How to Disagree

After years of seeing the same patterns of low-grade argument used in email, Usenet, forums, and now blog comment threads, it would be gratifying to see any evolution of disagreement along the lines Graham describes.

(The related articles – “The Age of the Essay” and “What You Can’t Say” – are also both interesting reading.)

Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s by Paul Ford – The Morning News

As you might expect, the snarky comments ("Someone’s been eating Hall and Oatesmeal.", "Five seconds of music 120 times.") are much more entertaining than the complimentary. And yet when someone who has taken the time to listen and encapsulate 763 songs in a row then says "I’ve listened to this thirty times" it speaks volumes.

You can also grab the torrents and grade them yourself, but just like college radio, be prepared to swim through a lot of Meh to find the Awesome.

Absurd Entries in the OED

One example is a tautological pair that reads like a lexicographical snigger -

The entry for unpoetic gives no definition, but there is a note that tells the reader to ‘cf. next.’ The reader dutifully looks ahead to the next entry which is unpoetical, the definition of which reads ‘cf. prev.’

Others might be considered circumlocutive obfuscation, such as trondhjemite (“Any leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is oligoclase“) and disghibelline (“To distinguish, as a Guelph from a Ghibelline“). Yet ironically, when I posed the latter to my friend SW as a joke, she immediately started describing the differences between those terms – for as it happens, they are two warring factions from 12th and 13th century Italy…and she is a doctoral student specializing in art of the Italian renaissance. So maybe KA’s geology class will have covered trondhjemite (aka plagiogranite). For my part, I fondly remember getting Yggdrasil as a selection in a game of Balderdash and casting it as some kind of Yiddish, while of course knowing it as the World Tree from Norse mythology where Odin hung for nine days (cf. Gaiman’s American Gods).

Some notable aspects of the Pirahã language and culture:

• No other (active) languages in common.
• Language based on only eight consonants and three vowels. Men use one more consonant than women, and some pronunciation of phonemes also varies by gender.
• Phonemes include nasal whines, lip flapping, and whistles and “possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations.”
• Capacity for extensive prosody in this singing form, dropping syllables in the process.
• No terms for numbers – only terms for comparative “a small amount” and “a greater amount,” which further exhibit in an inability to track groups of items greater than two or three (asked to watch as a number of nuts are taken from a can, they fail to ascertain whether the can is empty if it originally contained more than three nuts). While superficially similar to gully dwarves of Dragonlance lore in this respect (who have terms only for “one” and “more than one”), this deficiency is not attributed to retardation but cultural adaptation.
• No fixed terms for colors – appearance is conveyed by descriptive comparison (“this [red cup] looks like blood”).
• No terms for right and left – directions are given in direct terms rather than abstract.
• No perfect tense – excluding more complex sentence structures as well as some conditionals.
• No abstract class terms for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few” which had been presumed as fundamental and even embedded in human cognition.
• No linguistic recursion, which Chomsky posits as the most fundamental operation in his universal grammar which is supposed to be innate in all humans. They speak only in direct assertions, like the extreme grammar suggested by Wittgenstein’s deconstruction in his Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus, grouping statements together rather than engaging in the expected recursion.
• No traditional of art – while balsa sculptures are made to emulate objects like an arriving seaplane, they are used solely in the moment and then discarded. No objects are kept for later contemplation.
• No “deep memory”

The absence of “deep memory” or “immediacy-of-experience” is put forward by Everett to explain many aspects of the Pirahã culture as compared to other norms. Compared to other Amazonian tribes, they resist any attempt to introduce agriculture (in fact, any lifestyle changes at all), and do not even store food. He suggests that they resisted Christian conversion (Everett began as a missionary) because they could not meet Jesus directly; when told Biblical parables of his work, they would ask “Have you met this man?” and lose interest after learning of his death millennia ago. They have no creation myth. Describing a person going out of sight around a bend of the river, they use the same word as for a candle flame fluttering: xibipío or “gone out of experience.” This language/cognition intermingling evokes the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, where the use of a language affects how the speaker thinks about or behaves in the world.

