@book{flusser_does_2011,
	address = {Minneapolis},
	series = {Electronic mediations},
	title = {Does Writing Have a Future?},
	isbn = {9780816670222},
	lccn = {P211 .F6813 2011},
	number = {v. 33},
	publisher = {University of Minnesota Press},
	author = {Flusser, Vilém},
	collaborator = {Poster, Mark},
	year = {2011}
}

From writing to the “new codes”: programming languages

The new computer codes have made us all illiterate again. A new literate caste has arisen. For most of us, the new writing (computer programs) is suffused with that kind of mystery that surrounded alphabetic writing before the invention of print. [“Instructions”]

WRITING WAS ALWAYS PROGRAMMING. One “wrote to human beings as though they were apparatuses,” issuing instructions for behavior: first divine commandments, then secular laws, then modern regulations, then industrial user’s manuals, then computer programs. In this sense, “[p]rograms are not only a completely new way of writing, they are also the culmination of a pattern established when writing began.” Imperatives (“thou shalt not…”) are gradually secularized, eventually taking on the form of if-then propositions; in this process, values (eternal values that justify commandments, high values that justify laws) are gradually abandoned, until we reach the value-free, depoliticized functionalization of behavior modeled by the program, which has “no symbol for should.” “Accordingly, it becomes clear that the tendency of instructions (and of Western history as a whole) is toward a complete depoliticization of all behavior and that when this goal is achieved, human beings and their society will steer themselves automatically, like a cybernetic system.” [“Instructions”]

BUT PROGRAMMING BRINGS WRITING-AS-PROGRAMMING TO SUPERSEDE THE HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IT CREATED. “Such “profane, value-free thought […] can no longer be grasped in historical, political, or ethical categories. Other cybernetic, computable, functional categories must be applied to it. For this reason, programming cannot actually be called writing. It is a gesture that expresses a different kind of thought.” [“Instructions”]

NAÏVE VS. CONSIDERED OBJECTIONS TO PROGRAMMING. We can choose to see this as liberating, by shifting the “burden of instruction […] from human beings to inanimate objects.” The objection that some human behavior cannot be automated is mistaken: “All modes of behavior, of any sort, can be programmed and automated. It is a matter of breaking the behavior down into its constituent elements, into actemes, and then computing them back together again. Just such breaking down and recalculating is what programming is.” The objection that such “completely unconditioned behavior” is not liberating, but confining, is worth taking more seriously. [“Instructions”]

Since all literature is programmable, it is a mistake to argue that some writing, taking form other than that of instructions, will survive alongside programming, and that “by means of this sustained writing, historical, political, ethical, and aesthetic modes of thought will be preserved”: while it is true that literature does not consists exclusively of models for instruction, today all models of knowledge and experience can be reduced to “binarily, digitally coded models of knowledge.” [“Instructions”]

BUT THE “TERROR OF REACTIONARIES CANNOT BE DISMISSED SO LIGHTLY”

For in the recoding from alphanumeric into digital codes, something would be lost that not only reactionaries may acknowledge as the critical value of writing. For spoken language would lose its position as mediator between thinking and writing. Digital codes are ideographic in the sense of making concepts (ideas) visible. They differ from the alphabet in signifying no spoken sounds. In programming what was formerly alphabetically written, thought will have detached itself from language. And that is terrifying. Writing, as we learned it in school, is a gesture of historical consciousness. Programming, as our children are beginning to learn it, is a gesture of a different sort, a gesture better compared to a mathematical than to a literary consciousness. The codes it uses are as ideographic as numbers. Wittgenstein, in his remark on the meaninglessness of saying “two and two is four at six o’clock in the afternoon,” showed that mathematical thought is unhistorical. But until now, mathematical thought has been organically immersed in alphanumeric code and swept along in the flow of historical thought. Now programming is rising up from alphanumeric code, becoming independent and separating itself from spoken language. That justifies a degree of pessimism. [“Instructions”]

Natural languages are “double-locked codes,” which expand both denotatively and connotatively, and “are exceptionally productive codes as a result.” Pessimism is appropriate, considering that “if the future brings a new code that relies less and less on linguistic codes and more and more on codes of calculation and computation, if the swell of speech that will then flood over us turns out to be no more than background noise for the new mode of thought, then we may well fear the loss of language.” [“Spoken Languages”]