[Colloquium Mapping Trans- and Posthumanism as Fields of Discourses, Organized by Shin

Sangkyu, Ewha Institute for the Humanities, University of Ewha, Seoul, Korean Republic, 27-
29 may 2014.]

When does the reaction end? When does the response begin?
Remarks about Speech, Writing, Code Three Worldviews,
by Katherine Hayles.

Charles RAMOND
University Paris 8 / Laboratory LLCP

1
Humanity and language seem inseparable. Humans without
language would certainly not be a part of humanity; inversely, if animals
became capable of speech, we would have no valid reason to not consider
and treat them as we treat humans. The frontier between humans and
animals superposes itself onto the frontier between the presence and absence
of language. The best of proofs of this is that there is no interpreter (human or
animal) capable of translating an animal language into a human language,
though there are countless interpreters capable of translating any single
human language into any other single human language. This fact alone should
suffice to prove that animals modes of communication are entirely different
from those that we call language. Descartes expressed this truth, in his
typically radical manner, when he decided to account for no difference
whatsoever between animals and machines (also deprived of language) and to
distinguish these both from humans capable of speech.

1
M. John Stetter, Lecturer at the University of Paris 8, to whom I here express my
greatest gratitude, translated this text from French to English.

1
 The pre-human therefore distinguishes itself from the human just as
that which is deprived of language distinguishes itself from that which is
endowed with language. But then, how are we to envisage the post-human? Is
it with or without language? If we agree that it possesses a language that one
might translate into a human language, then the post-human will be no
different from the human. But if we grant that it has a language that humans
can neither understand nor translate, then the post-human will be no
different from a pre-human, that is to say, from an animal or a machine. In
both cases, the question as to the nature of a potential post-human language,
and thus as to the post-human itself, presents itself thus in an aporetic
fashion, as it is impossible for us to conceive of a post-human language that
would be at the same time a language and a non-human activity.

The great interest of Katherine Hayles text Speech, Writing, Code

Three Worldviews, which constitutes the second chapter of her book My
Mother Was a Computer Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (The University
of Chicago Press, 2005) is that it confronts us directly with these questions.
How can we imagine, how can we conceive of a post-human language, or
the language of the post-human, that is to say, of the post-human itself,
without falling into the contradictions that I have just evoked? The recent
evolution of technology, namely of computers, can it help us to make
headway into our subject? Nobody amongst us thinks seriously that the post-
human will be, for humankind, a return to animality. Rather, the consensus is
that the post-human will be a sort of machine-like state, a still imprecise
mixture of robot and of computer. But will this super-machine be endowed
with language? Suppose that it is, and suppose also that it has been fabricated
in the image of man. How then will we capable of distinguishing between the
creator and the creature? And worse still, would not this indiscernibility lead
us, by recursive reasoning, to think that human language was in the beginning,
always already, compatible with the functioning of a machine? How can we
know if a speaking robot reacts or responds, accomplishes a programmed or
an intentional movement? And a human? When does the reaction end in each
of us? When does the response begin?

Katherine Hayles text proposes a series of distinctions that to a certain

degree permit to develop these questions and to indicate some possible
responses, that is to say, to take up, in conformity with the general object of
this colloquium, the question of the post-human via the question of language,
of its potential evolution, and of its potential disappearance. First of all, Hayles

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proposes to distinguish between Speech, Writing, and Code as three
worldviews. As she says in the very first line of her text: Speech, writing,
code: these three major systems for creating signification interact with each
other in millions of encounters every day (SWC 39). These three
worldviews should be, according to her, conceived of in effect both on a
synchronic level (millions of encounters every day) and on a diachronic level.
In the order of history, humans first communicated by speech alone (during
tens of thousands of years). Then writing was invented (a few thousand years
ago). Writing did not make speech disappear, but it combined itself with
speech and it continues to combine itself with speech in myriad forms of
substitution and parasitism. At last, recent decades have seen the invention of
computers, thus of code, a language that permits us to communicate with
machines of a new sort. Though having come after writing and speech, code
has not suppressed them. The current situation, according to Hayles, is
therefore that of a constant interaction between these three systems of
signification which would be at the same time worldviews.

