Virtual quills: KODIKAS / CODE Ars Semeiotica Volume 24 (2001) · No. 3-4 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Towards an aesthetics in the polemical mode Joseph Wallmannsberger Den Ausgangspunkt des Beitrags bestimmen die modernistischen und technotrophen Mythologien, die sich im Feld der elektronischen Medialisierung von Kommunikation, Sprache und Literatur etabliert haben. Der dekonstruktive Ansatz, der hier ins Spiel gebrachten 'polemischen Ästhetik' zielt dabei nicht auf ein kulturkonservatives und technikskeptisches 'Alles Zurück! ', sondern versucht den Aufweis, dass gerade in der virtuellen Multimedialität das immer schon Schriftliche strengster Observanz das dominante Moment abgibt. Es werden drei Tropen elektronischer Ästhetiken einer dekonstruktiven Lektüre unterzogen: Zunächst wird die postulierte radikale Offenheit elektronisch mediatisierter Textualität diskutiert, wobei die fetischistischen Subtexte herausgearbeitet werden. Eine weitere Thematik findet sich in den Mythologien von Virtualität und Multimedialität als ein Jenseits-der-Schrift, das sich als unhintergehbar skriptural erweist. Der dritte polemisch-ästhetische Vorschlag findet die eigentliche digitale Literatur in der Praxis der Programmiererinnen, die als grammatologische Spurenkunst gelesen wird. 1. Digital projections Meditative silence in the library, no more. The solitary reader immersed in the tome in her hands, a subject of the past. The citizens of the new literary republic operate to the tunes of machines turned to füll volume: the implied reader (Iser 1995) of literary texts in the age of digitally generated virtual environments finds herself in the fictional equivalent of life in the Los Angeles corridor, following the trajectory of carnivalesque bodily configurations on Venice Beach, the synaesthetic postmodernity of always-already virtual Tinseltown, getting as real as it gets in some version of Blade Runner (Bukatman 1997) territory in South LA. Alright, this may be overstating the case somewhat at this particular point in time, but electronic literature, when it manages to come to its own, will be the fast moving, multimedia driven synaesthetic hyperevent the digerati have been promising us for quite a while. A possible beginning, no doubt. Electronic literature under this interpretation would aspire to being recruited as an important agent in bringing about the revolution of the dawning information age (Kurzweil 2000). We are currently witnessing remarkable convergences of big business, information technology, and creative practices of communication. Bill Gates (1999) getting all worked up at a Comdex presentation about interactive television, allowing, well, not viewers, but rather interactants, to decide on the development of the plot, shows a welcome interest in fictional genres (the CEO emeritus of Microsoft does have a humanistic streak in him, not only parting with considerable sums for Codex Hammer, but striving to make operating system code design into a form of helles lettres, denounced by cynics as vapourware). The more daring and avant-garde versions ofthis convergence can be found at 208 Joseph Wallmannsberger places like MIT' s Media Lab (Brand 1987), where, rumour has it, the e-poetics group is in the early stages of implementing a coat that will electronically model your emotional states and produce corresponding texts on its surface making it that much easier for the nerdier types to successfully communicate also with the opposite sex, which accounts for the code name of E- Cyrano given to the project. In a European context, the electronic literary revolution has adopted a more pedestrian pace, with electronic poets conducting their not too experimental experiments in the niche markets of academia and the art world. There is little doubt, however, that European electrobards, provided appropriate funding from Brussels is made available, will do virtual reality caskets, data gloves, and distributed creativity modules (Rheingold 1992) in the not so distant future. Humanists in literature and language departments will welcome the opportunity to engage in critical discussion and commentary of these developments. We are thus positioned at the end of a beginning, a possible beginning, no doubt. The present paper will take a different point of departure and adopt a critical agenda deconstructing a number of the fundamental assumptions present in current discussions of the structure, function, and social consequences of electronic textuality, more specifically the set of institutions, agents and practices taking creative writing into virtual environments. Some words are in order about the polemical (Arditi and Valentine 1999) thrust of the arguments put forward in this paper: polemics is brought into play here as a heuristic (Ulmer 1999) instrument in deconstructing theoretical options regarded as misguided in the discussion of electronic textuality; this move does not imply wholesale rejection of proposals or their proponents, aiming on the contrary at bringing into play a dialectics