The "system" of textual analysis

Something that really hit me while reading today, especially the Kirschenbaum material was the idea that machine level instructions are even a form of media. Think about the way that a blank word document, in and of itself is constructed of many thousands of lines of code. Just because that code is not inherently visible to us in its raw form does not mean that it doesn’t exist and have meaning. The meaning of the code is, in and of itself, reflected to us as the lines and the white, blank space right before us. Everything on page, even the blinking cursor waiting for us to give it meaning, to formulate some grand new scheme has in and of itself a pre-determined meaning: a code which makes it blink and exist. A code that defines it. We are simply manipulating (or re-defining/interpreting) that code so that it will have the meaning that we assign to it. I suppose in that vein we could even argue that the very words themselves that we type are also comprised of some sort of coded language, and therefore the representation of the letter “p” on this screen is the result of a system of actions that must take place on a hardware level and therefore comprise their own language and code within themselves. Fascinating! Thinking about this in terms of the book, I began to understand the “technology” of the book in much clearer terms. The book itself is a measurable product of some reaction (on a chemical level for the paper/binding) or even of a physical labor. Each one of these sets of technological definition of the book also has it’s own inherent subset of technology which enable it to occur. For example, the books pages were created as a result of the technology which drives the lumber industry. From the saw that cuts it down to the chemical stripper which makes it easier to write on, a piece of paper can be viewed as a system and a language in and of itself. I suppose that is where the readings have taken me since last night when I posted: system-level thinking about the inputs and outputs which comprise the physicality of the book, whether it be on a computer or in a book form, each has a system which can be defined in non-definite, interpretive ways.