Regards Croises: Perspectives on Digital Literature

“Agents Provocateurs” : Codework Interventions on the Listservs

26 “agents Provocateurs” | Paloque-Berges “agents PRovoCateURs”: Codework interventions on the listservs camille Paloque-Berges (Translated by Justin Katko & Camille Paloque-Berges) 1 Introduction: a poetics of information? f the limits of digital literatures have not yet been defined, then we know—at least since Lev Manovich articulated an “informational aesthetics”—how to approach textualities elaborated by and for the digital medium.44 A Mcluhanite criticism of media (medium equals message) is replaced by a critique based on the study of the language of digital media, where the processing of data determines cultural forms whose ideological values are flexible and ambiguous. Roman Jakobson already supplied an informational approach, resituated by Sandy Baldwin into the lineage of Claude Shannon’s statistical theory of communication.45 Shannon undertakes to define information in a context of mediation: information moves through channels, carried by combinations of units, units that are both signals (material ) and symbols (conceptual). Shannon proceeds with a quantitative and statistical analysis of symbols in order to determine how information is produced , and thus, how to define information. For a given message, if the combination of units is improbable, information is produced in high quantity; if the combination is redundant, less information is produced. Jakobson’s poetics are informed by Shannon’s system: literature, characterized by interconnected structures, is defined by a literary ratio, the index of its “defamiliarization .” This ratio is the motor of an innovation that renews informatic systems, repositioning expectations and redundancies in a structure of probabilities. Baldwin explains that for Shannon, the more complex and difficult the encoding of a message, the more information it contained. . . . Now, the novelty of literature was Shannon’s singular example of information density. . . . Since information theory addresses i Paloque-Berges | “agents Provocateurs” 27 systems of coding and transmission, literature remains necessary to the definition of information while lying outside its space of application. Literature is the medium of information ‘itself’.46 This conclusion is only possible in a context where messages are inscribed within a larger structure, an interconnection of writings defined by the structure’s inter-mediality (or medial connectivity in an exchange network). Above all, this sense of interconnection reinterprets its context as a frame in which processes (not only of communication but also of signification ) are at stake: a virtual community where codes are not only functional but also semiotic. One could argue that an innovative mode of textual agency, e.g., hijacking speech acts and injecting noise into informational systems, renders this superimposition of codes a dead end. This essay asks: what kind of poetics, elaborated with the help of early information theories, could emerge out of a confrontation between actors in a networked communication system? 2 Agonistic noise experimentation with listserv protocols Virtual communities running listservs have a practical understanding of interconnection: it is a textuality contributing to the “language-plus-code” problem, as formulated by N. Katherine Hayles: digital code, as in programming languages and computer network protocols, should be taken into account for any language-oriented theories in the context of technologically developed society.47 Going back to an early pragmatic, informational, and codeoriented theory of communication may illuminate the literary (hypertextual) and sociologic (collaborative) definitions of interconnection.48 A semiotic approach might ask: what are the textual strategies at play in the poetic processing of information? The most obvious examples of this are the codeworkers’ interventions on listservs. Codeworks are the online texts of a group of artists and writers that emerged toward the end of the 1990s. Codeworkers work at the intersection of programming and natural languages, mostly on their own personal websites and blogs, but also on digital art-oriented mailing lists. Florian Cramer, one of the pioneer theoreticians in the “language-plus-code” field, 28 “agents Provocateurs” | Paloque-Berges has joined other codeworkers in suggesting a narrower definition that suits our object of analysis: “Codeworks are technically simple e-mails whose text, however, calls to mind associations of computer crashes and interferences, viruses and spam.”49 Can the study of a textuality that confronts protocols (in the computational sense of a rule set that determines the format—and thus the meaning—of messages exchanged between computers) limit itself to the analysis of interpretive strategies, or should it take into account the stochastic dimension of informational systems?50 As Florian Cramer reminds us, codeworks are originally only e-mails; more particularly e-mails sent to listservs, which are channels of...