of alternative agendas. Specifically, the aesthetic polemic will target three interdependent theoretical orientations I take to be at the centre of impasses at theorizing more forcefully the sphere of electronic logos. First, the postulated openness (Strano 1998) of electronic textuality as opposed to traditional print based versions has tobe radically deconstructed, in view of its constant danger ofturning into fetishistic reifications of virtual vs. physical modes of information. Second, the idea of virtual realities doubling as a brave new world of synaesthetic pleasure, thus finally fulfilling the promise of literature. The third step, in turn, will have the most far-reaching implications by deconstructing the idea of literature, electronic or otherwise, by defining a set of social, cognitive, and verbal practices as literary that have hitherto been excluded from theories of literary production and reception (Butler 1998). The polemical aesthetics proposed in this paper will contribute, it is hoped, to theories of the electronic word both intellectually relevant and useful for creators and agents in digital environments, allowing the theorist to not only describe, but critically reflect on and intervene in the domain of inquiry. The aesthetic (Bredin and Santoro-Brienza 2000) moment in the polemics will make for a comprehensive approach not limited by conventional disciplinary boundaries. The theory and practice of perceiving the always-already perceivedthe particular version of aesthetics adopted here cuts across the more limited agendas and methodological inventories that have in the context of electronic textualities proved to be of limited fruitfulness. 2. Fetishes of aperture deconstructed The problem with Gutenbergian books is taken tobe their solidity as objects in the real world, Manichaeistically restraining the flights of the virtual literati in the prison house ofpaper or Virtual quills 209 parchment; there is a Hamletian (Act I, Scene 2) undercurrent to attempts at creating digital literature, reinterpreting the prince' s melancholic disposition to the constraints of the only here and only now along the lines of, if this all too solid paper would melt. The desired free flow of uninterrupted signi: fication infonns a number of digital literary strategies, focussing variously on degrees of freedom in the medium, the author or the reader. All three approaches have tobe theorized against the intellectual short-cuts ofreification and fetishism. The degrees of freedom offered by electronically mediated textual environments at a technical level are clearly evident, and no attempt will be made here to argue against the crucial relevance of technical innovation in the domain of the digital word. By the same token, the new materialities of the sign (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1988) have to be put into a specific context, if we want to steer clear of the pitfalls of techno kitsch propaganda found in places such as Wired magazine or the public relations gigs of information technology businesses. Three aspects of the digital medium will have to be of major concem here, namely random-access storage, generalized pointer models and strategies of disturbed text and knowledge processing. 2.1 Random access and control Random access storage defines the epistemological and technological rupture (Bachelard 1971) between the old and new textual economies, also known as analog vs. digital or continuous vs. discrete processing. The leading metaphor in the ancien regime of infonnation management has been, going there. Listening to a track on an audio cassette means first going there: the fast forward button makes the manreuvre more practical, but the fact of the matter remains that one has to make a move before the music plays, very literally so. In the digital domain, however, you will be taken there right away, not postponed wishes and desires in terms of the technological set-up. Not only will random-access memory technologies get the user there in no time, but at this privileged site of always-already (Ronell 1992) there, she will be in füll control of operations. The effects are most direct and ubiquitous in digital audio and video environments, with tracks of sound and image being configured at the user' s pleasure. Processing of textual, and by extension literary material follows the same principles, however. The digital literary text does not have to be read, processed or digestedany and all of the topoi of textual incorporation (Crary 1992) will do in linear fashion: the implied reader of electronic literature is given access to all locations in the text at all times. Given the constraints of canonical westem ontologies and standards of average mental health, the reader will not technically be present everywhere at a particular point in time (Deleuze and Guattari 1980), but the material condition of the signifier allows potential and strategic omnipresence. Random-access memory' s nom de plume in humanistic circles is hypertext (Landow 1997): non-linear development and articulation of chains of signification. The basic plot of this story of technical revolution can be put into a nutshell: the reader supposedly is no longer required to read a book from the first page to the last, but creates networks of lexias and events at her own will. Before we address the more far-reaching implications of this technological innovation of the electronic word (Lanham 1993), we will take into account two related aspects of the new economies of the sign, namely the generalized pointer approach and the database model of textuality. The argument has to be developed in steps with a view to getting a fuller grasp of what is at stake with mythologies of radical aperture in digital textual modes. 