The Code

            In her book My Mother Was A Computer Hayles uses Derida’s argument with Sassure over the speech and writing ,and the question of which one dominate the other making it subordinated to itself, writing or speech, in order to take advantage from them both showing that the code system is as important as writing and speech. She doesn’t aim in her work to make either writing or speech as subordinated to the code, but rather to explain how the code in our modern digital life became as important as the language, in a part of her discussion, Hayls mentions that “code has became arguably as important as natural language because it causes things to happen, which require that it be executed as commands the machine can run”(49). 

        One of the things that come to the mind is the fear of being overwhelmed by the modern technological life, and the fear of the consequences of any mistake in the coding system. In this reading we read that if the code doesn’t work it must be changed, but what if it went out of control. In the movie ( eXistanZ), we saw the creator of the game getting anxious about losing the original program of her game, and the fear of losing control over the technology was a repeated theme in the movie; people were doing things they wouldn’t do in real life. By connecting this to Hayles book, she reveals that the code is a strong system which exceed the spoken or a written language, because our language is controllable by our brain, its performance “happen in the mind of human”(50) while the code is an ‘executive’ language, from one side this show its limitation to what the human insert to it, but from the other side it shows its ability to do an desirable orders if it got a virus for example, Hayls say, “ by contrast, codes running in a digital computer causes changes in machine behavior”. As she quotes from Gallaway, ““code is a language but a very special form of language. Code is the only language that is executable””(50) , So thinking of codes as a language that has the ability of causes things to change or to happen, make it different from the ordinary writing system that keeps its form and content preserved throughout the time. Even by examining the development and the changes of language we will see it takes a long slow process to get changed , for example have a look to this development of signifiers in the Sumerian language throughout the history line, it shows the changes that happens over hundreds of years to the written form of this language: