To: _arc.hive_@lm.va.com.au
From: mez <netwurker@hotkey.net.au>
Subject: Codeworld [by Alan Sondheim]
Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 16:35:56 +1000

Codeworld
Alan Sondheim
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Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Ogden: The world is everything that 
is the case. Pears/McGuinness: The world is all that is the case. Die Welt 
ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge. Pears/McGuinness: The 
world is the totality of facts, not of things. Ogden: The world is the 
totality of facts, not of things. ... Die Tatsachen im logischen Raum sind 
die Welt. Die Welt zerfallt in Tatsachen. Ogden: The facts in logical space 
are the world. The world divides into facts. ... Wovon man nicht sprechen 
kann, daruber muss man schweigen. Ogden: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof 
one must be silent. Pears/McGuinness: What we cannot speak about we must 
pass over in silence. (From beginning and end of Wittgenstein, Tractatus 
Logico-Philosophicus, Ogden translation 1922, Pears/McGuinness translation 
1961.)
[1] TLP describes a Dostoevskian crystalline world divisible into facts. 
The German is clear; the motto to the book, by Kurnberger states, in 
translation: ... and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling, 
and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.
[2] TLP portends ideality. The world is logical, mathematical, capable of 
clear division. Logical space is the space, I would assume, of the natural 
numbers, if not the integers; as Russell says in his introduction, TLP 
presents, inscribes, a finite mathematics -- there's no room for the 
continuum, and proof of the continuum hypothesis was far in the future.
[3] The translations are different, almost never radically so, but 
different nonetheless. There is a residue in German such that both English 
versions converge, but often never meet. The sememes are equivalent, but 
only to a degree; translations are almost never one-to-one.
[4] In this logical space of facts, programming, and protocols, there is 
always a wavering, always room, always doubt, critique, and I would say 
desire as well. Never mind that this wor(l)d breaks down, evidenced a few 
decades later by Godel, Tarski, Skolem, etc.: Coherency, living within the 
safety-net of mathesis, matrix, maternality, remains a dream of humanity. 
DNA coding, cryptography, hacking the world -- all appear to guarantee that 
everything is possible.
[5] Computer languages are logical; computers are presumed so, but aren't; 
protocols are logical as well; logical spaces may be compared to 
drive-space; garbage-in, garbage-out; and so forth. Hacking depends on a 
closed world with closed loopholes; the loopholes themselves are coherent, 
logical, _there._
[6] Codework, code writing, rides within and throughout the logical world, 
as a disturbance, a sign of things to come, both extension and breakdown.
[7] Where does the content lie? Is it in the translation of code into 
messiness or residue? Is it in the interpretation of residue? Or perhaps, 
and herewith a criticism, is it in the wonderment, confusion, and novelty 
of the residue itself?
[8] Is codework a minor art, minor literature? What is the point of 
repeatedly shaking the scaffolding -- if not the emergence, in the future, 
of an other or another approach, or an other, being or organism, for which 
codework now both provides augury and its weakness as portal/welcoming? For 
what is come among us already no longer speaks the world of logical facts, 
just as computers are no longer large-scale calculators, but something else 
as well, something unnamed, fearful -- that fearfulness already documented 
by, say, Cruikshank in the 19th century.
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[9] Codework references the alterity of a substrate which supports, 
generates, and behaves as a catalyst in relation to its production. To this 
extent, codework is self-referential, but no text is completely 
self-referential (sr); things waver. So for example 'ten letters' and 'two 
words' and 'english' may be considered sr -- but only to the extent that 
the phrases are presumed to apply to themselves. Extended: 'This sentence 
has thirty-one letters.' -- 'This sentence has five words.' -- 'This is an 
english sentence.'
[10] What is the residue? What are the sentences 'about'? On the surface, 
letters, words, language. This is an additional or diacritical relation- 
ship to sr; if one, for example, didn't know English, none of these would 
make sense.
[11] All sr possesses a residue -- an _attribute tag._ In codework, which 
has a component of sr, the tag may be plural, muddied -- the world is never 
presumed complete, total. Codework is not an instance in this regard of 
mathematical platonism or Godelian-platonism; if anything it relies on the 
breakdown of the ideal, pointing out the meaning-component of computation, 
program, protocol, even the strictest formalisms.
[12] Early on Whitehead pointed out that 2+2 = 4, but only in a certain 
formal sense; in fact, the equation implies an operation or unifying 
process; within the 4, the components are combined, their history lost. 
Strictly, '2+2' and '4' are equivalent; within the symbolic, they differ -- 
for that matter, in terms of thermodynamics as well. This domain is 
expanded by codework, which endlessly interferes.
[13] The danger of codework is in its delimitation; it tends to repeat; the 
works tend towards considerable length; automatic generation can flow 
forever. Sometimes it appears as maw-machine emissions -- text in, modified 
text/partial code out. Sometimes it extends language into new uncharted 
territories. Sometimes it references the labour and/or processing of 
language. Sometimes it privileges the written over the spoken, or portends 
the spoken within a convolution of stuttering and close-to-impossible 
phonemic combinations. Sometimes it appears as a warning against the 
all-too-easy assimilation of linguistic competency.
[14] Sometimes it breaks free, relates to the subjectivity behind its 
production, the subjectivity inherent in every presentation of symbol-symbolic.
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