The idea that Speech, Writing and Code would constitute three
worldviews, or three great systems of signification, enunciated here as a
self-evident truth, or as an axiom, is nevertheless surprising on many levels.
Without a doubt, it was once believed that societies without writing
profoundly differed from societies with writing. We taught children (Im not
sure that this is still the case) that human history begins with writing and
that prehistory is the name given to that period during which humans did
not yet know writing. From this point of view, it was perfectly legitimate to
consider Speech and Writing as two worldviews extremely different from
one another that gave rise to forms of civilization, and thus to worldviews,
entirely different from one another (writing opens up the possibility of
archives, of transmission, of genealogies, of account books, of resource
management, of investment, of economics). On the other hand, in a world
such as ours that knows writing, it is difficult to believe that we change our
worldview when we pass from the oral to the written or vice versa. We
spend as much time everyday speaking as writing, with a feeling that there is
between these two activities more continuity than discontinuity (one can with
equal ease both speak and write with smartphones, for example). Some men
speak like books, others write like they speak, and every transition from
speech to writing exists in our daily lives as well as in literature itself.

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 This interpenetration of speech and writing was first theorized by
general linguistics, founded by Ferdinand de Saussure, and even more still
afterwards by grammatology, founded by Jacques Derrida two authors that
Hayles knows well and that she discusses in her text. For Saussure, in
conformity with a tradition that remounts at the very least to Plato, writing is
but a transcription of speech. In this way, without a doubt, writing is according
to him different from speech, and might even be the source of the faults and
defaults specific to expression. Nevertheless, according to Saussure all of the
mishaps that writing forces onto speech are due to their excessive proximity
and resemblance (a bit as the sophist resembles too greatly the philosopher,
or the Devil resembles God). Saussure would certainly not have said then that
speech and writing represent two worldviews radically distinct from one
another. He would have on the contrary underlined their proximity (all the
while deploring it). The gesture of Derrida, who (as Hayles sees quite rightly)
only criticized Saussure because he wished to be more Saussurian than
Saussure himself, was to push to its limit the identification of speech and
writing. All communication, according to Derrida, takes place in absence,
including face to face dialogues because we never know if he who is facing
us is truly present. And as writing is the mode of communication by which this
absence is the most visible, Derrida called archi-criture every form of
communication, whether written, spoken, or whether it takes any other
possible form (for example, light signs, or flags, or Morse code).

Consequently, for grammatology, writing or speech, far from

constituting worldviews or separate systems of signification, constitute a
single worldview that essentially consists of renouncing the metaphysical
phantasm of communication in presence. And from this point of view,
deconstruction is nothing else but the putting into plain sight of
philosophers shortcomings (whether Plato, or Rousseau, or many others) due
to their attempts to clearly distinguish between a worldview which would
be that of speech and another worldview which would be that of writing.
This is why we are surprised when Hayles poses a parallel between her and
Derridas undertakings, declaring: One of Derridas critical points is that
writing exceeds speech and cannot simply be conceptualized as speechs
written form. Similarly [my emphasis, CR], I will argue that code exceeds both
writing and speech, having characteristics that appear in neither of these
legacy systems (SWC 40). A surprising parallel, in effect, since Derrida, far
from maintaining that certain traits of writing would not appear in speech,
always maintained on the contrary that all of the traits of writing could be
found in speech. To appropriate the gesture of Derrida, Hayles would have

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had to pose not a code possessing characteristics that neither speech nor
writing possess, but rather an archi-code of which speech and writing would
have all the characteristics. Furthermore, Derridean diffrance, far from
being that which would summarize the difference between writing and
speech, as Hayles writes (SWC 40), is exactly the same in speech and in
writing, as a condition of possibility for the production of signification. Lastly,
far from it that codes be incompatible with iterability and quotation, as
Hayles assures us2; their only possible existence, just as with speeches and
writings in general, is due their iterability, their capacity to circulate and to
graft in many different contexts all the while resting valid and intelligible.
The idea of a structurally secret code, one knows, is as contradictory as the
idea of a private language 3. Every code, in order to be a code, every
password, in order to be a password, must be intrinsically repeatable. This
thesis is not unique to Derrida, for it correctly describes the reality lived by
each of us in our ever more frequent recourses to IDs (user names,
passwords), increasingly necessary to connect to the networks that surround
us. What would be the value of a check, if signatures only had value in the
context of their emission?