The debate continues between Chomsky’s camp and Everett over whether the Pirahã represent a counterfactual example to the universal grammar, particularly whether they truly lack recursion, although the particulars suggest a certain amount of cultism and dogmaticism from the Chomsky side. In his most recent rebuttal, Everett makes the interesting observation about his own early work on the Pirahã, which was inspired by Chomskyian grammer:

‘Descriptive work’ apart from theory does not exist,” he told me. “We ask the questions that our theories tell us to ask.”

This is further set against the contention by Chomsky that “no coherent alternative” exists to his Universal Grammar, which almost seems an attempt at fallacious victory by definition. Everett’s doubts are echoed by Steven Pinker, who has evolved from his pro-Chomsky position in “The Language Instinct”:

“There’s a lot of strange stuff going on in the Chomskyan program. He’s a guru, he makes pronouncements that his disciples accept on faith and that he doesn’t feel compelled to defend in the conventional scientific manner. Some of them become accepted within his circle as God’s truth without really being properly evaluated, and, surprisingly for someone who talks about universal grammar, he hasn’t actually done the spadework of seeing how it works in some weird little language that they speak in New Guinea.”

The strict adherence to Chomsky’s innate language position also constrains work on exploring the evolutionary origins of language ability in humans; he is consistently dismissive of arguments for natural selection in language development. However, the Pirahã language possibly represents an earlier stage of development in linguistic ability. When all humans lived purely as hunter-gatherers, existing from moment to moment, they would have had no more need for recursion and numeric terms than the Pirahã do now.

Further resources:

• Another article by Everett on the lack of recursion and numbers in Pirahã
• Related debate between Everett, Pinker, and Robert Van Valin

These things are certainly possible but what would be missing, at least in my stubborn take on it, is the creative aspect that attempts to incorporate human emotion/experience/transcendence into the
supernatural, etc.

I try and take this on without instinctively defending what is really a fledgling idea, and not automatically assume that code can be poetry. But I will try and address some of your questions to see how far the idea can go.

First, programming is inherently creative, and acts as a way of encoding human thoughts into formalized syntax. Terms like “transcendence” and “supernatural” would give me problems in analyzing any language act. So, to start let’s go back to the concept of writing as problem-solving. Clearly code can function in a literal analogue to, say, a short story that means to convey a certain idea or process. What may have to happen first is some tedious definition and delineation. For “code poetry,” do we mean adopting code in syntax, in grammar, in total or in homage?

Syntax: Write poetry in a particular programming language vocabulary (limited set of function-words), not necessarily in a structured programming form. Not likely to hold up well on its own, as programming syntax typically borrows from living language, particularly English, except lower-level languages like assembly. You would mainly get some funny words like Foreach and Gosub, maybe a phrase like Do while, etc. which would just make it sound archaic.

Grammar: Write poetry in the style of a program, with indenting, grouping, internal cross-reference – some of which falls under “syntactic sugar”, while other requires some understanding of the logic behind how a program flows, which is frequently not top to bottom. You could potentially do this without a particular code syntax, which is even practiced in programming as “proto-code” where you design a program functionally without writing in actual code. I can see some interesting writing experiments here simply borrowing a few concepts from programming without giving up natural language – function blocks, iteration, addressing, flow control. As simple throwaway examples:

	If (I was young again) then
		I would see the world with onion eyes.

or, more procedural:

	While (the sun shines)
		the world turns its face from side to side.

	Until (death is come) {
		Life continues apace;
		Death++;
	}
	...yet Death remains a stubborn local variable,
          and instantiated out of frame.

The latter being both loops that continue until a trigger state is defined. The notation ++ in some languages means “to increment a value by 1,” and the conceit is that Death has a known final value but only the wider program, not the local programmer, knows its final amount.

(Please don’t judge the idea by the examples!)

Incidentally, each logical block of programming language is called an “expression.”

