"In her brilliant analysis of MEZ’s “code-wurk,” Rita Raley demonstrates that the reading process is significantly altered with a mezangelled text, for the decoding that normally constitutes literary reading is here disrupted by visual signs that have no phonemic equivalent, for example the “][“ symbol or a word like “libr][bin][ary.” This is a language that cannot be spoken in all its fullness. The historic evolution of a system of marks tied to oral articulation is disrupted and re-encoded as a system of mixed phonemes and code symbols that can be read and apprehended but not spoken. Thus “la langue” of Saussure and the generations of semioticians following him is displaced by a language system that can be fully understood only by a bilingual reader who knows both English and code.

Spoken language cannot be the desired object of study, as it was for Saussure, who saw written language as derivative and secondary. It is not oral articulations but inscriptions that are central in this language system, and moreover inscriptions that go deep into the machine. As the code symbols continually remind us, the screen text is only the topmost part of the language system; underlying the screen text are layers and layers of coding languages essential for producing the surface text. To read mezangelle is to experience a world in which language is inextricably in-mixed with code and code with language, creating a creolized discourse in which the human subject is constituted through and by intelligent machines."

- N. Katherine Hayles, "Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature".