Week 4 - The "elsewhere" of code... - Core Post 3 (Hyejoo)

So, Galloway and Chun are debating one another on whether or not code is inherently ideological (simply put). I side with Chun, but I was convinced by Galloway when he reasons, via Aarseth, that the “internal” level of code is not represented in the same way “externally,” even if these two levels rely on each other via command (Galloway 328). Code for Galloway is neutral material without any “inert material determinism” (329). To this Chun sharply states that you cannot separate code from its execution (and correct me if I’m misusing technical language here), as code is inherently directional, inherently a command (Chun 309). The reason why code exists is for it to do––it is, indeed, deterministic. Moreover, insistence on isolating code from execution and software turns code into a fetish, an axiom by which Chun suggests it is like a deity, technology onto which the modern world has displaced a pre-Enlightenment desire for God(s). Like capital, also worshiped, code is “an independent source of value” (311). And this is precisely the problem: code is held onto as self-evident, thus not accountable to any ideologies, politics, or history.

Adrian Mackenzie demonstrates a novel approach to interrogate code’s self-evident status. The Linux code is also axiomatic because it operates, and is felt, through repeated usage, the discourse around it, and even its artistic value––it is performed and circulated. This made me think about academic work on code as well. Isn’t academic work (especially the humanities’ tendency to vilify code) likewise a sort of circulation, “utterance” and “performance” of code, feeding into its fetishization? What “authoritative set of practices” to code do scholars also “cover over” (Mackenzie 82)? To refrain from any critical discursive work on code is far from Mackenzie’s final point, but the need to address discursive circulation is something Kara Keeling explicitly encourages. We must question and disrupt our own thoughts about new media (code included), offering a different type of knowledge circulation (Keeling 156).

Yet, going back to Chun. If I understand her conclusion correctly, Chun wraps up to say that code, despite being one and the same with its execution, is still not directly experienced––there is a spectrality to code that “lies elsewhere,” and for now we can only imagine, visualize this presence (Chun 323). Galloway and Chun, in a roundabout way, converge at this point, in the sense that Galloway emphasizes how code can “only be fully experienced by way of the external, expressive level” (Galloway 328). This is essentially the same idea of code being spectrally expressed elsewhere. The full experience of code (though, what does “full” even mean here?), whether through hardware, an affective experience of an OS, or even a movie’s representation of code, etc.––is nonetheless detached from code/software itself. Code is always experienced indirectly. Circulation is one experience. But the layperson is not the tech bro who works with and talks about Linux. The layperson experiences code through a device typically with a screen, where code is hidden under a clean and seamless UI designed to make you not think about code. Chun cautions against over-emphasizing human perception that clings to a “retrograde humanism” (Chun 323), but given that the sensory, affective interface is still the typical experience of code––(audio)visuality, aesthetics, affects of the screen and how they are perceived––are methodologies, I feel, that we still have not exhausted.