Validity: Here’s where the idea would need formality. Poetry can subsume elements of code grammar, as above, and stay essentially intact. But as an independent poetic method, there is a tension between a work’s validity as poetry and as a program. If a program expresses an idea, in the form and language of something like Ruby, but does not compile and generate a result, what is that? What if the code does not represent poetry in itself, but generates a poetic effect (such as by requesting input from the reader/user), distinguishing the map from the territory. Poetry succeeds by entangling the reader in its imagery; can a program do the same?

So, the idea has multiple facets, starting with just the idea of poetic form following programming conventions as another useful constraint, like a sonnet or sestina. Then, possibly code can become independently poetic if written to that purpose. And finally, code can become a means to the end of poetic work, in generative ways that the comparatively procedural written language (which generally only goes in one direction, from start to finish) cannot emulate.

When we create the intelligence that supercedes us, will it write code poetry, and will we appreciate it?

Can programming language ever really be “fiction” in the sense that we mean the term literary?

If you mean fiction as simply “not true”, then perhaps not. But if you mean as “a potential space not limited by fact and literal observation,” then all programming is an act of creative fiction – you create structures, meaning, process, and at some extremes an entire ongoing environment separate from describing what already exists.

…but I think you would be very hard pressed to win the argument that anything written in computer code could play on the same level as say Kafka or Byron.

That’s the conceit I have trouble accepting. The literacy or receptivity of the audience does not make a compelling criterion for artistic endeavor. Plus I think you may be reacting to the naïve notion of programming as poetry, namely taking extant code off a line printer and reading for inspiration. Certainly it could be more challenging to read, but arguably Kafka’s surreal bureaucracy (an interesting choice, and a potential seed for another idea – can legal prose, bureaucratic doublespeak, even IRS forms be made poetic?) and Byronic verse are both distinct exercises in challenged reading.

What do you mean by “play on the same level”? In terms of appeal, range of expression, effective messaging? Of course you cannot posit brilliance in a form as a justification for art. Who knew when we first made shadow shapes in caves that we would get Shakespeare?

The mechanics have some mirror qualities, granted, but the Heart of it needs to be different for poets and authors to still feel they have a special purpose in cataloging the vastness and uniqueness inherent in the expressive qualities of their craft.

I don’t see anything in that statement incompatible with the idea of programming to a poetic purpose, as opposed to programming just being gainsaid as a poetic act. It would have to be pursued to that end, just as a writer must intend to be poetical and not prosaic. And potentially code poets have a uniqueness in capacity that is absent without them.

Code poetry is cool, but is it beautiful?

Ask a programmer (the only built-in audience for ‘pure’, in-the-wild code spotting) if they have ever seen beautiful code. “Elegant” is another common adjective, just like in mathematical and physics circles that pursue proofs that are “beautiful” solutions to theoretical problems.

Does it DO anything that has a real impact on who we perceive ourselves/world/each other to be?

Does all poetry meet this requirement?

Can it illicit the same kind of response that we [associated] with music– can it bring us to tears at the mere thought, anticipation, of its “verse”?

That’s a distinction of great art, not a qualification for poetic form. That response transcends media – music, writing, film, dance – and cannot be made a prerequisite for poetic expression, else most poetry would cease to be such. I do think great code poetry can cause an opening of the mind, revealing a concept or truth in a moment of eureka.

As far as a genre– sure. Anything written in a new form, with enough steam behind it, can be dubbed a new genre.

And maybe that’s all it is – an experimental writing form. Again, I am just surprised I have not seen more about it, as it seems a logical extension of our increasingly code-defined world. And code continues to become more egalitarian with the expansion of markup languages, and milder languages like Ruby – just as poetry was once the exclusive reserve of educated, landed gentry not up to their elbows in dirt farming, but gradually became available to every schoolchild.

I really think the idea can hold up to some scrutiny, although how much and how far is still unclear. Of particular importance is setting the outlines for it – is it code that happens to be beautiful (found poetry), poetry written more like code (formalism), or code and poetry merged as a discipline? And then, do we already start to stifle a potential art by drawing lines around it, as always the conflict arises between creativity and study of it?

