Notes and Quotes: New Media Poetics (Cayley on page 307)

Notes and Quotes

John Cayley (beginning on page 307)

We must keep asking ourselves, what is code? What is the relationship of code and text in cultural objects that are classified as literary and that are explicitly programmed? (307).

Code that is not the text may instantiate—as durational performance—the signifying strategies of a text (308).

Atoms or instances of language are not things, but processes (309).

For an object to be identified as a process there must be some way for its state to change over time and perhaps enumerate the temporal sequence of such states (310).

Five provisional categories that “code” is used in discussions of codework: Code as language, code as infecting or modulating natural language, code as text to be read if it were natural language, code as a system of correspondences, and code as programming (311-312).

The author wants to read more critically about the code that is hidden, and possibly operating, as we read (312-313).

The idea that the signifier is multilayered, with shifting and floating relationships of correspondence between the layers, is well known and widely accepted in criticism (314).

Coding applied to textuality in new media allows us to perceive, if not the coding itself, then the unambiguous effects and consequences of that coding (315).

What the punctuation does is set up a time-based revision of the atomic meanings of and within the sentence (316).

No reading takes place without a process of reading (320).

Textuality as instantiated in programmable media realizes the potential for a more radical restructuring of the culture of human time (321).

Many hypertext theorists and researchers would say that the Web falls short of even the fundamental requirements for a properly hypertextual system (322).

The author is, more specifically, discussing programmed signification in which codes and coding operate to generate or modulate texts substantively (322).

For Nelson, “a document is really an evolving ONGOING BRAID” (323).

The Nelsonian docuverse and the “permascroll” (323).

The textual event is defined culturally, by cultural institutions and media technologies (324).

Criticism must address the cultivation and articulation of temporality in this work as well as an analysis of the code that guarantees and drives literal temporality (327).

List of reasons for a necessity to elaborate this distinction (distinction on bottom of page 327) listed on 328.

Code is presented to us a special type of linguistic archive (328).