In maintaining that speech, writing, and code constitute distinct

worldviews, Hayles therefore develops anti-Saussurian and anti-Derridean
theses, or more exactly pre-Saussurian and pre-Derridean ones, pre-linguistic
and pre-grammatological. But such a position, if it were systematically
maintained, would be astonishing on the part of an author to such a degree
interested by our eras world and thought, and who, besides, borrows from
Derrida a good deal of her conceptual tools. In fact, despite the title of the
text that I am analyzing here, Hayles does not always consider speech,
writing, and code as three distinct worldviews. It does happen, of
course, when for instance she retraces a sort of history of complexity,
according to which, during the age of speech, complexity was vested [...] in
the logos; then, during the age of writing, conceptually invested in the
trace; whereas today, during the age of code, complexity inheres neither in
the origin nor in the operation of difference as such but in the labor of
computation that again and again calculates differences to create complexity

2
SWC 48 : Although Derrida asserts that this iterability is not limited to written
language, but is to be found in all language (Limited Inc, 10), this assertion does not hold
true literally for code, where the contexts are precisely determined by the level and nature
of the code. Code may be rendered unintelligible if transported into a different context .
3
Cf. Derrida, Signature vnement Contexte , in Marges De la Philosophie,
p. 375.

5
as an emergent property of computation (SWC 41). Or again, when proposing
a history of the discontinuous, that is to say, of the movement from the
analogue to the digital, she declares: in the progression from speech to
writing to code, each successor regime introduces features not present in its
predecessors (SWC 57). In effect, as she remarks, whereas speech is a
continuous flux, writing introduces discontinuity into signification by placing
spaces between words; finally, code accentuates this discontinuity even
further to the degree that it only knows 0s and 1s (the electrical current
passes, or does not pass) without any form of transition. In such passages,
therefore, Hayles distinguishes neatly between speech, writing, and
code as three worldviews, three systems of signification quite district
each one from each other. But more often still, Hayles considers speech and
writing as a whole, as one single worldview, which she opposes to code
as a new worldview adapted to the post-human (as if, consequently, there
were not three worldviews, but rather two: on the one side, speech and
writing, on the other, code).

This repartition into only two worldviews appears in many of Hayles

texts. Fundamentally, this is quite natural, since her aim, essentially, is to
describe the characteristics of this worldview, of this system of
signification that is code, our contemporary worlds great novelty that is
driving us towards the post-human. But then there appears another
significant hesitation, as to knowing whether code, following in the wake of
both writing and speech (without therefore abolishing or replacing them),
should rightly be considered as a form of language. Without a doubt, as we
have noted, Hayles declares, as soon as her texts first line, that code is one
of the three major systems for creating signification, and in this sense there
is no doubt that code pertains to language (as she says, Code is a language,
but a very special kind of language, SWC 50). In effect, Hayles understands
code as the language that allows humans to communicate with
computers, to give them orders, or to make them accomplish certain tasks.
But that cannot make us forget that the word code is the object of a much
older and larger usage and that it pertained to semiotics long before
semantics made a claim to it. For example, one generally considers (and with
great verisimilitude, as I already recalled at the beginning of this present
intervention) that animals do not have a language, but that they use codes,
that is to say groups of signals corresponding to particular situations (danger,
confrontation, seduction, etc.). And of course humans, all the while making
use of language, do not thus cease to also use non-linguistic codes: the
manner in which one dresses oneself (dress code), one walks, one speaks,

6
one eats, one sits, one salutes, one does ones hair, etc., but also hand
gestures, laughter and crying, yawning, etc., these are all just so many signals
which we send to one another, just so many codes that permit us to express
a great number of affects and to address signs of recognition, complicity, or
hostility without using language. A dress code resembles a secret code
that allows for the deciphering of an encrypted message much more than one
might think. In effect, a certain manner of dressing opens the door to certain
places just like a key might, or a secret code, or a password. Just as Proust
so marvelously showed us, the passionate search for these codes that might
permit to at last cross the doormat before certain doors in order to enter into
certain salons can constitute the essence of social aspirations. In the same
way, animals refuse their territory to other animals that do not possess the
right codes (odor, posture). In all of this, code designates a pre- or infra-
human level, a semiotic level that we share with animals, but not the semantic
level that characterizes humankind alone. Besides, even if we simultaneously
make use of codes and of language, we know quite well how to distinguish
between them: the interpreters of signs (diviners, cabbalists, haruspices,
astrologists, psychoanalysts, semioticians?...) have always been treated as
akin to the superstitious, whereas nobody has ever treated translators of
languages as superstitious types.

