"Almost uniquely in a theoretical culture shaped and guided by linguistic paradigms, Baudrillard and Deleuze-Guattari treat the dominating operating systems as running, not primarily on language, but on code. (...) Where Baudrillard seems to yearn for a (cultural and semiotic) space transcendent of code -- which he nevertheless grants it is impossible now to access -- Deleuze-Guattari emphasise the way in which all code includes its own margin of decoding. Decoding is not so much a matter of translating -- or understanding, comprehending -- code, as dismantling it. 'Let us recall that decoding does not signify the state of a flow whose code is understood (deciphered, translatable, assimilable), but, in a more radical sense, the state of a flow that is no longer contained in its own code, that escapes its own code.' And when two -- or more -- codes come into contact strange, unheralded new assemblages can emerge: this is 'surplus value of code' -- 'the phenomenon when a part of a machine captures within its own code a code fragment of another machine: the red clover and the bumble bee; or the orchid and the male wasp that it attracts and intercepts by carrying on its flower the image and odor of the female wasp.'
Flatline constructs : gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction - Anna’s Archive
