance of materiality, or medium. He explains that it is not the content inside that provides the message, but rather, the shape and control that the medium provides to human association (pg. 2). Like Delia explains in her post (see Delia’s post in this same website: http://elitsp.blogspot.com/2018/09/codex-leads-to-code.html), citing from McCluhan’s work, the idea that the medium is the message is exemplified by “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” (n.p.). And the message is evolving with the development of new technologies, as well. “The airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for” (McCluhan, pg. 2).

This leads me to a question that Delia expressed in her blog, cited here: “what does code achieve that the codex cannot?” (n.p.). If we’re going to take Hayles idea that materiality must be front and center in our analyses of any piece of art, and if we accept McCluhan’s assertion that the medium is the message, then the materiality of code must be analyzed from its contribution to what the codex already provided. When Delia compares a book to electronic literature, she states that, “[for a book] there is only one level of words existing or animating the page… With the constant technological advances, code also allows greater animation and the creation of effects that appeal to almost all of the bodily senses” (n.p.). I agree with that statement; for example, Loss Pequeño Glazier’s White-Faced Bromelias on 20 Hectares is a e-poem that constantly changes the order of the lines, providing a new poem to different readers or even the same reader during two distinct visits to the website. The more than 250 iterations of the arrangement of the lines is able to give the reader something that the codex isn’t able to: a non-linear, unfixed representation of the content of the work. And the way code “accelerates” (to use McCluhan’s term) the work that the book is already doing, it allows readers to generate different interpretations of the same work at a much faster pace. In other words, the book is the railroad while code is the airplane.