Describing the problems of electronic texts in her book Electronic Texts in the Humanities, Susan Hockey laconically observes that "There is no obvious unit of language" (2000: 20).
Hockey is reflecting critically on the ordinary assumption that this unit is the Word. Language scholars know better. Words can be usefully broken down into more primitive parts and therefore understood as constructs of a second or even higher order. The view is not unlike the one continually encountered by physicists who search out basic units of matter.
Our analytic tradition inclines us to understand that forms of all kinds are "built up" from "smaller" and more primitive units, and hence to take the self-identity and integrity of these parts, and the whole that they comprise, for objective reality.
Hockey glances at this problem of the text-unit in order to clarify the difficulties of creating electronic texts. To achieve that, we instruct the computer to identify (the) basic elements of natural language text and we try to ensure that the identification has no ambiguities. In natural language, however, the basic unit – indeed, all divisioning of any kind – is only procedurally determinate. The units are arbitrary.
More, the arbitrary units themselves can have no absolute self-identity. Natural language is rife with redundancy and ambiguity at every unit and level and throughout its operating relations. A long history of analytic procedures has evolved certain sets of best practices in the study of language and communicative action, but even in a short run, terms and relations of analysis have changed.
Print and manuscript technology represent efforts to mark natural language so that it can be preserved and transmitted. It is **a technology that constrains the shapeshiftings of language**, which is itself a special-purpose system for coding human communication. Exactly the same can be said of electronic encoding systems. In each case constraints are installed in order to facilitate operations that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. In the case of a system like the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the system is designed to "disambiguate" entirely the materials to be encoded.
The output of TEI's markup constraints differs radically from the output generated by the constraints of manuscript and print technology. Whereas redundancy and ambiguity are expelled from TEI, they are preserved – are marked - in manuscript and print. While print and manuscript markups don't "copy" the redundancies of natural language, they do construct systems that are sufficiently robust to develop and generate equivalent types of redundancy. This capacity is what makes manuscript and print encoding systems so much more resourceful than any electronic encoding systems currently in use. ("Natural language" is the most complex and powerful reflexive coding system that we know of.)1
Like biological forms and all living systems, not least of all language itself, print and manuscript encoding systems are organized under a horizon of co-dependent relations. That is to say, print technology – I will henceforth use that term as shorthand for both print and manuscript technologies – is a system that codes (or simulates) what are known as autopoietic systems. These are classically described in the following terms:
If one says that there is a machine M in which there is a feedback loop through the environment so that the effects of its output affect its input, one is in fact talking about a larger machine M1 which includes the environment and the feedback loop in its defining organization. (Maturana and Varela 1980: 78)
Such a system constitutes a closed topological space that "continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its own components, and does this in an endless turnover of components" (Maturana and Varela 1980: 79). Autopoietic systems are thus distinguished from allopoietic systems, which are Cartesian and which "have as the product of their functioning something different from themselves" (1980: 80).
In this context, all coding systems appear to occupy a peculiar position. Because "coding … represents the interactions of [an] observer" with a given system, the mapping stands apart from "the observed domain" (Maturana and Varela 1980: 135). Coding is a function of "the space of human design" operations, or what is classically called "hetero-poietic" space. Positioned thus, coding and markup appear allopoietic.
As machines of simulation, however, coding and markup (print or electronic) are not like most allopoietic systems (cars, flashlights, a road network, economics). Coding functions emerge as code only within an autopoietic system that has evolved those functions as essential to the maintenance of its life (its dynamic operations). Language and print technology (and electronic technology) are second- and third-order autopoietic systems – what McLuhan famously, expressively, if also somewhat mislead-ingly, called "extensions of man." Coding mechanisms – proteins, print technology – are generative components of the topological space they serve to maintain. They are folded within the autopoietic system like membranes in living organisms, where distinct components realize and execute their extensions of themselves.
This general frame of reference is what makes Maturana and Varela equate the "origin" of such systems with their "constitution" (1980: 95). This equation means that co-dependency pervades an autopoietic structure of relations. All components of the system arise (so to speak) simultaneously and they perform integrated functions. The system's life is a morphogenetic passage characterized by various dynamic mutations and transformations of the local system components. The purpose or goal of these processes is autopoietic – self-maintenance through self-transformation – and their basic element is not a system component but the relation (co-dependence) that holds the mutating components in changing states of dynamic stability. The states generate measurable co-dependency functions both in their periods (or basins) of stability and in their unique moments of catastrophic change.