What even is code, anyway? [Rohan - core post #1]

I will focus on three of this week’s readings that collectively addressed, often implicitly, what is code, and how should we understand it? I see the biggest contrast between Mackenzie on one hand, and Galloway and Chun on the other.

First, Mackenzie (2005) seeks to situate the study of code in cultural studies by asking: what kind of cultural object is code? Looking at the case of Linux—as a “code object”—she presumes that the operating system is unique because it is neither a medium, nor a message, nor a conventional commodified object, and therefore exceeds the analytical boundaries of traditional cultural objects. Instead, she examines the performativity of Linux through what it circulates. This brings her to the text of the Linux kernel—a site in which Linux is both constituted and distributed recursively—which leads her to conclude through a sort of textual analysis that the operating system circulates social relations that are fixed in code

Next, Galloway (2006) and Chun (2008) analyze, broadly, how to interpret code. Galloway expands on Chun’s (2004) assertion that “software is a functional analog to ideology”. He validates this statement by providing a highly refined definition of software that distinguishes what is and is not remarkable about software compared to other forms. (However, he does not seem to clarify the relationship between code and software.) He argues that there is a comparable formal structure in both software and ideology that makes software a simulation or model (but not itself a vehicle) of ideology—largely validating Chun’s (2004) original assertion.

In her more recent article, Chun (2008) responds to the turn to “software studies” by arguing that code is more than just an objective calculation or command. She disputes claims that code is solely logical by turning—similarly to Galloway—to the technical-material constitution of software (e.g., transistors, chips, even electrical signals), and argues that conceptualizations of code as inherently magical take code as a “fetish”. Instead, “code is a medium in the full sense of the word. As a medium, it channels the ghost that we imagine runs the machine—that we see as we don’t see—when we gaze at our screen’s ghostly images” (p. 310).

These articles seem to disagree about what, exactly, is code as an object of analysis? Is code the text in a “code object” such as software or an operating system (as Mackenzie and Galloway seem to assume), or is it a mediated, fetishized interpretation of electrical processes (per Chun)? I don’t think these approaches necessarily conflict, but rather offer different lenses to answer different questions. In fact, I find that Galloway and Chun agree much more than they disagree. Thus, I found it most compelling to deconstruct code as mediations of technical-material processes—especially how Galloway argued against overdetermined distinctions between the digital and the analog, or software and hardware—which aligns with Chun’s argument that abstracting code from its material and social construction advances a “profound logic of ‘sourcery’” (p. 300).