Core Post #1, Max Berwald

I think there are finer points to the disagreement between Chun and Galloway that are escaping me, but Chun’s position seems less extreme. In the Chun and the Parikka there is a call for scholars to remain in the interstitial zone between human behaviors and cultures and the medial system of code, and to see these as at work on one another. Chun gets a lot of mileage out of the allegory of the blind men and the elephant, which bookends the article. Scholars approaching any of the various media phenomena that emerge from and are sustained by code will fall easily into contention with each other about which manifestation reveals the true nature of code. But of course code is produced by humans in particular socio-economic and historical circumstances. Even if we don’t see these circumstances as completely overdetermining the creation of a thing exactly like code (as we might refuse to see anything being completely overdetermined by circumstances) we have to concede not only their influence upon but their embededness within code. 

On 310 Chun draws on Deleuze and Guattari to argue that software, as an axiomatic, “artificially limits decodings. It temporarily limits what can be decoded, put in motion, by setting up an artificial limit– the artificial limit of programmability– that seeks to separate information from entropy by designating some entropy information and other ‘non intentional’ entropy noise. Programmability… depends on the disciplining of hardware and the desire for a programmable axiomatic.” (310)

This foregrounding of “artificial limits” reminded me of a great article by Martin and Lynch, published in Social Problems, on the politics of counting (2009). In that article, the authors use case studies to explore the fraught politics of determining “what counts as an eligible case, instance, or datum.” (243) While their case studies reflect technical problematics in the counting of chromosomes or the evaluation of DNA evidence, their article makes the act of counting any case or object appear as an assertion as to the fundamental stability and uniformity of the category of case being counted. Cases that do not belong to the same category cannot, after all, be counted. Even categories like “0” and “1” or “on” or “off” on a circuit board reflect acts of will and “artificial limits," neither of which sits outside of ideology.

Returning to not fully understanding the conflict between Chun and Galloway, I think the idea of software-as-an-axiomatic takes us very near code as ideology. I was extremely interested in the section “Source Code as Fetish,” which points out that the disavowal of the things that make code code– the artificial limits imposed by the nature of programmability and by the value judgements as to what is desirable for those writing code, as well as by the cultural technical systems embedded in the hardware that coconstitutes software, etc.– lubricates code’s ability to reproduce our values. Chun draws on Marx’s argument that “the capitalist… confuses social relations and the labor activities of real individuals with capital and its seeming magical ability to reproduce…” (311) to argue that “we ‘primitive folk’ ”– like the West Africans imagined by the Portuguese merchants who purchased their fetisso– “worship source code as a magical entity– as a source of causality– when in truth the power lies elsewhere, most importantly in social and machinic relations.” (311)

This seems very much related to the idea that “language wants to be overlooked” (as in the title of the Galloway) and that all articulations have an ideological dimension. Of course, I do agree with Chun that the “anthropomorphization” of code charged by Galloway is really just the incorporation, into the study of code, of the forces that produce code– and there is plenty of the human in that. (I think this is the same problem I have with some of the propositions in the Manovich from last week. It just seems like an extreme position to say that the social has to be cleanly excised from the technical, and that this is going to improve our analytical purchase.) 

Martin, Aryn and Lynch, Michael. 2009. "Counting Things and People: The Practices and Politics of Counting." Social Problems, vol. 56 (2): pp. 243–266.