[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Core #1/5, Blog #3/15] Queer OS

The above tweet represents me, “layman,” interacting with the readings for this week. Please excuse my subpar understanding and discussion of “Code/Software/OS.”

In Chapter 1 of Programmed Visions, Chun states that code as fetish underscores code as a “thing.” It is a “dirty window pane” rather than a window that leads us to the source. Code, in her words, is not an enclosed object but rather layers upon layers of performative language, or uttered reality that depends on relationality and community to sustain itself. Karen Barad, similarly in their article “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” points out how “language has been granted too much power” (a sentiment echoed by Chun in her articulation of code as fetish) and directs our attention to the usefulness of the concept of “performativity”:

A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real. (802)

Barad clearly differentiates “discourse” from “language,” defining discourse as “not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said.” (819) I thought that this understanding of “discourse” was a useful way to see what an “OS” could be through the lens of performance studies. Invoking performativity, this week’s readings demonstrate how the power imbued to language, discourse, code, and OS limits our understanding of society and technology. Keeling invokes “common sense” in these terms, suggesting that we must “queer” the dominant logic of the sociocultural milieu embedded in operating systems. The project that Keeling proposes, while it reads as more speculative in the short essay, posits urgency if we consider how proliferated the logic of the UNIX is via the strands of operating systems that evolved out of it.

But how are we to queer an OS? Just as the intervention of collective agency and timely circumstances allowed LINUX, “programs for hackers by hackers,” to be created from reiterations of the UNIX (Mackenzie), is there potential for “programs for queers by queers” to come forth from the dominant common sense?

Chun emphasizes that “fetishists importantly know what they are doing – knowledge is not an answer to fetishism.” (315) Derrida similarly theorized the reiterability of the written language while moving away from Cartesian omniscience in his discussion of différance, or the transformations of meaning as language develops. Human language, though iterable and repeatable, can never be perfectly communicated due to context, memory, perception, temporal delay, etc. As Derrida emphasized the significance of this gap between the uttering agent and the uttered language, Chun makes a similar argument to see code as “re-source” which will help us see the gap between source and execution, and to see the interface as a process rather than real-time “sourcery” (321). Codes, in other words, must be seen as more human and procedural first and foremost.

Chun argues that the magic of the real-time interface, developing from the phenomenology of the cursor discussed by McPherson, is what makes the medium invisible and digital media spectral. This discussion of the interface is continued by Fiona Barnett, Zach Blas, Micha Cárdenas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Margaret Rhee in “Queer OS: A User’s Manual.” Barnett et al. propose a radically queer and disruptive interface that merges the human “flesh” to the OS, interrupting the binary of the real and the language, revealing and “reconfiguring content generated by hierarchical ontological pasts; those rooted in slavery, settler-colonialism, prison and military industrial complexes” into “horizontal, circular, reversible, retractable, prescient, and/or prophetic forms, writing code for programming that makes explicit and holds space for new forms.” 

Interesting points are also made in “Queer OS: A User’s Manual” regarding the function of memory, which Chun pointed to as “what makes possible daemons, makes our media daemonic.” Barnett et al. argue: 

“It is memory that allows the user to build upon previous work, to continue the work done by a previous self, other selves, and future selves. Memory provides the continuity required to execute projects, but for Queer OS this function is not in the strict service of executability. Rather, it is about making visible the moment of potentiality—that is, what could be the result of this executed code, what happens if it is changed, reordered, or transformed?”

Not only does the memory of Queer OS point to futurity and potentiality, but “Queer OS also recognizes the right of the user to be forgotten, erased, or made otherwise unmemorable.” By honing in on that gap of language, the Queer OS is able to disrupt the naturalized process of codes so that predictive algorithms cannot rely on users' habits, data, and fantasies. Radical transformations, alterations, and unsettling are made possible within the Queer OS. Such interventions into the "commonsensical" understanding of what operating systems should be is proposed by Barnett et al. as a possibility for a Queer OS: “Queer OS thereby embraces uncertainty. It welcomes crashes.” 

But I am still left with the question: where could we find actual real-life applications of these speculative and, in many ways, utopic ideations of what Queer OS could be? It is difficult to imagine such radical form of OS being produced — and perhaps that is demonstrative of how confined I am to the prison of language and the common sense.