What do programming code and poetry have in common? Elliot Swan draws some parallels in his essay, “Making Code Poetry.” For example, when narrowly defined, poetry is “literature written in meter,” or more generically, “literature constrained by particular grammatical rules (e.g. meter, syllable or line count).” That sets up a possible argument that code can be poetic, even though some poems would not be (such as free verse). Another attempt at definition would be Dylan Thomas’ description which eschews poetry as a simple literary subgenre, but instead as a fundamental creative act using language. And programming code is creative, on various levels (it both requires creativity and creates output), as well as being language-bound.

Wikipedia further offers, “Poetry often uses condensed forms and conventions to reinforce or expand the meaning of the underlying words or to invoke emotional or sensual experiences in the reader, as well as using devices such as assonance, alliteration and rhythm to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poetry’s use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations.” The first element, condensing, is another overlap with code – programming languages are often characterized by how compact they are syntactically (or how overweighted, such as C++), and great code often reveals a brilliant simplification of a complex problem.

Visual layout of code has certain aesthetics specific to it, particularly highlighted in teaching languages like Scheme and modern inventions like Ruby. This also appears as “syntactic sugar” in languages, where the programmer is provided with additional syntax options that make it “sweeter” in practice without affecting the formal output – the “sugar” provides a more familiar, more easily understood, or more “beautiful” way to express the code. (Conversely, “syntactic vinegar” or “salt” discourages bad code form. “Make that which is common, that which is preferred, into a beautiful structure. Sprinkle syntactic sugar to encourage. Then, make that which is uncommon, that which is suspicious, into an ugly structure.”)

As for ambiguity and other stylings, many elements of programming inherently provide great flexibility of meaning – variables, functions, recursion, abstraction. Code also has multiple modalities of meaning, from its raw “source code” form pre-translation into compiled/interpreted bytecode which can be consumed by the compiler/interpreter, or interpreted by another programmer, or even the same designer later in time; to the actual program output, which can self-contained, generative, interactive, reactive, etc. Code also represents one possible interpretation of a given problem, in that programmers will often write different code (based on their education, familiarity, style) for the same given requirements, within the same language.

So, code has poetic characteristics. It even has a rich collection of distinct languages, some derivative and others completely foreign in approach, that resist simple translation. And just as I’m curious about the poetic expression in artificial languages (how does one write a proper poem in Klingon, Tengwar-Elvish, Esperanto, American Sign Language?), surely I thought there must be some corpus of programming poetry. Not just “poems about programming”, but poetic forms derived from or entirely existing within a formal programming language. Most of the examples I found are the expected puns, such as the recursive acronym GNU that names a major Unix source branch (GNU meaning “GNU’s Not Unix”); and software art, like self-replicating automata and “Quines,” even William Gibson’s virus-infected “Agrippa” floppy (which contained a poem that could be read only once before it was destroyed by the reader software, rendering the ‘art’ worthless…but otherwise it was like having a painting under a cloth you could never remove without it bursting into flames). But I only ran across one short article about code itself used as poetry:

“In its 1962 manifesto, the French Oulipo group around the poet Raymond Queneau and the mathematician Francois le Lionnais proposed to use computers for poetic games, process text with Markov chains (just as a number of more contemporary digital arts works like Charles O. Hartman’s and Hugh Kenner’s “Virtual Muse” poems, Ray Kurzweil’s “Cybernetic Poetic” and Cornelia Sollfrank’s “Net.art generators”) and write poetry in the Algol programming language. In the early 1970s, Le Lionnais and Noël Arnaud published poetry written in Algol code which, just as the early Perl Poetry of Larry Wall and Sharon Hopkins from 1990.”

The further examples given are again “net art” which uses code as the means to produce some kind of algorithmic artifact as an art piece, but not code itself as a poetic form.

So, by what constraints could “code poetry” be produced – must it be syntactically accurate, or simply borrow from the style and grammar of a language? Must it compile, or does the code itself convey something – even if it no longer communicates to the machine for which the language was originally conceived? And to tie back to the original “closed system” idea, can poetic code be understood without reference to its literal instructions – purely appreciated for its form and language play rather than its mundane machine implementation?