Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0402100006580.17999@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Note on "Codework"
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 00:07:29 -0500 (EST)
Note on "Codework" I think I came up with the name (which surely had been used before) in a conversation with Ken Wark - we were talking about code - the term at that point, as far as I remember, was code-poetry - and I borrowed the notion of 'work' - i.e. labor, production - I think - from Heiner Muller - running the two words together - as in Hamletmachine - so there was a political component as well - not wanting the limitation of poetry, however defined, or poetics for that matter - opening the framework, not closing it - I'd also felt that code-poetry - however spelled - was too close to concrete poetry - which didn't interest me at all - at least not any longer - not even dom sylvester huedard - maybe huedard actually - but not the usual suspects - anyway - I thought that codepoetry would minimize the design aspect - emphasize the symbolic or asymbolic or presymbolic - for that matter the (Kristevan) choratic of language - so the political and psychoanalytical met on the grounds of mathesis and semiosis - all this into the naming of the word - pretty commonplace now - at least this is what was going through my mind at that point - still is - anyway - _