Critical Inquiry — Volume 33, Number 1

N. Katherine Hayles
Traumas of Code

Language isn't what it used to be. In computer-mediated communication, including cell phone conversations, email, chat room dialogues, blogs, and all documents written on a computer, the language we learned at mother's knee is generated by computer code. Though computer-mediated language may appear to flow as effortlessly as speaking face-to-face or scribbling words on paper, complicated processes of encoding and decoding race up and down the computer's tower of languages as letters are coupled with programming commands, commands are compiled or interpreted, and source code is correlated with the object code of binary symbols, transformed in turn into voltage differences. Most of this code is inaccessible to most people. At the level of binary code, few are equipped to understand it with fluency, and even fewer can reverse engineer object code to arrive at the higher-level languages with which it correlates.1 As a result, contemporary computer-mediated communication consists of two categories of dynamically interacting languages: so-called natural language, which is addressed to humans (and which I will accordingly call human-only language); and computer codes, which (although readable by some humans) can be executed only by intelligent machines.

The vast majority of the literate public who are not computer programmers becomes aware of this dynamic interaction through ordinary experiences. The easy flow of writing and reading human-only languages on computers, increasingly routine for the millions who populate cyberspace, is regularly interrupted by indications that unseen forces are interacting with the language flow, shaping, disrupting, redirecting it. I mistype a word, and my word processing program rearranges the letters. I think I am making the keystroke that will start a new paragraph and instead the previous paragraph disappears. I type a URL into the browser and am taken to a destination I do not expect. These familiar experiences make us aware that our conscious intentions do not entirely control how our language operates. Just as the unconscious surfaces through significant puns, slips, and metonymic splices, so the underlying code surfaces at those moments when the program makes decisions we have not consciously initiated. This phenomenon suggests the following analogy: as the unconscious is to the conscious, so computer code is to language. I will risk pushing the analogy even further; in our computationally intensive culture, code is the unconscious of language.

N. KATHERINE HAYLES, John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature and professor of English and Design/Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science, and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her recent books include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005). She is currently at work on a study of the interaction between narrative and database.