The same difficulty with respect to signification appears once we

consider code in the world of machines. A code is a way to make computers
work, for they know but how to distinguish between two things, and two only,
even if they do this very quickly: the electrical current passes (1), or it does
not pass (0). Hayles is very sensitive to this, the quasi-physical level of matter,
which, according to her distinguishes, the code of computers as much from
speech as from writing. As she says it in a brilliant formula: in the world of
code, materiality matters (SWC 43). The whole question is to know whether
codes great proximity to matter allows for the emergence of signification.
In this perspective, Hayles does not hesitate to propose an entirely electrical
(that is to say, material) reading of the Saussurian distinction between the
signifier and the signified: In the context of code, then, what would count as
signifier and signified? she asks. And she responds: Given the importance of
the binary base, I suggest that the signifiers be considered as voltages [...]. The
signifieds are then the interpretations that other layers of code give these
voltages. [...] Thus voltages at the machine level function as signifiers for a
higher level that interprets them, and these interpretations in turn become
signifiers for a still higher level interfacing with them. Hence the different

7
levels of code consist of interlocking chains of signifiers and signifieds, with
signifieds on one level becoming signifiers on another (SWC 45).

This lecture, in the very least intrepid (there is no example, in the

Saussurian theory of the sign, of a signified that interprets a signifier, nor of
a signified that might serve as a signifier for a signified of a higher level), is
founded by Hayles with the notions of hierarchy of code and flickering
signifier. By hierarchy of code, Hayles designates the fact that the codes, in
computers, are almost always superposed onto many layers, through which
one approaches, through greater and greater abstraction, to that natural
language with which we govern machines. In this way, below the action that
opens or closes an electronic document (an action that for us is now as
natural as opening or closing a book) are found many layers of code: a first
code at the level of materiality itself, that is to say at the level of the passage
of the electrical current; then a second code, in an alphanumerical language;
then, higher-up still, the system of exploitation (the OS); and, at last, our
preferred word processor. All of this composes what one calls in computer
science a compilation, that is to say the transformation of a program written
in a language readable by a human into a program executable by a machine,
and vice versa.

Consequently, even if a text appears on our computer screen in a

manner quite similar to the way in which it appears printed on a sheet of
paper, Hayles believes that this resemblance is deceptive. The printed word is
present and flat, whereas the word as it appears on the computer screen is
a constantly active process and, at the same time, the visible part of a
depth, the superposition of invisible codes. Consequently, the word as it
appears on the computer screen, far from having the consistent presence of
the printed word, reveals itself to be structurally flickering. It can be erased
without any difficulty and continually depends on the electrical current and on
the codes and the applications that allow for its visibility. Carrying the
instabilities implicit in Lacans floating signifiers one step further, Hayles
explains, information technologies create what I will call flickering signifiers,
characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses,
attenuations, and dispersions4. And she adds, in an interview published in
2002 by the Iowa Review Web: I hoped to convey this processural quality by
the gerund "flickering," to distinguish the screenic image from the flat durable
mark of print or the blast of air associated with oral speech. The signifier on
4
Hayles, How we became posthuman, p. 30.

8
screen is, as you know, a light image produced by a scanning electron beam.
The screen image is deeply layered rather than flat, constantly replenished
rather than durable, and highly mutable depending on processes mobilized by
the layered code5. This notion of flickering signifiers is itself related, for
Hayles, to her often reaffirmed preference for the couple pattern /
randomness rather than for the couple presence / absence6. In a computer,
in the world of code, presence and absence are more often than not illusory.
Only processes, patterns, and randomness exist.