210 Joseph Wallmannsberger 2.2 Pointers of signification Pointers in computer science (Chaitin 1998) parlando provide a basic method of linking chunks of information on the fly. If a particular piece of information is needed in computational processing, there is no need to provide the real thing, a link to where it can be found being perfectly adequate. Tue analogy of the book index works reasonably weil for the purpose at hand: the entry will not itself define the meaning of a given term, but provide a reference in the form of a page number containing the expression. Readers of traditional books, not only the more scholary tomes, but also biographies, travel guides, or how-to manuals, have come to appreciate an expertly designed index as the via regia to the cognitive networks of print-based docuverses. Tue generalized pointers of electronic information processing go beyond the index model by allowing dynamically growing reference points and the cascading of possible targets. Tue technicalities of these systems need not concem us here; basically the pointer model provides the tools necessary to dissociate the content of information from the manipulation thereof, by allowing the delivery in what might be called a just-in-time scheme. Random-access memory and pointer technologies defme the basic modules of the leading idea underlying digital information processing, namely the database paradigm. 2.3 Database paradigms If an attempt was made to bridge the two cultures gap (Lepenies 1985) and explain to physicists and computer scientists, what the impact of digital literature was all about, the text as database model would prove to be a helpful heuristic. Tue database strategically separates information content from rules of processing (Connolly 1990). In mathematical terminology, a database can be characterised as a set of objects with a set of operations defined over them. Conceptualising databases as set theoretic entities may seem somewhat unfamiliar for both humanities scholars and information technology practitioners alike. In the context of a discussion of digital literature, it is inspiring to note that the essential technological innovations in electronic information management are not due to the ingenuity of experts in electric and electronic engineering. What lies at the heart of the database paradigm is the purest and most abstract form of writing, the art of mathematical prose (Davis and Hersh 1995). We will retum to the ideological implications of this state of affairs in intellectual history; at this point we will focus on key elements of database theory, to prepare a deconstructive approach to topoi of radical openness in digitally mediated texts. The division of content and processing in databases makes possible radical and comprehensive recon: figurations of the structures at hand. Not only is it possible to extend the set of informational entities tobe includedthis will simply guarantee openness in a limited, quantitative manner but also to redefine the set of operations possible with the basic units in the collection. Provided a formally precise and explicit method of what the operations are supposed to do is available, there are no constraints on what can count as a possible operation. The world of the database is the universe of facts and relations, a Wittgensteinian cosmos of everything that can be said in a precise manner. Much of the bravura of current experimentation in digital literary modes is motivated by a wholesale adoption of the database model for creative writing. Writers of hypertext tend to get their best clues from friends who have taken lo 1 courses in database theory, among them dynamic reconfigurations and multiple views of data sets. In canonical form: hypertext is Virtual quills 211 database. Who then is the implied reader of a database? We make use of databases, integrate them into office and work environments, why would anyone want to read a database? Experimentalist modes in literary writing have prepared avant-garde readers to develop catholic expectations about what configurations of signifiers count as writing in the literature game: dadaist collages of tidbits from newspapers and posters are most certainly in, as are verbatim reports of conversations at public toilets, but databases (Rasula 1999)? Do we want to accept databases as bona fide