Code and Temporality (Mahnoor Core Post #1)

The unique, or “eccentric” (Keeling), temporality of code, software, and “new media” more generally served as a motif that underpinned some of the central inquiries of this week’s readings. From the labor that produces code to the “mystical” (Chun) or “mystif[ied]” (Galloway) wizardry that reads, processes, and mechanizes the instructions lying therein, there is a chronology that finds itself invisible to the user not only because it is a process that is obscured by an interface but because it is, or at least feels, instantaneous. In invoking Butler’s performative utterance, Chun and Mackenzie bring to light both the future orientation of code, the progress towards tasks to be completed, but also prompt us to couch its “provisional success” (Butler via Mackenzie) in its potentially palimpsestic nature. That is, code’s “iterability precedes the so-called subject (or machine) that is supposedly the source of the code […] most importantly, an entire structure must be in place in order for a command to be executed” (Chun). In order for code’s utterances to be effective, they must be grounded in an existing textual framework. 

Similarly, in order for code’s utterances to be understood, according to Chun, critical analysis must begin “in the middle of things”:

“Rather than offering a smooth chronology, the past is introduced through flashbacks—interruptions of memory. To return to the parable of the six blind men relayed much earlier, this means that the position  of the blind men who know without knowing is not one that can be superseded, but rather the exact position from which we can intervene and know. Software in media res also means that we can only begin with things—things that we grasp and touch without fully grasping, things that unfold in time— things that can only be rendered ‘sources’ or objects (if they can) after the fact.”

Galloway builds off of many of Chun’s arguments but problematizes the notion of code as performative: “To see code as subjectively performative or enunciative is to anthropomorphize it, to project it onto the rubric of psychology, rather than to understand it through its own logic of ‘calculation’ or ‘command’.” While this command structure implies a linearity, Galloway also highlights the layered nature of code structure and the “incommensurability between any two points or thresholds on the continuum of layers, and therefore about the difficulty of achieving a collective or ‘whole’ experience.” This resonates with the elephant parable in Chun. Software cannot be grasped as a “whole experience” because it cannot, in one glance, be grasped as a complete one. There is an overall sense of being overwhelmed by code not necessarily because it is textually vast but because despite this vastness, the points of entry are limited or obscured. Perhaps these points of entry can manifest in what Galloway calls, “a privileged moment in which the written becomes the purely machinic and back again.” This claim introduces a different temporal directionality, that of the “re-” prefix: redoing, reversal, repetition, rewriting. It further pairs this protean temporal directionality with an ontological confusion seemingly inherent to computing – where exactly does the line between written and machinic start?      

At times, Keeling too reflects on temporalities rooted in reversal and repetition, and Galloway’s written/machinic dichotomy finds an echo in Keeling’s claims about the robot and human: “Queer OS can be grasped as a malfunction within technologies that secure “robot” and “human,” a malfunction with a capacity to reorder things” (Keeling 157). I believe “reorder”, here, takes on multiple shades of meaning, metonymically referring to a shift in a world order founded on structures of logic that are overwhelmingly straight and white, but also implying disruption rooted in temporal reversal. Malfunction in tech is generally an occurrence that programmers take great pains to avoid, but Keeling sees the potential in malfunction to provoke a look backwards, to prompt an intervention that can, in the present, right (and rewrite) wrongs of the past.