This rich series of concepts does not however lead us necessarily to the
idea that code could be a means for creating signification. When Hayles
maintains, in effect, that signifiers are structurally flickering in computers or
in the worldview of code, she does not whatsoever mean to say that
signifiers would thereby unceasingly flicker and give way to pure signifieds!
After all, that would constitute a return to a spiritualist or theological vision of
language, according to which the signifiers matter would spiritualize itself
until it utterly disappears, by a kind of divine transmutation or
transubstantiation (In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et
Deus erat Verbum). On the contrary, as we have already seen, Hayles
consistently insists on codes material dimension. But then, following such a
materialist conception, the notion of flickering signifiers will consequently
and necessarily entail the disappearing or flickering dimension of
signifieds themselves (since, of course, the signifieds cannot subsist in the
absence of, or independently from, signifiers), and thereafter, the pure and
simple disappearance of signification in machines (because there where
neither signifiers nor signifieds are to be found, there can no longer be any
signs at all, and thus there is no signification whatsoever). The new analysis of
the machines code leads accordingly, as already did the more traditional
analysis of the animals code, to the conclusion that code cannot be easily
conceived of in continuity with speech and writing, because, in contrast
with the first two, it is not a part of language.

This conclusion sees itself confirmed and reinforced by the analysis of

code in terms of performativity. For Hayles, code that runs on a machine is
5
Gitelman, Lisa and N. Katherine Hayles, 2002. Materiality Has Always Been in
Play, an interview with N. Katherine Hayles, The Iowa Review Web,
http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/TIRW_Archive/tirweb/feature/hayles/NKHinterview.pdf
6
Voir N. K. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, chp 2 ( Virtual bodies and
flickering signifiers ), p. 26 et al. ; chp. 10 ( The semiotics of virtuality : mapping the
posthuman ), p. 247 et al.

9
performative in a much stronger sense than that attributed to language
(SWC 50). It is difficult to know, when reading such a declaration, whether
Hayles considers that code remains a language endowed with a greater
performativity than ordinary language, or whether the performative nature of
code is so superior to that of ordinary language that in fact code ought to be
considered as something other than a language. This ambiguity adheres to the
very terms of her analysis all the way to its conclusion: Code is a language,
but a very special kind of language. Code is the only language that is
executable, writes Hayles, appropriating a quotation from the book Protocol,
by Alexander R. Galloway7. The question is to know if such an executable
language is correctly called a language, even one of a very special kind. It is
altogether exact that a computer program, a code, is composed of a long list
of instructions, of tasks to accomplish. As we have already seen, these tasks,
as one progressively approaches the machines material level, eventually
reduce themselves to two and two alone: let pass, or do not to let pass, the
electrical current (1 or 0). As Hayles quite rightly insists, at the level of binary
code, the system can tolerate little if any ambiguity (SWC 46). Without a
doubt, as the system builds up levels of programming languages such as
compilers, interpreters, scripting languages, and so forth, they develop
functionalities that permit increasingly greater ambiguities in the choices
permitted or tolerated (ibid.). But the feeling of flexibility and of adaptivity
procured in the computers user corresponds to nothing at all in the code
considered in itself. Whatsoever the length of the path, a computer can only
execute a task if it presents itself as a series of 0s and 1s. A program is thus
very exactly a user manual, or a list of instructions. It is therefore deprived
of the quasi-totality of languages ordinary functions: one cannot find in it any
ambiguity, nor the attribution of a subject to a predicate, nor (must one say
it?) double-meaning, irony, rhythm, musicality, poetry, or humor. The
computer is of course the most obedient of slaves and we develop in the
world of code a great capacity to command, to give orders, and to be
obeyed (this may not be entirely the best habit to develop). But language
does not reduce itself, far from it, to the function of giving orders, and
consequently, all having been well considered, code, deprived of
intentionality, incapable of producing signification, does not merit the name
of language when we consider it under the angle of its performativity any
more than when we consider it under the angle of signification.

7
Galloway, Alexander R., Protocol : How Control Exists after Decentralization,
Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2004, p. 165.