players in the literary field? Stanley Fish's (1980) classic question of "Is there a text in this class? " invites extensions and variations of the following kind: Does the graduate school database assigning students and professors to this particular class count as part of the canon? Habitues of salons in literary theory will, with some ennui maybe, enlighten us that excerpts from New York City's telephone directory have made successful claims to being literary texts, so why would one possibly want to reject print-outs from IRS databases, the Amtrak electronic timetables or Playboy magazine's data wa/ e/ o(a little Derridadaist fist, excusez moi, dear reader)rehouse from the domain of literature. Radical eclecticism of this kind would take out some of the nervousness and pathos not infrequently present in discussions of digital literature, surely a welcome move. The crux of the matter is, however, more complex. The 'weak version' of experimentalist orientations is willing to change the set of permissible objects in the literary domain, while the question of how the set of possible operations over this set will be defined does not even occur. What is at stake with the advent of database driven forms of digital literature is the idea of reading per se, not only what may be fit to print in a work of literature. The problems faced by the reader of hypertext, literary or otherwise, reflect the trials and tribulations ofbecoming literate in the database mode (Poster 1990). Hotly debated issues in hypertext theory, such as 'getting lost in hypertext' or 'information overload', have to be restated in terms of the implications of writing and reading the database. The two-cultures game may be instructive in this respect: practitioners of 'hard styles' of information management, such as scientists and engineers, have rieb experience in dealing with massive sets of data, while some humanists have developed virtuosity in coming to terms with fuzzy and analogical semiotic environments. The database model provides a site of convergence, stimulating theories and practices of electronically mediated textuality (Mowitt 1992) not constrained by disciplinary traditions andrituals. As an immediate practical consequence, talk of the radical openness of digital literary texts will be put into perspective and lose most of its mantric dynamism. Hypertexts make it possible to freely move from one set of lexias to another, one thing leading to another being the name of the game. This allows for degrees of openness not usually associated with print-based texts, suggesting a fundamental difference between Gutenbergian and Turingian (Turing 1987) texts. Add to that a humanistic penchant for turning matters of fact into broad general statements, preferably with deep ontological and metaphysical infrastructures, and one ends up with mythologies of textual aperture in its age of electronic mediation. This is not to deny that the problematics of aperture and closure of textual events is a crucial one, both in terms of its theoretical import and its practical implications in electronic environments. The theories tend to be much improved, however, by a transformation well established in intellectual history, namely being tumed from their heads to their feet. The epistemological rupture of digital literature is not driven by the ghosts of experimentalist writing, venerable as the ghosts may otherwise be, but by the innovation of database exegesis into the field of textuality. Humanists then may be tempted to look for answers to the problems of digital writing from practitioners of hard styles of information 212 Joseph Wallmannsberger processing, such as computer scientists and information technology wizards. Ironically, the virtuosos of database how-to are unlikely to provide the desired insights, instrumental reason not being inclined to talk about itself. Fruitful answers will take the form of creating discursive sites of convergence and conflict, a table of all tables (a logician' s SQL to the humanist' s drama of puns). 3. Counter reformist iconophilia: multimedia and its discontents We will retum to the tables and tabulations of eletronic texts and discuss the broader intellectual and social implications of database scriptoria after an intermezzo devoted to mythologies of multimedia and the end of scriptural writing. There has been a plethora of proposals in varying forms and contexts inaugurating the end of the Gutenberg galaxy, heralding the advent of brave new worlds of image, sound and multimedially driven synaesthesia. Research by educationalists indicating massive decline of time spent by children reading, and at the same time ever increasing periods spent watching television, has been taken to be an indication of industrial societies moving into a phase of multimedia enhanced secondary orality (Postman 1996). Television under this view is construed as a rather crude first attempt at creating virtual environments immersing viewers, users, or interactants in digitally produced reality equivalents. Virtual reality as