Current textual and especially poetic practices in networked and programmable media highlight the crucial role of code, in an increasingly literal sense of the word. Setting out from arguments that require us to re-examine and re-establish the distinctions of code and text, this contribution explores and exemplifies the implicit necessities and benefits of doing so. Coding is always already an aspect of poetics, and crucial to writing in networked and programmable media. However, subsequent to its appearance at the 'scene of writing', the distinction between code and what we may call the 'interface text', must be clarified in order to realize end engage with performances of writing in our newly and continually reconfigurable literal media.
The reasons for this are related to the radical rethinking of textuality currently being proposed by N. Katherine Hayles, rethinking necessitated by the emergence of a textuality specific to programmable media and based on a nuanced understanding of its embodiment and materiality. In this context I return to Hayles' 'flickering signifier', examining, as it were, the 'atoms' of linguistic materiality in embodied electronic texts. As my specific contribution, I attempt to show how code functions to instantiate a time-based materiality of the signifier. Finally, I set this theoretical discussion in the broader theoretical context associated with a poetics of writing as ultimate poem and universal machine, writing as psychic apparatus. Why? Because if writing constitutes its writers and readers, our understanding of the practices of writing tell something about the characteristics of - amongst other things - our interiority and our culture of time: our privacy and our moving history.