10
 We can now understand better the difficulty that we have sometimes
encountered, when reading Hayles, as to determining if speech, writing,
and code ought to be understood or not as successive steps of an evolution
that would have led from the human to the post-human. In many places, as
we have seen, Hayes envisages these three worldviews as successive and
neatly distinct from one another, each one bringing with it characteristics
absent from the precedent ones. However, it proved each time to be difficult
to distinguish the anterior from the posterior. Was there speech before
writing? Yes, from the point of view of history; no, from the point of view of
grammatology. Is code the past or the future of language? For a Cartesian or a
Saussurian or a Lacanian, a code is not yet a language; rather, it is the lot of
animals, machines, or animal-machines, but not humans. For a theoretician
of computers and of computer programming, code might be drawn closer to
constituting a language, for it indicates to humanity the path towards the
post-human by its infallibility and its absence of ambiguity maybe also by its
docility It so happens that Hayles nuances the evolutionary point of view
that she otherwise maintains. Taking a distance from the radical conceptions
of Morowitz, according to which code ought to be validated as the lingua
franca of nature (SWC 55), and according to which speech and writing ought
to appear as evolutionary stepping stones necessary to ratchet up Homo
sapiens to the point where humans can understand the computational nature
of reality (ibid.) 8, she declares that speech and writing [...] should not be
seen as predecessors to code that will wither away but as vital partners on
many levels of scale in the evolution of complexity (ibid.). As she resumes it
in the last pages of How We Became Posthuman, Hayles would like to believe
that the human has evolved towards the post-human, in that it has been able
little by little to abandon the liberal humanist subject, abandon the
ambition to totally dominate nature, and accept that it has entered into a
dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines (HWB 288),
without thereby conceiving of the post-human as the end or the
disappearance of humanity in the way that we understand it today. And she
produces, in a striking manner, this double demands only possible logical
solution with a sort of mixture of the thought of Bruno Latour and that of
Jacques Derrida: Bruno Latour, as she declares it herself, has argued that
we have never been modern; the seriated history of cybernetics [...] suggests,
for similar reasons, that we have always been post-human (HWB 291). The
only logical way, in effect, to conceive of the post-human without at the same
time conceiving of the destruction of humanity, is to pose that the post-

8
Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything :How the World Became
Complex, New York : Oxford University Press, 2002.

11
human precedes the human, exactly as code was always already within
language, and writing within speech.
Thank you all for your attention.

O finit la raction ? O commence la rponse ? Remarques sur Speech,

Writing, Code Three Worldviews, de Katherine Hayles
Rsum : Dans le chapitre 2 de son livre My Mother Was a Computer
Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (University of Chicago Press, 2005),
Katherine Hayles aborde la question du posthumain par le biais de la
question du langage. Elle dgage trois visions du monde : la parole ,
l criture et le code (au sens de langage des machines intelligentes
de notre temps, savoir les ordinateurs), et analyse leurs relations
rciproques, en sappuyant sur le Cours de Linguistique Gnrale (Course in
General Linguistics) de Saussure, sur La Grammatologie (Of Grammatology) de
Derrida, et sur de nombreux thoriciens contemporains des codes et de la
littrature numrique. Nous prsentons et discutons ici les thses de lAuteur,
et tchons de les prolonger, en nous demandant partir de quels types de
comportements et de quelles dfinitions du langage et de la signification on
peut faire la diffrence entre un humain qui rpond , et un non-humain
(animal ou machine, pr ou post-humain) qui ragit ?

When does the reaction end? When does the response begin? Remarks
about Speech, Writing, Code Three Worldviews, by Katherine Hayles
Summary: In the second chapter of her book My Mother Was a
Computer Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (University of Chicago Press,
2005), Katherine Hayles takes up the question of the post-human via the
question of language. She extracts three worldviews: speech, writing,
and code (understood as the language of intelligent machines, which is to
say, in our day and age, computers), and she analyses their reciprocal
relations, relying on her readings of the Course in General Linguistics of
Saussure, Grammatology by Derrida, and numerous contemporary
theoreticians of codes and of digital literature. We will present and discuss the
theses of the Author, and attempt to develop them by asking on the basis of
what types of behavior and what definitions of language and of signification
can one account for the difference between a human who responds and a
non-human (animal or machine, pre- or post- human) that reacts.

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