currently advertised focuses on video helmets supplying 3D-visual input and data gloves connecting the cyberian to rich collages of objects with varying degrees of realness. Would the programme of VR, if and when it is realized, mean the end of literature? Should we think of literature as the alchemy of virtual reality chemistry? Taking the power of imaginary evocation to be at the centre of what literary texts are all about, we would be hard put not to accept virtual reality systems as literary devices of the information age. The usual agitation of cultural pessimists - Shakespeare as a technological gadget, horribile dictu: "little Latine and lesse Greek" still functioning as the hallmark of the culturati does not solve the fundamental problem at issue here. Why should one semiotic system not supersede another, orally transmitted epics fmding their way into manuscripts, and helles lettres in turn being transformed into virtual reality streams? The theory of digital literature would then have to double as the theory of the dispositif of virtual reality. The critical wars about the ontological status and theoretical implications of virtual reality may be fun, but there simply is no real battle here. Virtual reality systems as the most systematic and comprehensive implementations of multimedia may appear to be the ultimate triumph of iconophilia, what with the rich visual, acoustic, and haptic environments provided for the user. lt is indeed ironical that virtual reality really is the most radically literalist and scripturalist semiotic environment ever designed: what the interactant interacts with is a stream of worlds made of letters, literally so. Virtual reality fundamentally is not about video chips or data gloves, what is at the heart of the project is analytic geometry coming into its own. Descartes' (1637) analytic geometry allows objects to be moved in virtual space, transformed and repositioned, the objects being configurations of letters..Tue transformations are as real as it gets, engineers design bridges using these mechanisms, and we tend not to have ilßY philosophical qualms walking over them (the bridges, that is). There is a new kind of writing that comes into play at the beginning of the 17th century, whose long term consequences we are beginning to feel in today' s VR caves. Tue idea of digital geometry as a form of digital literature articulates yet another aspect of the central question at issue here: Who is doing the writing anyway? Virtual quills 213 4. Codes of literary programming Deconstructing ideologies of literary aperture and digitally induced synaesthesia, we have prepared the ground for making constructive proposals for the articulation of an aesthetics of writing in the electronic mode. The proposal is polemical insofar as conventionally accepted disciplinary boundaries (Mowitt 1992) between different kinds of writing will be questioned Digital literature under this view is to be located in domains clearly distinct from the social subsystem of 'literature' as defined in contemporary westem societies. The development of plot, strategies of interactive fiction and navigation in literary docuverses are relevant problems in the context of academic literary debate; the real challenge of writing in the digital mode is of a different nature. Thus redrawing the boundaries between social practices will imply a reappraisal of writing, communication and creativity in electronically mediated semiotic systems. Tue theoretical approach here advanced resonates with echoes of death of literature debates, arguing that currently available forms of digital 'literature' are not in fact the sites for the development of literary, that is poetic and self-referential, functions öf language. Tue poetic function in the electronic domain operates out of area .. A number of recent contributions have discussed the problems and challenges of creative electronic writing, focussing on the aesthetics, poetics, and pragmatics of writing the electronic word. The essential aesthetic and epistemological rupture involved in the development of globally distributed networks of collective poesis, however, has gone largely unnoticed. The almost exclusive focus on the surface structures of electronic textuality, the linking of lexias and hypertextual navigation, has tended to blind us to the fact that writing globally networked code is the supreme literary, that is poetic event informing the digital domain. In a Gramscian (Strano 1998) vein, one-may define writers of code as the organic intellectuals and poets of the information age. Humanists will have noticed, if only in passing, initiatives such as the Free Software Foundation, the Linux community or TeX and the literary programming movement, but the impact of these practices on the fundamental question, What is poetic writing in electronic environments all about ? , has not been theorized. This may be due, at least in part, to lack of expertise in programming on the part of most scholars in the humanities, but equally to a fundamental reluctance to