Week 4

Language wants to be overlooked – Alexander Galloway

In Galloway’s writing his perspective contrasts with Chun’s claim that ‘software is a functional analog to ideology’ which entails the ‘ideology’ of abstract concepts a user understands between the relationship of code and interface. The example Chun utilises is the users understanding of folders and desktops. At face value Chun implied it as a purely functional transcoding of software, the user treats the concept of folders and desktops as they are. Almost like separate entities from the underlying code that created it, despite knowing that there is more to it than the interface. 

“software is an example of technical transcoding without figuration that nevertheless coexists with an exceedingly high level of ideological fetishism and misrecognition.”

Galloway, on the other hand, merely views code as commands issued into a machine, its sole purpose is to instruct a machine how to act. Galloway then offers that Chun’s approach follows a fetishistic logic, the expressive and figurative logic of representation. As discussed in Marx, a value appears in the form of something that it isn’t in an attempt for a better understanding of the concept. Due to its allegorical nature Galloway argues that “software is not merely a vehicle for ideology; instead, the ideological contradictions of technical transcoding and fetishistic abstraction are enacted and ‘resolved’ within the very form of software itself.” (p. 319) 

My takeaway from Galloway’s point is that the digital is only deemed ‘arbitrary’ due to the disconnect or inability for users to refer to an empirical referent of the pragmatic language of code. Galloway states that the very presence of abstraction and figuration within software when applied to- for instance, ‘desktop’ as a metaphor leads to a functional yet perceptible concept that originates from a source code. This in turn demonstrates the lack of establishment for technological apparatus grounded in mathematical language. 

On Commands and Executions: Tyrants, Spectres and Vagabonds – David Gauthier 

In this reading Gauthier points out that as the commercialisation of computing machinery grew, so did the need to transform it into a transcendent and universal body of knowledge. This, inevitably, led to the invention of symbolic programming languages based on human-readability, code. Gauthier claims that by doing so, it has brought to life an “epistemic and discursive life of their own.” Similar to languages.

“I turn to critiques of violence and theories of law and authority that address how concepts of law are enforced through rules, instructions and commands.” 

Gauthier argued that, the violence embedded within the process of execution represents a primitive ‘outside’ of the symbolic order of law. By operating in a different category as “non-knowledge” and as “non-law” or “out-law”.  

The commands calls for a constrained set of actions to fulfil the promise of its execution, which will then produce the expected effects. The commands itself does not act, instead it prescribes an action that it assesses its (“correct value”). In this way, Gauthier utilises ‘tyranny’ as a metaphor to ascribe the judgement of the ‘correct value’ in an almost judicial fashion.