Peter Wildman's thesis Deconstructing code that works (a paper and accompanying performance/installation) deconstructs not so much working code, but rather the rigid binary of runnability itself: whether a piece of text can be called "code." To explain why this is necessary, Wildman recounts the early days of code poetry and its debate over runnability, which has never quite gone away.
Code is a Text that Runs
In 2001, Alan Sondheim coined "codework," a term for the growing field of hybrid texts that read as both code and poems. This was an attempt to describe what was, like most emergent movements, a motley group of creators with very different intentions (Sondheim's paper, and some of the others referenced by Wildman, can be found on Monoskop's code poetry page). Before codework, it had as many different terms (rich.list, programmable poetry) as it did writers. While Sondheim's term caught on, the looseness of this new category of writing, along with some of his idiosyncratic vocabulary and ideas, was challenged, most notably by John Cayley. In a debate on the nettime mailing list (summarized here on Cayley's site), the two debated whether texts that are not code belong in the codework category at all. In what sense does poetry that can't be run as code belong to a genre that merges code and poetry? Yet the writing of perhaps the best known writer of the genre, Mez Breeze, is not easily confused with runnable code.
To esolangers, this debate might seem odd, as the opposite impulse is much more common: making code that is less traditionally code-like in appearance or logic -- or sometimes non-textual entirely: made up of emoji, music, or images. But it should not be a surprise that work by folks approaching this work from an experimental literary perspective are dominated by its textual qualities.
In 2002, Rita Raley's paper "Interferences: Net. Writing and the Practice of Codework" attempted to move past the executable/non-executable debate, describing it as the central issue in a first wave of critical discourse, now past. To her, the more interesting exploration is in the tension between natural languages and programming languages at work in writing like Breeze's. But here, Wildman argues that she is still trapped in the same dichotomy:
Raley attempted to reunify the field, or more precisely Sondheim and Cayley’s divided terms of reference, by incorporating the binary divide of executable/non-executable into the qualities of the field itself. She states that “codework tries on the whole to move beyond this schism - the code and its ‘work’ or operation - to make something new. It relies on this schism in order to produce its effects, but then there is a mixing, an interfusion, and something other emerges.” (Raley 2002, par 31) Yet, this reunification of codework has not taken hold as we can still see this schism being referenced fourteen years on.
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