go beyond traditional conceptions of what literary language use is all about. Currently accepted literary canons, with their emphasis on fictional texts, support ideologies of literariness excluding a wide spectrum of genres, such as technical and scientific treatises, from discussion; ironically, Ancient and Medieval definitions ofliterature bad been more liberal, encompassing special language treatises like Vergil' s instructions on agriculture or the atomistic meditations of Lucretius. We are thus ill prepared for a radical reconfiguration of social practices focussed on the poetic function of language (Jakobson and Pomorska 1983). Tue collective poetics of code writing takes two interrelated theorems as its point of departure, namely creating literate programmes and the social manufacture of poetic structures. The literate programming approach (Knuth 1992) starts from the radical premise that code has to be designed in such a fonn as to be readable by both woman and machine; this approach may seem counterintuitive at first, since even neophytes of computer science know that the binary codes necessary for efficient processing by the machine are impossible to digest for a human use, while even high-level programming language code cannot be applied directly to the computer, but has tobe tumed into machine language first. Knuth' s revolutionary innovation is based on the strategic choice that for the binary codes to be efficient, they have to be generated from a textual environment that is a direct reflection of the creative 214 Joseph Wallmannsberger process. The distinction between actual code and commentary is discarded in favour of a fully integrated view of the poetic development of prograrnming ideas, devices, and implementations. When Knuth talks of the similarities between a good programme and a novel, he does not intend to express some loose analogy, but offers a technically precise model for designing more efficient code. The commentary in the code serves the dual purpose of making the intemal logic transparent and to guide the design process by way of providing a powerful heuristics. Tue writer, or more often the group of writers, is guided by the plot outline and character development, as it were, of the literate programme, making the running commentary · an integral part of the design process itself. The art of programming, the title of Donald Knuth' s (2000) axiomatic foundation of computer science, again has to be taken in the most literal sense: art and programming converge into a site of poetic activity that hitherto had gone unnoticed and unnamed. Tue paradigm of literate programming is thus relevant not only as an avantgarde and efficient code design methodology, whose specific advantages become most dramatically evident with large scale, distributed projects, but also a metatheoretical theory-cum-practice mobilizing the resources of both verbal and formal intelligence in creative semiotic environments. Tue influence ofliterate programming in communities and cultures of writing code has been so pervasive that some of the innovations of this particular approach are now simply taken for granted. The priority given to documentation and modularity in the most advanced code architectures available today is motivated in ! arge measure by Knuth' s attempt to transcend the boundaries of the two cultures, namely the hard science formalists and the humanistic verbalists. The signal distinction of literate prograrnming has to be located in allowing this convergence to operate on a precisely circumscribed technical level: no cheap metaphors or analogies here, the formal and verbal aspects of the programme as a piece of art have tobe integrated with a view to making the logico-verbal hybrid both an executable algorithm and an interpretable text. Literate programmes qua programmes have proved tobe a successful innovation in computer science and engineering quarters; the humanists' response to and exegesis of literate programmes qua texts has so far remained a project largely unfulfilled. Tue advent of digital literature is the kairos for a reappropriation of sign systems fundamentally philological in nature (a philology, projected as interest in and passion for all aspects of verbal signs, possibly very different from the academic institutions going by that name). Tue writer of code is the poet of the information age. Again we have to make an attempt at being both technically precise and philosophically daring. A simple analogy, in the sense of, okay the mathematics and logic buffs also have a creative streak in them, will not do. The de: finition provocation to some parties on both steies of the two cultures divide will have tobe motivated and elaborated. Jakobsonian (Jakobson and Pomorska 1983) models ofthe poetic function of language are instructive in making the proposal both explicit and plausible. In everyday referential use of language, speakers create text-world-correlates coupling signifier and signified in representational configurations. Tue intellectual history of critiques of the representational paradigm has made it abundantly clear that unabashedly realistic versions of semantics are fraught with difficulties and contradictions, it is true, but this will not have any direct import for the discussion at hand. We will contrast the text-world-correlates with contexts where language clearly does not and is not meant to refer to anything outside, recursively tuming on itself as it were. Most if not all cultures have produced serniotic practices of this type, including play, poetry, and art. Tue focus will be on the poetic function of language, in its narrow sense comprising verbal systems of expression. In poetry Virtual quills 215 words specifically refer to other words, a situation quintessentially captured by Hamlet' s (Act II, Scene 2) answer to what he is reading: words, words, words. Experimentalist and avantgarde traditions in literature have made us aware of the inherently self-referential nature of creative writing, poetic agendas being based not on ideas, spirit, or emotions, but most radically on words (Rasula 1999). lt is against this background that the poetic function of literate programming becomes clear. The literate programme is not primarily a set of rules to be executed by a machine, nor a text to be read and interpreted by humans, but a poetic and artistic construct whose elements and components recursively and self-referentially keep processes of signification in motion. Wallace Stevens' s (1957) Anecdote of a jar (placed in Tennessee) as the closest equivalent in traditional literature of a literate programme? Possibly. The second aspect of current practices of code writing that is of immediate relevance to the project of digital literature is the collective and distributed communities sharing in the creative process. Gutenbergian literature has played a pivotal role in implementing regimes of individuality, the solitary reader serving as the role model of the autonomous subject. Attempts to overcome the power structures inherent in enforced individuality through collaborative writing environments have so far not proved to be unqualified successes. Meaning fundamentally being implicated with power struggles, this may hardly come as a surprise. Even the more anarchic and anti-authoritarian communities of writers tend to find it difficult to keep the dialectics of individual impulse and communal focus in balance. In the electronic domain, we do, however, find groups, initiatives and subcultures successfully integrating antagonistic tendencies. Members of the Free Software Foundation or the Linux development community have relied on ethos, self-organisation, and the technical opportunities afforded by electronic media to create environments of unlimited personal creativity and clear focus on the common project. GNU (Stallman 1986) as the epos ofthe information age? Yes, but. 5. After the end of literature The aesthetic polemics here advanced locates the discursive site for. the articulation of a programme for digital writing at the end of literature. Announcements variously of the death of the author, the end of the book, or the dawning of post-Gutenbergian galaxies do not shock habitues of literary and critical salons over the last few decades: a sense of an ending has proved to be the most reliable beginning for most discussions. Literature may be defined dead, but then it would find itself in first-class company, necrophilia having recruited God, the Nation, the Proletariat, and most ofthe other Actors in the grand narratives. The specific difference of my polemical proposals is to be found in their lack of metaphysical infrastructure: ideas, ·theorems, or world views are cheap to come by in debates about electronic writing, while theories with a focus on the materiality of the word in its age of electronic textuality are a clear minority interest. The idea of digital literature will be all the richer for daring to think the unthinkable: literature is in the programmes now. Would this mean that language and literature scholars will have to immerse themselves in the interpretation and exegesis ofprogrammes? Polemically and logically, the answer has to be yes. Would this mean that the poet in the information will have to write code instead of text? Recursively, back to square one. Poetically, she has been writing code all along. 216 Joseph Wallmannsberger References Arditi, Benjamin & Jeremy Valentine 2000: Polemicization, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bachelard, Gaston 1971: Epistemologie, Paris: Presses universitaires de.France. Brand, Steward 1987: The media lab, New York: Viking. Bredin, Hugh & Liberato Santoro-Brienza 2000: Philosophies of art and beauty, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bukatman, Scott 1997: Blade Runner, London: British Film Institute. Butler, Christopher 1998: Interpretation, deconstruction and ideology, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Castells, Manuel 2000: The infonnation age. Volumes 1-3, Oxford: Blackwell. 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